The lessons to be learned from early scalers of agile
How to overcome cultural clashes and the lack of leadership buy-in
Not only has the pandemic accelerated digitalisation by several years, but it has also ramped up the adoption of agile methodologies. According to the State of Agile Report, in the first year of the pandemic the percentage of software development teams that adopted agile grew from 37 per cent to 86 per cent. The past five years have also seen some of the most reputable multinational companies reap the benefits of agile adoption across the whole enterprise.
There are a multitude of setbacks that global companies have to overcome to successfully scale agile. The sheer size of these enterprises makes the idea of structuring them into self-governing and autonomous agile teams sound chaotic and unviable. However, the agile transformation of some of these giants and the resulting improvements in time-to-market and revenues show that it can be done – although the margin between success and failure has proven rather narrow.
As is often the case with enterprise-level transformations, transitioning into agile should also start with small-scale pilot projects, which, if they prove their worth, can be followed by similar projects launched in other business functions. But this is easier said than done. Although it makes sense for an organisation to become agile incrementally in order to reduce the risk of failure, a drawn-out transformation from a command-and-control type of organisation into an agile one is somewhat like a gradual switch from left to right driving. Collisions between old and new operating models are far from rare.
The number-one barrier to scaling agile cited by respondents in the survey was the discrepancies in processes and practices during the transitional period. Global engineering and technology company Bosch, for example, set out on its agile journey with a ‘dual organisation’ plan, only to realise that inconsistencies between agile and traditional approaches can undermine the whole effort. As a result, the company adopted a more unified approach in 2015 and appointed a software-engineer-turned-agile expert as VP for Agile Transformation.
In the same year, Dutch multinational banking group ING embarked on a big-bang transformation. As an initial step, it announced that its 3,500 staff at group headquarters were put ‘on mobility’ and encouraged to reapply for new roles in the transformed organisational structure. The main criteria during this selection process was the candidate’s mindset and adaptability rather than knowledge and experience.
To buffer the cultural clashes between the old and the new ways of doing things, it’s key that business functions outside the initial scope of the transition project also adopt some agile features to empower the units going fully agile. Finance or purchasing, for example, might not lend themselves so readily to operating as a software development squad, but it’s of the utmost importance that they become more collaborative than before, as well as responsive to the needs of agile teams working in short cycles.
As long as an organisation has a hybrid structure of agile and command-and-control, tying agile teams to business units and product lines may be a good way of bridging the old and the new. This will ensure that leaders in the old hierarchy understand how cross-functional teams can feed into their results.
It takes agility to make a success of agile
The leaders of a company often see the introduction of agile as a bitter pill that their digital-native competitors make them swallow. Rather than becoming advocates of the new methodology, they think that by adopting some of its more spectacular characteristics, such as small teams and the terminology, they can reap benefits while also containing the ‘chaos’ it may unleash. But a top-down implementation and scaling of the new operating model via directives is doomed to fail. That’s why it's strategic to educate corporate leaders at the early stages of a transition journey and immerse them in agile practices so that they can understand both the benefits and the stumbling blocks the organisation may encounter throughout adoption.
‘Inspect and adapt’, the core tenet of agile, needs to be applied to the implementation of the framework, too. No two organisations are the same, and different functions will call for different implementation approaches that leaders can hit upon by experimenting – withdrawing measures that don’t work and going ahead at full steam with the ones that create value. To get leadership buy-in, it also helps if they find out first-hand how the agile method can resolve age-old management problems. The State of Agile Report found that the top three areas where transformed organisations see the best results are managing changing priorities, visibility, and IT and business alignment – attainments associated with resilience, transparency and collaboration rather than lack of control and disarray.
Zita Goldman
Don't let agile be the enemy of productivity
The pandemic has drastically increased the number of large organisations seeking to adopt agile practices. Agile transformation is being seen as the best way to accelerate ambitious strategies, use resources more effectively, and create an optimal employee experience in an increasingly virtual workplace.
But going agile within complex global businesses comes with risks to productivity and performance. And from the employee’s perspective, the transition can be messy, confusing, full of jargon and disruptive to the day-today.
There’s so much information out there to help organisations adopt agile – just glance at the amount of agile scaling frameworks available such as SAFe, Sas, Less, DA and SoS. But these frameworks often fail to adequately address the people side of change, which is a critical step to doing change right.
By focusing on the frameworks over the people who need to use them, there is the potential that agile becomes the enemy of productivity.
