Living with Change
It’s a cliché to say that the pace of change has sped up dramatically over the past few decades. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. Moore’s law predicted that the speed of integrated circuits would double every 18 months—which has held true for a surprisingly long time, so that modern laptops easily outperform multi-million dollar supercomputers from the 90s. But life isn’t as simple as faster computers. As computers got faster, communications got faster too, along with the ability to collect and analyze data. That inevitably meant that the pace of change for businesses got faster. Upstart companies could outcompete stable, wealthy industrial giants, some of which (like Amazon, Google, and Facebook) became giants themselves.
Here are the principles that define and drive the
companies that will dominate the 21st-Century economy:
n These companies don’t just sell products; they build
existing products and services; they redesign the way services work
n They don’t stick to the status quo; they transform the
structure of their industry
n They don’t exist in a vacuum; they create an ecosystem
where many players can prosper
Many companies show some of the features of the evolution of technology—some show the principles more clearly than others. For example, every company now has learned to apply big data and predictive analytics, but 15 years ago, Google was the best Silicon Valley exemplar of this trend.
To flourish in our constantly changing economy, businesses must make the following changes:
Businesses must use data to make better decisions. We are entering an age where devices and sensors collect data continuously. With increased computing power, this data can be processed faster and easier. With the advent of smarter computers, smaller devices, and more precise algorithms, businesses can automate some of this decision making. However, not all data-driven decision making is done by a machine. Humans, therefore companies and cities, will be smarter and able to do more because machines do the heavy lifting.
Businesses must invest in talent. Data-driven decision making doesn’t eliminate humans; it augments them, and enables them to make better decisions. To succeed, businesses need to attract and retain the best talent
Businesses must be agile and flexible.They must be organized in ways that allow them to make changes quickly; they must decentralize decision making and trust their employees; they must have communication patterns that are fast and efficient. Understanding the need for change doesn’t help if you’re locked into a hidebound structure that prevents you from making those changes.
Businesses must focus on customers. Data makes it possible to discover what customers want to a degree that was never before possible. But data by itself isn’t enough. Henry Ford said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The transformative insight comes from thinking about customers from the
beginning: not just what they want, but what they really want that they can’t yet express. In your business, who represents the customer? Who does the design thinking that creates products that surprise and delight?
The following resources will help you transform your company so that it can prosper in the face of constant change.
Understanding the need for
change doesn’t help if you’re
Building a Company that Can
Respond to Change
Companies can talk about change all they want, but if they aren’t organized in a way that lets them respond to change, they won’t get anywhere. These resources tell you how to transform organizations so they can adapt to change, rather than be defeated by it.
Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale: How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and
emerging technologies? Lean Enterprise presents principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale—and
demonstrates why and how to apply these principles throughout your organization, rather than with just one department or team.
Creating a Data-Driven Organization: Practical Advice from the Trenches: What do you need to become a data-driven organization? Far more than having big data or a crack team of data scientists, it requires establishing an effective, deeply ingrained data culture. Being truly data-driven involves processes that require genuine buy-in across your company, from analysts and management to the C-Suite and the board.
The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage: The methods that enable marketers to meet this challenge are emerging from an unexpected place: the world of software development. The Agile methodologies that once revolutionized software development are now revolutionizing marketing.
Us vs. Them: Redefining the Multi-Generational Workplace to Inspire Your Employees to Love Your
Company, Drive Innovation, and Embrace Change: Learn about the root psychological causes of generational tension at work: causes based in the hardwired human tendency to see others as “one of us” or as “one of them.” This dynamic has existed forever, and it always will.
The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business:
Innovative businesses large and small are discovering new opportunities, strengthening customer loyalty, and mastering real-time buyer satisfaction.
Empowering Employees
Employees are the heart of any organization. If your
employees think they are only cogs in a machine, and can’t creatively engage with the future you’re building, they won’t grow and they will leave. To build the best workforce,
businesses need to encourage their employees to learn, empower them to make decisions, and participate in building their careers. You need to help your staff reach their full potential, for their good and your own.
Engaged: Unleashing Your Organization’s Potential Through Employee Engagement:Engaged explains what employee engagement is, why it matters, what the benefits of it are, what helps and hinders it, how to measure it, and how to put theory into action when trying to create it. It offers real solutions to managers and business leaders who want to enhance performance and increase productivity.
Driving Career Results: How to Manage Self-Directed Employee Development: Expert tips for leveraging strengths and improving development in areas such as judgment, problem-solving, creativity, trust, influence, teamwork, planning, business acumen, customer focus, grit, technical savvy, communications, collaboration, integrity, accountability, curiosity, innovation, courage, and more. You’ll
learn where to start, what to prioritize, how to commit to a personal plan of action…and how to make it happen!
Creating Engaged Employees: It’s Worth the Investment:
Engaged employees feel recognized, encouraged, and supported—they demonstrate enthusiasm, inspiration, and pride in their jobs. Despite work demands and pressure, they successfully achieve their individual and team goals.
Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through
Collaboration: Even among people who have spent decades learning the technical side of their jobs, most haven’t really focused on the human component. The authors share their insights on how to lead a team effectively, navigate an organization, and build a healthy relationship with the users of your software.
