INTRODUCTION TO MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Being Digital

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

—Ray Bradbury

I could write an entire book examining the definition of digital. I could frame, define, argue, and create frameworks outlining the many aspects, variations, categories, and nomenclature. I don’t see what I would be adding.

What most managers, leaders, and teams are struggling with is not what digital is, or knowing that their businesses need to evolve, but how to do it. What do you and your organization need to do differently? If these are your questions, then you are in the right place. And despite the title of this chapter, it’s not “mission impossible.” It can just seem that way.

BE OPEN TO CHANGE

Secret 1. Compete Differently

It’s said that the only people who like change are babies. But an appetite for change is what separates innovators from laggards, entrepreneurs from bureaucrats, and digital winners from digital losers. The professionals, teams, and companies who learn to love change, who are addicted to challenging everything about the status quo, are the digital winners. You must wring out the last drop of capability every single day until you and your organization are great. Then wash, rinse, and repeat.

Why? Because digital is neither the technology nor the social networks. Digital is competing differently by leveraging new customer experiences, lean business practices, and innovative business models, which are powered by the convergence of a wide range of technology and computer science capabilities such as cloud computing, social and mobile collaboration, and artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. Repeat. Digital is not the technology. It’s about competing differently.

Secret 2. This Time, It’s Personal

What people often don’t understand is that digital transformation is not just about organizational change—it’s also about personal change. You must be, as Gandhi said, the change you want to see in the world. The entire organization cannot be transformed if you fail to change your own personal habits.

Digital transformation is both the organizational change and personal change needed to thrive as a business or a professional in the digital era. Digital transformation is new beliefs, new management philosophies, and new techniques, at both the organizational and personal level. The personal changes typically needed are encapsulated in many of the ideas in this book—being a builder, writing narratives, designing metrics, seeking root causes, and innovating by solving a problem. And while you can’t do it all by yourself, you need to be much more of an owner or direct contributor rather than always delegating.

Secret 3. Speed Matters

On paper, it’s simple. Digital equals speed and agility. Speed is operational excellence. Agility is the ability to make change happen. To win in digital, make everything faster and more nimble.

This includes what you offer your customers and how you go about your work. Both inside and outside, you need to deliver and get things done with shorter time frames, and you need to be able to adapt, react more nimbly, shorten cycle times, and improve the data from the customer experience and your processes.

MAKE IT EASY

Being digital is about competing differently. How are innovative companies doing it? The overarching strategy that defines the digital era is making things easy. And by “easy,” I mean easier by factors of 10 or 100. Perhaps the real value proposition of Amazon is giving back time to its customers. Customers save time by not going to the store. Merchants save time by not having to market or brand to get customer exposure. Logistics leaders save time by leveraging Amazon fulfillment to deliver orders. “Easy” also means giving your customer far more data, insight, and control vis-à-vis their interactions with your organization.

Take the cloud, a technology-disrupting traditional hardware and software industry. First, you pay only for what you use. Cloud computing changes the purchase from a fixed and capital expense to a variable and operating expense.

Second, cloud computing removes cycle time from procurement, setup, and installation, and it delivers immediate scaling. The elasticity to scale up and scale down easily allows organizations to save vast amounts of time, resources, and expense. Scale was once the great advantage of incumbents. No more. Platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or WeWork allow small teams to have an immediate and scalable workforce. When I ran two businesses at Amazon, the trait I admired most was that every function had a plan to improve and scale. Not all these plans were funded, but every leader had a plan and a chance to pitch that plan for funding and resources.

Finally, cloud computing abstracts complexity and makes infrastructure management exponentially more accessible than running your own. As I said, easy.

Digital competition is about convenience and choice for the customers, empowering them to choose how and when they want to do business with you. It’s about erasing steps that do not add value, cut costs, improve quality, or save time. For example, “fast fashion” companies like H&M have cut lead time from idea to product to six weeks. It’s also about providing transparency and access to your customers. Travelocity disrupted the world of travel agents and travel through one killer feature: making all options and prices available to the consumer.

“Technology today is creating totally new business models. Uber, the largest limo company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the largest news company, develops no content. Alibaba, the largest retailer, doesn’t have inventory. Airbnb, the largest hotelier, doesn’t own hotels,” says Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity and Kayak. “These companies are drop dead easy. There’s a slogan in Silicon Valley: Step one, install software. There is no step two. That’s it. That’s how easy you have to be.”¹

FIND AND HIRE DIGITAL LEADERS

There’s a common belief in sports that you can’t coach speed; you were either born fast, or you weren’t. Training and technique can develop, hone, and refine that speed, but nothing can make a slow athlete fast. Fortunately, that’s not the case in business. Speed can be coached, but you need the right coaches.

Finding leaders with the critical eye and instincts necessary to innovate and execute digital transformation is tough—it’s a magical skill set. Why? Mature organizations have solved their customers’ problems and now measure success by profit, which means an increased focus on operational efficiency. As a result, innovation suffers.

“Such practices and policies ensure that executives can deliver meaningful earnings to the street and placate shareholders. But they also minimize the types and scale of innovation that can be pursued successfully within an organization,” wrote innovation researcher Maxwell Wessel in the Harvard Business Review. “No company ever created a transformational growth product by asking: ‘How can we do what we’re already doing, a tiny bit better and a tiny bit cheaper?’”²

In other words, asking the same teams and people to be both operators and innovators will fail. The two things a company leader (be that a CEO or middle manager) is best positioned to do are to communicate vision and allocate resources. For enterprises to combine operational excellence and systematically create innovation, to help give permission to move quickly and “fail forward,” leaders must create the environment to nurture tiny seeds.

“Both [Amazon Retail and AWS],” Bezos explained, “were planted as tiny seeds, and both have grown organically. . . . One is famous for brown boxes and the other for APIs. . . . Under the surface, the two are not so different. They share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles.” Those principles, as designed by company leadership, have created the scaffolding for a culture of forward failure that carries success across Amazon’s many lines of business.

The key to innovation, within Amazon or your own company, is to imagine and build your own scaffolding of trial and error. According to Bezos, “You need to select people who tend to be dissatisfied by a lot of the current ways. As they go about their daily experiences, they notice that little things are broken in the world, and they want to fix them. Inventors have a divine discontent. . . . You want to embrace high-judgment failure—this was worth trying, it didn’t work, so let’s try something different. All of our most important successes at Amazon have been through that kind of failure: Fail, try again, and repeat that loop.”³

At the risk of oversimplifying, if digital is best described as speed, then digital transformation is best described as making your organization and yourself fast.