From my experience leading agile change, fixed mindsets are typically the biggest factor that get in the way of transformation success. Some of the most common can be traced back to cognitive biases that are simply human nature. These are biases that everyone experiences, whether you are the CEO or working on the manufacturing floor, and include:
- Egocentric bias: this is when people hold onto their own preconceptions of what agile is and resist the specific flavour of agility an organisation may want to embed. With this bias, one’s own point of view shapes one’s actions whilst disregarding outside influences, no matter how sensible they may be.
- Ambiguity effect: this is a person’s tendency to focus on agile tools and rituals, while neglecting the more valuable – but harder to visualize – mindset and behaviour changes. This highlights the inclination to avoid options that are ambiguous or uncertain in favour of the predictable and clear.
- Dunning-Kruger effect: this is observed when someone, often a leader, overestimates their agile capabilities and forges ahead, with damaging ramifications. This is a consequence of when a lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area causes a person to overestimate their own competence.
- Mere-exposure effect: this is seen when change leaders believe their agile transformation can be copied from a framework or previous experience, but then find what worked elsewhere won’t work within their unique organisational context. This is a manifestation of one’s tendency to defer to something experienced over the unfamiliar if given the choice.
The solution? Take a people-centric approach to agile adoption. Here’s how:
- Co-create what you mean by "agile" to dispel inhibiting preconceptions. The language you use really matters and influences mindsets and behaviours. Traditional agile language is loaded with baggage. Create clarity by taking a co-created approach to set and test your starting agile formula. Articulate and rigorously communicate what it is, and explicitly what it isn’t, to swerve avoidable resistance.
- Make it an ongoing learning experience for leaders and managers. These two groups have the most difficult leap of faith to take as they learn to become servants and curators of their agile organisation. Putting in place a tailored learning and coaching approach, where support can be offered in a safe environment, will help accelerate change. Letting go of control is not easy.
- Focus on the mindset and behaviours first before introducing tools and rituals. While it is tempting to rush ahead with introducing scrums, Kanban boards and other ideas, take the time to figure out how new agile practices will work in your cultural context before implementing process and organisational change. Building the desired growth mindset at scale will take time, and it’s best to start early before introducing the “shiny" rituals that might distract.
- Beware of agile scaling frameworks - go bespoke. Use frameworks as an accelerator, but not the single version of the truth. One size doesn’t fit all, so being thoughtful about what you follow vs. flex will reduce chances of rework and slow-down. Success is possible by exploring the frameworks, selecting what seems appropriate, and testing with your employees. This seems obvious but can be missed in the rush to see results.
- Recognise and address the emotional impact. There’s no way around it, it’s a significant organisational change, and individuals naturally go through a range of emotions, from fear to anger and resistance. Taking an empathetic and human-centred approach to your change management will help predict and defuse resistance, whilst getting employees on board with the change. Try creating employee personas so that your change approach can be tailored by employee type, not just role description.
Remember, being agile shouldn’t be the end goal, but a means to get organisations to where they want to be – the execution of strategy and purpose. Taking steps to deal with the often-neglected human factors that can get in the way of your agile transformation is the quickest way of realising the benefits of your agile journey.
For more information or to get in touch, visit daggerwinggroup.com.
Andy Rugeroni
Senior Principal, Daggerwing Group
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM DAGGERWING GROUP
Real estate in the metaverse is booming. Is it really such a crazy idea?
The idea of spending thousands or even millions of dollars to buy fictitious “land” in a virtual world sounds, to be frank, absurd.
But in recent months, we’ve seen significant investments in virtual land within the metaverse. PwC is among the latest to dive in, having purchased real estate in The Sandbox, a virtual gaming world, for an undisclosed amount.
If other reported sales are anything to go by, it would have been a handsome sum. One person recently bought a plot of land in the Snoopverse – a virtual world rapper Snoop Dogg is developing within The Sandbox – for US$450,000 (around £332,500).
Meanwhile, the Metaverse Group, a real estate company focused on the metaverse economy, reportedly bought a piece of land in Decentraland, another virtual platform, for US$2.43 million.
Let’s refresh on what the “metaverse” is. You probably heard the term a lot when Facebook re-branded to Meta in October 2021. Other companies, such as Nike and Microsoft, have also announced they will launch into this space.
The metaverse describes a vision of a connected 3D virtual world, where real and digital worlds are integrated using technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). This immersive environment will be accessible through the likes of VR headsets, AR glasses and smartphone apps.
Users will meet and communicate as digital avatars, explore new areas and create content. The idea is the metaverse will develop to become a collaborative virtual space where we can socialise, play, work and learn.
There are several metaverses already – for example in virtual gaming platforms like The Sandbox and virtual worlds like Decentraland. In the same way a website is part of the broader 2D world wide web, individual metaverses will form a larger, connected metaverse.
Importantly, as in the real world, it is and increasingly will be possible to buy things in the metaverse – including real estate.
Virtual land as an NFT
Transactions in the virtual world are generally monetised using cryptocurrency. Other than cryptocurrenies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the primary method for monetising and exchanging value within the metaverse.
An NFT is a unique digital asset. Although NFTs are primarily items of digital art (such as videos, images, music or 3D objects), a variety of assets may constitute an NFT – including virtual real estate. On platforms like OpenSea, where people go to buy and trade NFTs, there are now plots of land, or even virtual houses.
To ensure digital real estate has value, supply is limited – a concept in economics called “scarcity value”. For example, Decentraland is made up of 90,000 pieces or “parcels” of land, each around 50 feet by 50 feet.
We’re already seeing examples where the value of virtual real estate is going up. In June 2021, a digital real estate investment fund called Republic Realm reportedly spent the equivalent of more than US$900,000 to buy an NFT representing a plot on Decentraland. According to DappRadar, a website which tracks NFT sales data, it was the most expensive purchase of NFT land in Decentraland history.
But then as we know, in November 2021, the Metaverse Group bought their plot in Decentraland for US$2.4 million. The size of this purchase was actually smaller than the former – 116 land parcels compared to 259 bought by Republic Realm.
It’s not just Decentraland seeing appreciations. In February 2021, Axie Infinity (another virtual gaming world) reportedly sold nine of their land parcels for the equivalent of US$1.5 million – a record, the company said – before one land parcel sold for US$2.3 million in November 2021.
While it appears that values are climbing, it’s important to acknowledge that real estate investment in the metaverse remains extremely speculative. No one can be certain if this boom is the next great thing or the next big bubble.
The future of metaverse real estate
Financial incentives aside, you may be wondering what companies and individuals will actually do with their virtual land.
As an example, the Metaverse Group’s purchase is in Decentraland’s fashion precinct. According to the buyer the space will be used to host digital fashion events and sell virtual clothing for avatars – another potential area for growth in the metaverse.
While investors and companies are dominating this space at the moment, not all metaverse real estate will set you back millions. But what could owning virtual land offer you? If you buy a physical property in the real world, the result is tangible – somewhere to live, to take pride in, to welcome family and friends.
While virtual property doesn’t provide physical shelter, there are some parallels. In shopping for virtual real estate, you could buy a piece of land to build on. Or you could choose a house already built that you like. You could make it your own with various (digital) objects. You could invite visitors, and visit others’ virtual homes too.
This vision is a while away. But if it seems completely absurd, we should remember that once upon a time, people had doubts about the potential significance of the internet, and then social media. Technologists predict the metaverse will mature into a fully functioning economy in the coming years, providing a synchronous digital experience as interwoven into our lives as email and social networking are now.
This is a strange fantasy come true for someone who was a gamer in a former life. Some years ago, a younger version of my conscience was telling me to stop wasting time playing video games; to go back to study and focus on my “real” life. Deep inside I always had this wish to see gaming overlapping with real life, Real Player One style. I feel this vision is inching ever closer.
Theo Tzanidis, Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, University of the West of Scotland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
3 ways for businesses to fuel innovation and drive performance
Over the past two years, businesses have experienced unprecedented operational disruptions and market uncertainties due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Accordingly, many business executives are prioritizing innovation to enhance competitiveness and performance in 2022. This is easier said than done, as the list of supposedly essential innovative practices is extensive and growing.
For example, recent research shows that innovative companies, compared to their non-innovative counterparts, engage in many highly touted best practices. While these practices can enhance competitiveness, some are more important than others, and implementing them in the absence of a strategy is highly problematic.
As a marketing and innovation management researcher, I found these complexities led me to two research questions. First, what kind of organizational culture best supports implementing these innovative practices? And second, which of these practices universally enhance firm performance?
C. Brooke Dobni and I investigated these issues in our forthcoming article in Research-Technology Management, an innovation management journal.
Global innovation study
In co-operation with national conference boards in the United States, Europe and Asia (non-profit organizations that support research aimed at helping leaders address societal challenges), we collected data from 437 companies, across 11 industries, in 27 countries.
Our findings showed that an innovation-focused culture was required to successfully implement crowd-sourcing, stage-gate systems, design thinking, open innovation, big data analytics, innovation management software, scientific discovery and prototyping. However, only some of the these practices enhanced company performance.
Companies with strong innovation cultures have leaders that support innovating, dedicate resources to experimentation, pursue knowledge generation and dissemination and have processes to test and launch ideas. High innovators are able to execute strategy, create competitive advantages and achieve performance objectives.
We found that highly innovative people were better at implementing all of the innovation practices. We also found that across industries, companies with strong innovation cultures outperformed their counterparts without a similar culture. Given its performance benefits, how does one create an innovation-focused culture?
Previous insight from Fortune 1000 companies suggests that executives need to set innovation goals, encourage all employees to innovate in their roles, prioritize individual and organizational learning, remove negative consequences related to failed experimentation and support activities with incentives.
Based on the results of our study, we argue that an innovation-focused culture is the necessary first step. Only after companies have created a supporting environment can they attempt to implement any innovative practices.
Performance-enhancing innovation
Companies in all industries experienced the performance-enhancing benefits from crowd-sourcing, open innovation, innovation management software, scientific discovery and prototyping:
- Crowd-sourcing is the process of taking internal tasks and outsourcing them. Naturally, it creates new ideas and perspectives that can create value for companies.
- Open innovation is the process of sharing innovations freely among players in the value chain, also allowing more value-creating opportunities for companies.
- Innovation management software is designed to measure innovation progress. Because “what gets measured, gets managed,” innovation progress that is effectively measured generates results.
- Scientific discovery — people collaborating across space and time to deepen knowledge — has been recognized as a trait of top-performing companies.
- Prototyping, creating early and test versions of products, reduces risk and increases a product’s market performance.
We recommend companies explore implementing these innovative practices since they have universal performance benefits. But it’s important to reiterate that engagement in such practices needs to be guided by the organization’s strategy, and an innovation-focused culture is the necessary first step.
Less successful innovative practices
Although there’s a lot of hype about stage-gate systems, design thinking and big data analytics, our research shows that only companies in specific industries benefit from these practices.
Stage-gate systems are a linear process involving a series of sequential steps aimed at launching new products. We argue that the innovation process is anything but linear, and such a rigid process is not conducive for most industries.
Our data confirms that stage-gate systems are most effective in manufacturing, IT and health-care settings but not in any others.
Design thinking, an approach that uses a designer’s sensibility and methods to match consumer needs with what is technologically feasible, is nebulous and even vague among those who practise it.
We argue that design thinking’s ambiguity is the reason why only companies in the arts and entertainment, retail and marketing industries experienced its benefits.
Surprisingly, big data analytics — collection, interpretation, and decision-making based on large datasets — only benefited companies in some industries. Upon closer examination, we found that only companies in industries that have conventionally managed and interpreted large amounts of data (like finance, health care and IT) realized such value. We think this speaks more to some companies’ inability to manage big data as opposed to its value.
Managerial tips
We offer three ways managers can fuel and foster innovation based on our research:
- All executives should seek to create an innovation-focused culture.
- After an innovation culture is established, companies should engage strategically in some of the universally beneficial practices.
- Some practices should be avoided all together, as their benefits are limited to specific industries.
Grant Alexander Wilson, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Business Administration, University of Regina
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Diversity is not just important for tech – it’s an essential part of its future
How can organisations leverage one of tech’s greatest challenges – a lack of diversity – to solve another: the growing cloud skills gap
It’s no secret that tech has a diversity problem. For years we’ve seen reports of bias against people of colour in facial recognition software and sexist credit card algorithms. As recently as 2020, just 5.5 per cent of new hires that year were black.
Historically, the space has been seen as dominated by white men. According to a survey, the total estimated black, hispanic, and indigenous population of Silicon Valley sat at a paltry 5 per cent. And that was pre-pandemic.
Then there’s the impact of the pandemic itself. We know the pandemic opened up some opportunities for minority groups – moving to remote working made a lot of roles more accessible to people with disabilities, for example. We also know that it hindered efforts to increase more diverse hiring significantly across multiple sectors, and had a greater negative impact on working women compared with their male peers.
And there’s one more thing the pandemic impacted – it transformed the face of the tech sector, in many ways for good.
How the pandemic reshaped tech
In 2020, the pandemic triggered a frenzied dash for companies in nearly every sector to provide their services or products virtually, practically overnight.
This process, known as digital transformation, has been a buzzword in recent years, but its roots go as far back as the late nineties, and during and after lockdowns, it became increasingly essential for businesses looking to survive in modern, digital-first markets.
In fact, it’s so essential in a post-pandemic world that leading figures have estimated that nearly two years’ worth of digital transformation was conducted in the first two months of the pandemic alone. And it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down just yet.
Why the growing skills gap has gone from a problem to a catastrophe
In 2019, it was estimated that the skills gap had an estimated $302 billion impact on business – in just one year. Since then, the tech skills gap has grown so much this figure has been revised to $775bn worldwide.
And in a sector where skilled professionals were already in incredibly short supply, many companies’ attempts to rebuild after the pandemic and undergo digital transformation have – quite simply – been decimated.