Deciding How to Decide: Companies’ futures and executive careers are defined by key strategic decisions. Most
executives over-rely on basic tools and don’t match the tools to the situation. This is problematic because in highly
Embracing Technology
How do businesses respond to changes in technology? Companies that have understood how to take advantage of new technologies have been able to disrupt established markets. A few years ago, that meant e-commerce; today it means data analysis and cloud computing; tomorrow, it may mean AI, robotics, and virtual reality. You need to understand how technology is changing the business world, and how to use those new technologies to innovate.
The New IT: How Technology Leaders are Enabling
Business Strategy in the Digital Age: With the onslaught of cloud solutions, the consumerization of technology, and increasingly tech-savvy business people, it’s time for a manifesto for leaders who recognize—and are nervous about—the demands of the digital age. Whether you’re an executive, department head, or IT manager, The New IT provides an action-ready blueprint for building and strengthening the role of IT in your company—and prescribing IT’s future.
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining
Successful Growth: Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment.
Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of
Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean:
Roberto Verganti introduces a third strategy, a radical shift in perspective that introduces a bold new way of competing. Design-driven innovations do not come from the market; they create new markets. They don’t push new technologies; they push new meanings.
Mobilized: An Insider’s Guide to the Business and Future of Connected Technology: Mobile has now become such an integral part of how we live that, for many people, losing a cell phone is like losing a limb. Everybody knows mobile is the future, and every business wants in, but what are the
elements of mobile success?
Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Business: How does your company become a data-driven organization? Mainly, it means making decisions based not on opinion, but on what the data is telling you. And that usually requires a shift in company culture. In this collection, four data experts demonstrate different ways that companies have
Leading in a New Era
Leadership isn’t just telling people what to do; it’s enabling them to be productive. That requires rethinking your
relationship to your staff. How do you build teams? How do you protect them from administrative trivia? How do you keep them challenged so they don’t become bored and leave?These resources help you transform your leadership and build productive, empowered teams.
Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment:
A detailed look at the evolution of employment and its far-reaching implications
The New Rules of Management: How to Revolutionise Productivity, Innovation and Engagement by
Implementing Projects That Matter: A guide for modern organisations about optimizing productivity, creating a culture of innovation, and building high-performing teams.
Harvard Business Review on Finding & Keeping the Best People: If you need the best practices and ideas for winning the race for talent—but don’t have time to find them—HBR gives you 11 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place.
Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions:
Multiple studies have shown that, if people have the proper training and experience, they will make better decisions in
emerging situations while in a flow-state. How can your organization help your people experience flow more often, thereby improving their decision-making?
Team Turnarounds: A Playbook for Transforming Underperforming Teams: In today’s uncertain economic environment, teams are asked to do more with less. As sports fans already know, behind every great underdog story is a leader who roots out the competitive advantage that will propel the team to victory. Learn how the fine art of the turnaround really works, from how to inspire the team to the actual tools for change.
The Four Mindsets: This is the key to significantly increasing productivity, performance, and revenue in your organization. Developed as a guide proven to help all levels of managers to connect, focus, align, and activate their teams to elevate results, you will find a range of resources and tools to use and become a “best in class” leader today.
Leadership: A Master Class—High Performance Leadership: A former hostage negotiator and current professor reveal the latest research and practice behind high-performance leadership, bonding, and managing
Creating Value
Business leaders need to create value: how do you make decisions that expand possibilities and create new
opportunities? Business is not a zero-sum game. Too much business thinking has focused on capturing value, rather than creating it. These resources show you how to make decisions that are informed by data, and that enable you—and others— to thrive.
Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions: Few things are as valuable in business, and in life, as the ability to make good decisions. Can you imagine how much more rewarding your life and your business would be if every decision you made were the best it could be? Decision Quality empowers you to make the best possible choices and get more of what you truly want from every decision.
Data-Driven Leadership: Meet the challenges of high-stakes accountability, build performance-based organizations, and improve outcomes. This advice show you how to transform data overload into a data-positive culture. You’ll learn the difference between driven leadership” and “data-informed leadership,” and how to use distributed leadership to inspire collaboration and guided analysis.
Finding the Decision Making Sweet Spot: Scott Berinato, HBR senior editor, explains the opportunities and pitfalls of making decisions in a social context.
Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Business: How does your company become a data-driven organization? Mainly, it means making decisions based not on opinion, but on what the data is telling you. And that usually requires a shift in company culture. Four data experts demonstrate different ways that companies have experimented with change, often with surprising results.
Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution: To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate your organization’s competitive strategy into day-to-day actions that will enable your company to win in the
marketplace. By posing provocative questions, you identify critical gaps in your strategy execution processes, focus on the most important choices you must make, and understand what’s at stake in each one.
Before You Make That Big Decision: All leaders know that decision making is a critical part of their job. And most executives are aware they need to be on the lookout for biases that will distort or mislead and cause their
organizations to make the wrong decisions about
investments of time and money. Yet research shows that few executives actually use their knowledge about bias to
Telling Your Stories
You can’t transform a business if you can’t communicate your stories. But communication is much more than branding and advertising. Learn to build content that your customers want, and understand how all of your company’s actions are a reflection of its brand and values.
Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses: This is a new model for developing valuable content, building an audience round that content, and creating a product for your audience.
True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to
Transform Your Business: The old way to market a business was storytelling. But in today’s world, simply communicating your brand’s story in the hope that customers will listen is no longer enough. Instead, your authentic brand must be
evident in every action the organization undertakes.
Working with Your Customers
You won’t succeed if you don’t satisfy your customers. Period. Gaining new customers is a losing battle if you’re bleeding old customers because of inattention. As you work through your corporate transformation, learn how to work with customers as partners: how to engage them, how to satisfy them by making them awesome.
It’s the Customer, Stupid!: 34 Wake-up Calls to Help You Stay Client-Focused: Speaker and salesperson Michael Aun shares these secrets and many more in It’s the Customer, Stupid!, a guide to growing any business by gaining new
customers, and, more important, by keeping the ones you have happy and coming back for more. Most businesses think they’re customer-centric, but they just aren’t. Get beyond common myths about sales and customer satisfaction, and find out how to really keep your customers satisfied.
Competing for Customers: Why Delivering Business Outcomes is Critical in the Customer First Revolution:
Delivering customer success means radically changing the way you engage with customers—from sales, to marketing, to engineering and support. Step by step, you’ll learn how to make sure your customers are achieving business outcomes from your offerings…now, next year, and for years to come.
The Social Business Imperative: Adapting Your Business Model to the Always-Connected Customer: Company leaders and professionals must seek to personally grasp the tectonic changes arising from the always-connected
customer, and then rethink traditional business models, business practices, and even their own job responsibilities and careers accordingly.
Customer-Centric Marketing: Build Relationships, Create Advocates, and Influence Your Customers: As customers evolve, smart companies evolve with them, and, with a track record that speaks for itself, putting the customer at the center of strategic thinking is the key to a winning plan. Consumer evolution is happening more rapidly than ever before, and keeping your organization out in front has never been more important.
Badass: Making Users Awesome: Success isn’t about convincing customers that you have a great product. It’s about making your customers great at what they want to do. Customers who have become great through using your product are much better marketing than all the advertising you can buy.
Data-Driven Marketing: How to Engage Your Customers:
Learning from the Greats
Corporate transformation sounds like cutting-edge new ground. But you aren’t pioneers. Many companies have reimagined themselves over the years, and built something better as a result. As you lead your own transformation, stand on the shoulders of the giants who have already been through this process:
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail: Christensen explains why most
companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.
A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness: Peter Drucker was the original big thinker. His ideas on management, innovation, leadership, effectiveness, and adapting to change formed the
foundations of modern business wisdom. Drucker was also a mentor to many notable leaders in business, government, and nonprofits—a role he valued tremendously. In A Year with Peter Drucker, you will get to experience his mentorship process firsthand.
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer: Toyota was one of the first companies to radically reinvent itself—and in doing so,
became a major power. Learn the management principles and business philosophy behind Toyota’s worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.
Design Like Apple: Seven Principles For Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences: Apple sees design as a tool for creating beautiful experiences that
convey a point of view down to the smallest detail—from the tactile feedback of a keyboard to the out-of-the-box
experience of an iPhone package. And all of these capabilities are founded in a deep and rich embrace of what it means to be a designer.
Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way: Filled with exclusive front-seat insights from Mercedes-Benz employees, eye-opening testimonials from passionate Mercedes-Benz fans, and solid nuts-and-bolts advice for creating your own consumer-aligned road map, Driven to Delight will help you retool your strategies, reignite your customers, and refuel your team for the long haul.
The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and
Performance: Today’s leaders know that speed and agility are the keys to any company’s success, and yet many are frustrated that their organizations can’t move fast enough to stay competitive. The typical chain of command is too slow; internal resources are too limited; people are already
Gamechangers: Creating Innovative Strategies for Business and Brands; Lessons in Innovation from Those Winning the Game: Gamechangers are brands that have turned the world of business upside down. They win through ambition and innovation rather than legacy and scale, out-thinking the competition, focusing on the growth markets, and embracing technology in more human ways.
The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company: Rossman introduces readers to the unique corporate culture of the world’s largest Internet retailer, with a focus on the 14 leadership principles that have guided and shaped its decisions and its distinctive leadership culture.
The Most Powerful Brand On Earth: How to Transform Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners, and Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and Social Media: Brands that thrive and profit from employee and customer empowerment generate significantly greater awareness and revenues, while also decreasing the costs of marketing, selling, and customer service. However,
employees must engage in public, real-time conversations. And most people are not professional communicators.
A few years ago, we said that every business is a software business. That’s true, now more than ever. But being a software business means a lot more than having a website and adding some e-commerce. It means collecting and using data; it means augmenting your human staff with data-driven capabilities; it means making informed decisions that
combine data with human vision and insight. It includes staying on top of the newest technologies, including artificial intelligence and virtual reality, to make sure you’re the
