Issue No. 457 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting squeezes in one more book recommendation before 2021. Fast Times is “extremely useful and relevant” says the CFO of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and watch for the next issue with my 2020 book-of-the-year honors. Click here to check out the 30 books I reviewed in 2020.
“The Pace of Change Will Never Be This Slow Again”
Here’s your 2021 New Year’s Resolution: order Fast Times (quickly!) and delegate the reading of this transformational book to a senior leader. Or…if you follow the “Think Week” twice-a-year lifelong learning pattern of Bill Gates, add Fast Times to the stack of books you’ll read in your quiet quarantined cabin in 2021.
The four authors of Fast Times: How Digital Winners Set Direction, Learn, and Adapt wrote this stunning book “for senior executives who are frustrated by the slow pace and limited return on investment (ROI) of their digital transformations, and are unsure what’s holding them back.”
All senior leaders at McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm (for-profit, nonprofit, government, etc.), the four co-authors are based in Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Germany. They warn late-comers to the digital world, “Fast movers win.” They caution, “Time and again we see companies that have taken a fast-follower strategy and not be able to move fast enough.”
The coffee table book’s format and shape is arresting and will be copied by other book designers: short four- to seven-page bite-size chapters, eye-catching graphics, fascinating sidebars from the trenches, ample white space, big quotable quotes, and “Food for Thought” short summaries. Better buy two copies. Your copy will get “borrowed!”
Whether your digital strategy is non-existent, just mediocre, or best of breed—don’t think this book is just about digital. If I were still a CEO today, I’d make this eye-opener required reading by every board member, senior team member, consultant, and middle manager. Example: You want speed? The founder of Spotify says, “We aim to make mistakes faster than anyone else.”
Best of all, in just 141 pages (plus oodles of reference notes), you’ll feast on 18 management practices, organized around four key areas—all perfectly sized for your next 18 weekly staff meetings or Zoom calls. Here’s a taste:
STRATEGY
Q1. Are you rushing your strategy—and slowing your transformation? “…our experience has shown that companies often have only a hazy view of how much value they can squeeze out of what they already do.” Did you know that John Deere, besides selling tractors, also advises farmers on weather conditions? Must read: six questions on “Are you a target for disruption?”
Q2. Are you confident that you have an accurate picture of how your organization is really doing? Is “internal naval-gazing” your challenge? Whoa! In a fascinating sidebar about Procter & Gamble’s effort to raise the company’s digital IQ, a senior VP started “with a digital IQ test to assess base-level understanding.” More than 50 percent of the leaders at the annual top-management meeting did not pass! The result: it put a spotlight on the case for change—and why their business leaders needed to “commit to meaningful digital transformation.” (And P&G was a leader in strategy issues. Read my review of Playing to Win.)
Q3. Will your strategy work in the real world? Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.”
Q4. Are you clear about which transformation model is best for your company? Can you name the four models? (Yikes! Four?) Learn why a European bank created an HR “war room” to focus on faster hiring of top talent—a big theme in Fast Times.
Q5. Do you know what great looks like? First, get outside “your own four walls to see agile companies in action.” Speed? “When the CDO of a large US retailer said he wanted to launch a new business, the CIO said it would take at least 500 people four years, and cost $100 million.” Instead, the innovative CDO hired a new team and moved to a new location. In just five months (not four years), the new business was generating $150 million per month!
What fast looks like:
• Product launch: 6 months (normal) vs. 2 weeks (fast)
• New hires: 6 months (normal) vs. 3 weeks (fast)
• Marketing campaign: 1/month (normal) vs. 24/day (fast)
• Code release: 1 every 6 months (normal) vs. 1 per day (fast)
CAPABILITIES
Q6. Have you made it safe to fail? The CEO of ShopRunner “has asked executives in their reviews to describe recent failures. If the failures hadn’t cost the company money, the executives didn’t get their bonuses.” Another CEO “mandated that decisions be made within 30 minutes of the start of any meeting.” