All Posts in Organizational Effectiveness

|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

“Digital” has replaced “Cloud” as the hot synonym for “Everything.”

No matter what a company plans to do and how it plans to do it, it’s now officially Digital.

Not that I’m a Digital skeptic. I’d just like, when we talk about “Digital,” to be confident we’re talking about the same thing.

Google a bit and you’ll find quite a few different accounts of why Digital is so important, along with several definitions, some of which, reprehensibly, make it a noun.

My favorite: Digital enables new business models. Examples include Uber, AirBNB, and Zipcar, all of whose “new” business models amount to being brokers — companies that bring buyers and sellers together in exchange for a cut of the action.

It’s a very new business model, certainly no older than the Phoenicians.

For whatever it’s worth (probably what you pay to receive KJR) here’s my take on why business leaders not only can’t ignore matters Digital, but have to embrace the subject. Truly Digital companies:

  • Observe: Constantly scan the technology landscape for the new and interesting.
  • Orient: Spend serious time and energy, at the executive level supported by staff analysis and modeling, investigating whether and how each new technology might turn into an opportunity if their company gets there first, or might turn into a threat if a competitor gets there first.
  • Decide: Far too many business executives and managers, and therefore whole businesses run away from the decisions that matter most as if they were rabid weasels (the decisions, that is, not the executives, managers and businesses). Digital businesses have to become adept at making fast, well-informed decisions.

And remember, it isn’t a decision unless it commits or denies the time, staff and budget needed to effectively …

  • Act: It isn’t enough to make the right decision and then either flail away at it or not actually do anything to make it real. Successful Digital businesses must execute their decisions, and with high levels of competence.

It’s OODA again. Digital businesses are built on OODA loops focused on the potential impact of new technologies. Not static list of specific technologies. New and interesting technologies as they arise and mature.

For Digital businesses the Orient stage has outsized significance, because many of us humans have a strong tendency to reject the new as either wrong or no different from the same old same old.

Digital businesses can no more afford to fall into that trap than the opposite extreme — dying from the shiny ball syndrome of chasing the next huge thing before giving the current huge thing a chance to succeed.

So Digital business have to establish methods, and not just methods but a supporting enterprise-wide culture, that let them go beyond the lip service of “that’s what we’ve been doing all along” to accurately recognize what really are familiar old concepts hiding behind shiny new buzz-phrases and what are truly new and important possibilities.

And none of this will matter if the company’s IT organization hasn’t figured out just how different the Digital world is from the standard collection of “best practices” followed by old-school industrial-age IT.

Recent history — how IT responded to two past transformational technologies, the personal computer, and the world wide web — illustrates the challenge. In both cases, IT ignored them completely until long after they’d become entrenched elsewhere in the business.

Why was that? Boil everything down and it came to this: When they first appeared, and for several years afterward, neither the PC nor the world wide web fit what IT did. They were out-of-scope, and outside IT’s current areas of expertise. CIOs didn’t know what to do with or about them, so it was safer and easier to declare them Someone Else’s Problem.

In the Digital era this attitude just won’t cut it because new technologies that can have an impact on your business are emerging faster than ever. Digital businesses need IT that provides technology leadership to the business, at all levels of the business, and at all levels of IT.

Technology leadership means more than just (for example) the CIO explaining to the other members of the executive suite how the Internet of Things represents a threat to the company’s current product line.

It means the IT organization knows how to recognize, research, pilot, and incubate new technologies. And, for those that succeed, how to integrate them into both the company’s technical architecture and IT’s organizational architecture.

All levels of the business and IT means the conversations between a help desk analyst and a workgroup manager about collaboration technologies are just as Digital as the CIO’s executive-suite conversations about the Internet of Things.

And are just as important.

Comments

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Stand-up comics have to be just about the bravest people around.

If you’re a singer and the audience doesn’t enjoy your performance, you can blame the composer, the arranger, or your backup band.

If you’re an actor you can blame the script, the director, or the other actors in your show.

But if you’re a stand-up comic, it’s just you and the audience. They either laugh or they don’t. If they don’t, you’re up there with your bare face hanging out, soaked in flop sweat and with nowhere to hide.

We’ve been talking about political correctness and its impact on the workplace the last couple of weeks (“Polite-ical correctness,” 4/4/2016 and “It’s my turn to be the victim!” 4/11/2016). But so far we’ve barely touched on the most important dimension of the issue: Humor.

As a leader and manager you aren’t paid to be a comedian. You are paid to, among other things, create a healthy work environment.

What makes a work environment healthy? First and foremost, nobody in the workforce should feel threatened or harassed.

The law (as I understand it; I did lead HR once upon a time but I’m not an attorney) makes allowances for reasonability. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays. That doesn’t mean your other employees can’t celebrate birthdays. It does mean no one should pressure their co-worker to join the festivities.

But being unthreatening and unharassing doesn’t make a workforce healthy, any more than not having a fever and rash means you’re feeling fine. A manager who considers this an achievement needs to set the bar a wee bit higher.

This is where humor comes in. In my experience, in healthy work environments employees kid around — something that’s awfully hard to do without humor being involved.

Humor being what it is, though, kidding doesn’t always turn out to be funny. But then, there are no level-of-humor benchmarks you can draw on to determine the absolute level of funniness of a given wisecrack.

If the worst that happens is that nobody laughs, you’ll have an employee with newfound empathy for what stand-up comics risk at a professional level, except that all your employee has to say is, “Well, I thought it was funny,” and everyone moves on.

But there’s precious little in the way of kidding around that doesn’t risk offending someone, for several reasons the kidder has no control over.

The first has to do with DNA: Some people just weren’t born with the sense of humor gene. Strangely, the Americans with Disabilities Act ignores this syndrome and big pharma has yet to develop a treatment. It’s too bad, because the afflicted sometimes take offense at a remark specifically because their understanding of humor is, at best, theoretical.

The second reason is obliviosity. Congenital wisecrackers can be oblivious, more focused on eliciting a smile, guffaw, or something in between than on how what they’re about to say might offend a listener.

The third is the legitimate piece of what those who complain about political correctness are griping about — as a society we’re encouraging people to feel victimized, causing everyone to tip-toe around everyone else.

But as Offense-O-Meters are no more commercially available than level-of-humor benchmarks, it isn’t up to you or anyone else to tell an employee who’s feeling offended that he or she is wrong.

So what, as a business leader, do you do?

HR “best practice” says you play it safe. If there’s kidding, banter, jibes, or repartee, discourage it.

This will keep you out of trouble and the company out of court. It will also kill team performance. Teamwork depends on trust. Stop the joking around and you’ll pretty much wipe out the interpersonal relationship-building that trust depends on.

Or, you can establish a more relaxed atmosphere, with give-and-take and all the good-humored wordplay that goes with it.

And if someone does take offense? At the risk of horrifying your average HR professional:

Meet privately with the offended party (call him “Jim”). Explain that he has four alternatives.

The first: File a complaint with Human Resources. That’s his right and he’ll get a fair hearing with no retribution later on.

Second: Explain to the offender (call her “Jane”) that she was offensive, and why. If Jim chooses that course of action, you’ll be happy to mediate if he’d like.

Third: If Jim isn’t comfortable talking to the offender, you can have a quiet word with her instead.

Fourth: Jim can shrug it off and decide it isn’t worth making a fuss about.

So long as you’re completely neutral as to which alternative you’d prefer, you should stay out of trouble.

Just, whatever you do, don’t make a joke out of it.

Comments