Nearly 80 per cent of IT decision-makers surveyed in 2021 consider a lack of digital skills as the number one challenge for meeting present and future business needs. With so few tech professionals available, businesses have fast become over-reliant on increasingly in-demand contractors, and many companies have fallen behind on critical digital transformation projects. This is a huge problem for tech, for two reasons.
Firstly, when candidates are already in short supply, diversity becomes an issue that fewer and fewer companies can devote resources to improving. This risks locking women, people of colour, and other marginalised groups out for good, undoing years of collective work to improve the diversity in our sector.
Secondly, such a short supply of candidates in the space could inhibit the overall economic recovery of the sector and lead to billions in lost revenue. Ultimately, if the tech skills gap is not closed in the next five years, we could risk losing $12 trillion in global GDP revenue by 2028.
Using one problem to solve another
Historically, the lack of representation in tech has been an incredibly complex challenge, often compounded by the skills gap seen across multiple technologies. Not only has talent creation in the sector struggled to keep up with the demand for talent, but the talent that has been generated has been predominantly white and male.
These problems are complex and intersectional: the more the skills gap grows, the less able companies are to improve their diversity, which subsequently narrows their scope for finding new candidates and increases their skills gap yet again.
When we created Revolent, we knew that our sector’s best answer for bridging the skills gap was to focus on diversity, so we made sure that encouraging diverse and inclusive hiring was one of our core organisational strategies.
Diversity and the skills gap may be our two biggest foes, but they are by no means unrelated. It’s not like it was 20 years ago, when you’d need to pay hefty bootcamp or college fees to learn a specialist IT technology. Theoretically, anyone with an internet connection can learn the basics of cloud technologies, as the internet has levelled access to learning resources. What is often lacking is the support and opportunity to apply that knowledge in practice.
All it takes is for the right organisation, with a proper understanding of how to build diverse tech teams, to come along and match professionals who are interested in reskilling or cross-training with the thousands of businesses out there that desperately need their help. Which is what we’ve been doing since 2019.
At Revolent, we recruit existing tech professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds and cross-train them in core technologies. We help individuals begin an incredible new career in the cloud, and we help businesses by providing the talent they’re so desperately in need of.
And it’s working. Each year we’re partnering with more and more companies to build diverse talent pipelines, as people are realising that our business model allows us to flexibly and quickly plug skills gaps across a broad range of technologies.
And that very flexibility that has been our success? It comes directly from our ability to widen the net and source from a more diverse range of hiring pools than traditional recruitment routes.
Research shows that now, more than ever, the most successful companies are those that actively champion diversity. And, when it comes to cloud technologies, diversity is no longer just a moral imperative, it’s essential for our survival and growth as a sector.
To find out more about Revolent’s cloud talent creation programs, or to partner with us, visit our website.
Nabila Salem
President, Revolent
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM REVOLENT
Creating a seamless customer experience in 2022
Unified interactions with your customers are key to your company’s long-term growth and brand image
Over the past two years, thousands of brick-and-mortar stores and customer-facing centres have closed their doors. They haven’t gone bankrupt or disappeared from the face of the earth – most of them have simply shifted their efforts to online channels.
Yet, while providing a good end-to-end experience was quite easy face to face with customers, digital environments can feel quite fragmented, leaving customers confused or unsatisfied.
Customer service teams need to stay ahead of the curve and be able to build smooth experiences to satisfy the ever-increasing expectations of consumers.
Forget about isolated channels
Your customer experience needs to be approached holistically.
You can no longer expect customers to use one channel, then another, and repeat everything they need or want. Omnichannel has become a must, and channels can no longer be disconnected from each other.
Let’s say a consumer’s purchase journey starts on Instagram, where they ask about the functionalities of a product through a direct message. They then move on to the website and proceed to launch a live chat to enquire about payment methods or delivery times.
This has now become a typical customer path – and your CX planning needs to be ready for it. You need to make sure you know all the details about that customer’s prior questions, requests and possibly even purchases, no matter which channel they choose.
Let consumers pick up where they left off
People live busy lives, running from here to there, so you should expect consumers to communicate with your brand at any point during their journey.
Communications are also likely to be full of interruptions. Quite often, customers will be on the go and will have to stop their communication with you before picking it up later that day, or the day after.
This is something that has created friction with customers. People hate repeating themselves over and over, and many of the current customer communication systems are prone to taking support cases as a one-time request or ‘session’ instead of approaching it as a whole experience. Allowing your customers to seamlessly pick up where they left off can become a competitive advantage for your brand.
