The Three Laws
Building a customer-centric digital organisation that is focused on delivering value to your customers needs new and agile ways of working. Let's explore the Three Laws.
The Law of the Customer
Customers no longer line up meekly at our shop door, impatient to buy what you have to offer. You need a team who are constantly alert to discussions about your brand or products on third-party sites or social networks, and who build connections and understand what customers truly want to buy.
The Law of the Small Team
Small teams are essential to create a customer-centric company. With self-organising leadership and alignment to the overall product roadmap, they are given the autonomy to decide what to build, how to build it, and how to work together while building it.
The Law of the Network
Work flows smoothly and continuously. Instead of major programmes of work requiring significant capital investment, we move the whole company to an agile way of working where we continually respond to customer needs, and deliver increasing customer value.
An Individual's Guide to Working Remotely
Working at home all of the time is a lot different from staying in one day to receive a delivery. It requires some behavioural shifts, but once you realise what needs to change, you'll feel more confident.
Why Digital Transformation Fails
Many organisational change initiatives fail. We discuss hostility and indifference, encumbrance by the past, making the true commitment, a failure to iterate, starting with technology first, and, biggest of all, strategy execution. Knowing the reasons for failure informs what to do to succeed.
Functional Building Blocks
Products each have one of more operational functions, and each function itself is made up of smaller functional parts. Benefits arise when each of these smaller parts has one distinct purpose and is capable of being built and maintained by a small team.
How to Innovate
Innovation is essential to stay relevant and to grow your business. The successful surfacing of new ideas is crucial to being able to improve ways of working, to bring new and improved products and services to market, increase efficiency and, most importantly, to give new value to customers.
Innovation keeps you Trading
Innovation is at the heart of any business. No company, however successful, can stand still. Change happens whether you want it to or not. Successful leaders must reimagine and reinvent traditional legacy businesses or face becoming irrelevant in the market.
Leadership Tensions
Most workers today would agree that org charts cannot even remotely describe the reality of working life. Hierarchy works for setting up corporate contracts and paying taxes. Over-emphasis on formal structures reduces effectiveness and inhibits innovation. There are alternate structures.
Chief of Staff
Your CxO can’t do everything themselves. There is so much noise in the world. They need someone to help manage strategy and innovation and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. A Chief of Staff works alongside their Exec as a force multiplier.
People Matter
Whatever our background, all of us are a diverse mixture of our past and present, with our own hopes and fears, abilities and weaknesses. Together we represent society, and by embracing the breadth of what we all offer then we are also relevant to and engaged with our customers.