Book Review: Start with Why, by Simon Sinek
A short review of Simon Sinek’s foundational book, and the importance of Purpose.
All posts tagged: leadership
Book Review: The Technology Fallacy
Moving away from the concept of Transformation and into that of Digital Maturity, this book underlines the importance of People and Culture into a journey that is not just about technology. A must read for any leader facing this change, as it reminds everybody that any transformative change needs intention to be successful. The book by Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan R. Copulsky, and Garth R. Andrus is the result of a partnership with MIT Sloan Review and Deloitte, and through a focused research on both Digital and non digital companies, has identified some common traits that successful digital players should have. This book is deeply rooted in the analysis on the survey and interviews done by the authors, and the cluster analysis where organizations have been clustered on a maturity cluster. The concept of Digital Maturity itself Is one of the cornerstone of the book, and is defined as: aligning an organization’s people, culture, structure, and tasks to compete effectively by taking advantage of opportunities enabled by technological infrastructure, both inside and …
Digital Transformation in Traditional Organizations. It all starts with Culture.
The topic of Digital Transformation is often seen as an opposition between digital natives and “the others”. But how can we transform a more traditional organisation, while preserving some of the traits that have made the success of this organisation? The answer is to look in Culture first, and in making sure we intentionally embed values and practices in the transformation journey. When approaching Digital Transformation in many organizations, issues arises to how much we need to change without impacting the more traditional operations. Partially this is also a reaction to one of the most typical objections that many do when looking at the transformation on the markets. “We cannot be Google”. A very interesting read on how a traditional company should address this transformation, comes from a MIT Research published on Sloan Business Review: Building Digital-Ready Culture in Traditional Organization. Foundational Values The research has first of all identified 4 foundational values that characterize successful Digital Transformations. What’s interesting is that these where based on assumptions cited from digital native companies, but have been …
Book Review: Drive, by Daniel Pink
This book review analyzes the book by Daniel Pink “Drive”, and its critique to the standard understanding of Motivation.
A Book Review: The End of Average by Todd Rose
Review of the excellent book by Todd Rose, which analyses how what he calls “averagarianism” has affected organizations, and overall society for many past years.
What is the Purpose of a Company?
The recent statement issued by the Business Roundtable on corporate purpose, has raised a lot of media attention and buzz on professional networks like LinkedIn. Although the statement itself is not as revolutionary as it seems, (already the 1981 version did also acknowledge the importance of multiple constituencies for companies’ long-term success). Yes, for sure the 1997 version did focus a lot on shareholder’s primacy, and overall its true that aligning 200 CEOs around such a statement must have been a difficult endeavor. As HBR underlines, the question is what are the effects of this statement going to be. Multiple authors and academics have focused on the risks of excessive focus on Shareholder value (Ralph Gomory is just one of the many names, that has been focusing on Corporate Goals). This declaration is not setting out a new world of corporate affairs though. the language of the preamble suggests that it is little more than a new description of what CEOs already do—or believe they do. This is why a lot of the articles and commentary, that …