Eliminate waiting times as automation takes over
Automation will continue to be one of the top trends for 2022. We even hate calling it a trend, since it is here to stay, and it can take many forms.
You can use a chatbot, for example, as a way to collect data, providing the first layer of support to customers. Connect it to your systems and you will even be able to allow transactional conversations. Make sure you choose a good NLP chatbot that understands natural languages and intent.
Additionally, you can easily implement a knowledge base add-on to your support contact forms, so when a customer is filling in a form, any relevant content from your help centre will appear on the side.
These strategies combined can dramatically reduce waiting times, as well as the number of support contacts. The result? Happier customers and increased support efficiency.
Anticipate needs in a proactive manner
As humans, but also as customers, we love to be listened to. That’s the reason why personalisation has taken over marketing techniques during the past few years.
However, there are many ways to show a customer your brand listens to their needs. You don’t need to wait until they explicitly tell you what they want. Analysing behaviour and acting upon it is key to anticipating customer needs and boosting sales.
Choose to send reminder emails on promotions or items previously seen by visitors, or greet customers with a proactive chatbot on your website or app showing deals that might be of interest to them.
Be present in all relevant channels
Shopping channels have been evolving for a while, and so have support-dedicated ones. Many businesses saw an increase in sales in 2021 simply by building a social presence on new channels such as TikTok or Twitch.
Others found new uses of already existing channels, like WhatsApp or Messenger. For many businesses around the globe, these have become customers’ go-to channels whenever they are experiencing an issue with a service or a product or whenever they have any doubts about them.
Study your audience, and make the right channel choice while making sure you don’t miss out on any relevant potential channel. Plus, these channels are perfect to enable automation with chatbots or voicebots. They will also simplify the lives of your customer service teams.
Make your experiences conversational
Conversational AI is going to be a huge buzzword in 2022, and there is a reason for it. Until now, most customer-centric strategies have been missing a key component: engaging dialogues.
Of course, companies have been trying to build compelling and engaging messages for years, but up until recently, communication was going only one way.
Conversational marketing and support are closing this gap and creating experiences that foster one-to-one personalised interactions, focusing on dialogues and true interactive real-time conversations.
AI solutions based on NLP like Inbenta’s will be key to helping companies understand true intent from their customers at scale and crafting seamless experiences that boost engagement, drive higher sales and bring your brand closer to your end-users.
If you want to dive into the world of conversational AI, download Inbenta’s Conversational AI: The Ultimate Guide or experience it for yourself
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM INBENTA
Back from the brink: leading the Kodak comeback
I’ve led turnarounds for companies in a wide range of industries and I’m currently in the middle of a five-year plan to turn around one of the world’s most iconic companies: Kodak. Kodak is a global enterprise with lots of different businesses and unique challenges, but in many ways, it’s like all the other companies I’ve turned around. And my strategy for bringing Kodak back follows the same template that has worked for me in the past.
Talk to employees
When you enter a new situation, it’s important to talk to the people who are already there – and I don’t just mean executives. I made a point of visiting Kodak factories and meeting the people who run the processes that drive our business. Instead of talking, I listened. And instead of thinking I could tell them all the answers, I was open and honest about needing their input. If you’re humble and respectful, you’ll get valuable insights and respect in return.
Strengthen the balance sheet
Any transformation starts with a strong balance sheet. Even a child running a lemonade stand knows that businesses exist to make a profit. And if you’re spending your revenue and your energy paying interest and meeting covenants, you’ll have a hard time getting into the black.
That’s why my priority when I took the CEO role at Kodak was to raise cash and start paying down roughly $300 million of looming term debt. And that was just the beginning. More recently, we completed a series of transactions that retired maturing debt and provided the company with up to $310 million of incremental cash for investing in our core businesses.
Over the past two-and-a-half years we’ve lowered our net debt by $346 million, reduced debt service costs dramatically and put Kodak in a stronger financial position than at any time since 2013. But that doesn’t mean our challenges are behind us. We have a solid foundation, which gives us options and time to execute our long-term plan.
Simplify the menu
When I took the reins at Kodak, the company was launching a smartphone and had announced a licensing deal for a branded cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, none of those directions leveraged our core skills and resources. And none of them were profitable.
One of my first moves was to make it clear to our customers, executives, employees and investors that under my leadership we would focus on the businesses we know best: commercial print and advanced materials and chemicals.
Kodak has been a chemical company since its inception in 1892 and commercial print accounts for roughly 80 per cent of our revenue. It’s in our DNA. We have people with decades of experience in the science that goes into our print products – things like dispersions and deposition coating. And we have an undervalued gem of an asset in our 12,000-acre Eastman Business Park industrial manufacturing and R&D campus.
In a turnaround, it’s critical to be honest with yourself about what your company really is. And that’s just what we’ve done at Kodak. We are an industrial manufacturer and proud of it. We have doubled down on our commercial print business, especially digital print, and invested in driving innovation. The overall print industry is not growing, but specific segments like packaging and labels are. And we will deliver the solutions our customers need to capitalise on those opportunities.
Always start with the customer
Unfortunately, too many companies lose sight of that simple starting point. Kodak was guilty of just that before I arrived. But we’ve since made key changes, all with the goal of putting the customer first.
Our business had been organised to serve ourselves: five divisions, each with its own salesforce and agenda. I quickly reorganised the business as ‘One Kodak’ with shared resources and a shared mission – to offer customers solutions comprising products and services from across our industry-leading portfolio. We’ve fixed our front end and now we’re working on the back end with the same goal in mind: to make it easy to do business with Kodak.
Even our R&D efforts are customer-focused. Before we spend money on anything, we make sure we’re developing a product or technology that addresses a specific customer need. We really listen to our Customer Advisory Board. It’s working: we’ve launched 10 print products in the past two years and have won eight industry awards for innovation.
The strategy is just the beginning
Don’t get me wrong: turning a big company around is not easy. And although the strategy I’ve outlined is simple, executing it is hard. You still need to make tough decisions, negotiate deals, drive change and say no more than yes. And you need a great team to make it happen – a team that has a balance of institutional expertise coupled with a fresh perspective, collaborates well, has bought into the plan and has had success executing other turnaround plans.
If you stay laser-focused and tune out the noise and distractions, you can succeed in saving jobs and creating value and opportunities for the next generation. And when that happens, you get to experience a feeling of satisfaction and pride that’s like nothing else in business.
Jim Continenza
Executive Chairman and CEO, Kodak
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM KODAK
The metaverse: the new digital economy?
The importance of building the metaverse in an open and decentralised manner.
Imagine a virtual world in which you spend most of your working hours. A world in which you go to work, do your shopping, watch movies, play games, learn, travel, date and live out all the shared experiences you would typically have in a physical world. A persistent, immersive, comprehensive space in which everything and everyone is present.
The metaverse, in one form or another, has long been a staple of science fiction. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash gets the credit for the name, and its most well-known definition, although related concepts had been around ever since the 80s in a wide variety of media, ranging from novels to videogames. The technology required was too futuristic back then but, with accelerating development in the relevant fields, a path towards the metaverse finally seems to be forming. The choices we make over the next decade may impact the future of society and technology in ways that are at least comparable to the advent of the internet or smartphones.
Metaverse predictions
It is hard to predict, at this point, how we will interface with this world and whether it will truly present as one instance or a collection thereof. What is clear is that realising this idea is not possible in a world of silos and walled gardens. Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of its user count, is critical in this context – there is little point in living in a void.
The challenges underlying the metaverse are immense. Human-computer interaction technology is far from ready, with the metaverse potentially being accessible on existing devices but benefiting from improved and more seamless virtual reality and augmented reality experiences, and potentially brain-computer interaction. The storage, networking and computational requirements may be orders of magnitude above anything today. Security will be critical, as will privacy and intellectual property.
For several of these challenges, the Web 3.0 movement may hold the solution. As philosophical as it is technical, its members have been creating tools for building an open, decentralised and democratic internet for the last decade. Can these tools be used to create a more participatory economy, empowering users to go from mere consumers to purveyors of services and goods in a truly globalised world not subject to country borders and geographical disadvantages?
Is a digital economy in sight?
Blockchain networks, whose defining characteristics are the lack of a central authority, may provide a neutral ledger underlying payment and financial services denominated in a panoply of virtual currencies. Smart contracts may mediate transactions and encode appropriate incentive mechanisms. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), whose market slumped after a Q2 peak in crypto-art transactions, may find their killer application as the metaverse property registry. Tools for decentralised file storage, computation and self-sovereign identity management are already available and undergoing constant improvement.
In parallel, several groups are working on related standards. The adoption of open standards is essential in ensuring that developers can plug their applications into the metaverse, that virtual asset formats can be universally interpreted, and that users can choose which access interface they use.
A fully realised metaverse won’t just be a part of the digital economy – it will be its own worldwide and quasi-independent economy, whose implications may end up reweaving the fabric of society. We must strive to make the metaverse a force for global equality and inclusivity – in doing so, we will also be working towards a better reality.
Jorge Soares
How workers become seduced by the cult of ‘optimal busyness’
The consultant was on her way to a demanding client meeting when she realised she had had a miscarriage. But she did not interrupt her day. Instead, she went on to complete the meeting at her client’s offices.
The woman, who works at an elite professional service firm in London, was one of the professionals we interviewed as part of our recent study of the work life of highly educated professionals.
When we began our study in 2014, we set out to investigate how workers in demanding jobs managed their work-life balance. But soon after we started the interviews, we realised we needed to revise our focus, because it became clear that our interviewees were not seeking to balance their work and private life.
Instead, we found these workers were driven by a compulsion to be busy at all times, which meant they were also willing to sacrifice their family lives in important ways.
As one of our participants told us: “You become a little bit of a junkie for a deadline and work. It’s quite hard to switch off”.
While a common narrative in research and the media is that people want to slow down their lifestyles these days, our findings reveal a strikingly different story.
The desire to work fewer hours among our interviewees was uncommon. Instead they were in pursuit of something else: “optimal busyness”.
The quest for optimal busyness
We interviewed 81 people who work in some of the biggest consulting and law firms in London. Half of the workers were women, half were men, and nearly all of them had at least one child. All of the professionals we interviewed suffered from time famine – constantly having too little time to do what they had to do.
To deal with this problem, they were drawn toward a compelling state of busyness, one in which they felt in control of their time. We call this “optimal busyness” – an attractive, accelerated temporal experience that is difficult to achieve and maintain.
Overall, we identified three different kinds of experiences of busyness: optimal busyness, excessive busyness, and quiet time. Optimal busyness is an elating and enjoyable temporal flow in which the workers felt at their best and most productive. This buzzing feeling gave them adrenaline and positive energy, which was exciting. When they were in this state, they felt nothing could stop them, and that they could, for example, save a company from going bankrupt.
Such an attraction toward busyness can be understood as a kind of status symbol or badge of honour, a phenomenon that has been described in previous research.
But we found that this drive went far deeper than mere social signalling. The desired buzzing feeling was itself inherently addictive. One participant told us:
“I love the intensity of it, usually. I get a buzz out of it, that’s why I do the job that I do. I like it.”
We observed the pleasurable and positive state of optimal busyness often tipped over and became excessive. In such instances, professionals’ feelings of being in control of their time vanished. This is where busyness became overwhelming and sometimes depressing.
When the energising buzz of optimal busyness continued for too long without break, it became unbearable. Connection with family was often the first casualty. One participant went on a work trip and despite promises to call her family in the evening failed to do so – for the entire week.
We observed a similar pattern in the case of quiet time – that is, when the busy work period was suddenly interrupted by downtime, or typically, a holiday period. Quiet time was experienced as something undesirable and meaningless. It also caused boredom and even depression. The thought of a slower pace at work was a source of concern. One told us:
“When I don’t have deadlines I get bored. I’m much less productive because I like working on adrenaline.”
As well as interviewing busy knowledge workers, we also spoke to some of their partners. One partner said:
“My wife is terrible. If she wakes up to go to toilet in the middle of the night, she checks her emails – even at 3 AM.”
The conditions for optimal busyness
On one hand, workplaces produce the conditions that drive the quest for optimal busyness. We identified a number of mechanisms that did this, including unrealistic deadlines, performance metrics, time sheets, and the working culture itself – companies and peers expected everyone to be available to work at all times via their smartphones.
The firms we studied are elite institutions that hire the best university students with the highest grades. New recruits wanted to survive the impossible pressure because they knew it was the only way to get a promotion or to become an associate in the company. Busy working culture soon absorbed them and normalised unnatural working hours.
On the other hand, we found individuals themselves were also creating the conditions for optimal busyness. Some boosted their capacity to work with coffee, drugs, or physical exercise. Others went as far as isolating themselves in a hotel room so they could work without interruptions.
A common strategy was for workers to think: “This is only a short period and once I am through I will relax”. For most, the relaxation never happened.
A culture of overwork
For decades, scholars have observed the persistence of long working hours, overwork, and time famine. These problems are ingrained in many professional work contexts, not only in consulting, audit or law firms.
Academia is another striking example: studies consistently show that researchers’ poor mental well-being is linked to increased performance expectations, competitive ethos, and meticulous metrics that produce non-stop busyness.
Our research offers a new way of understanding this phenomenon. The quest for optimal busyness is a vicious cycle. However, until recently there has been limited research that would uncover our everyday experiences of time and how they can take a hold of us.
The individuals we studied, albeit in an arguably extreme context, were often unaware what was happening to them. Perhaps it is time for us all to reflect on how and why we are so addicted to feeling busy.
Joonas Rokka, Professeur en marketing, EM Lyon and Ioana Lupu, Associate Professor, ESSEC
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.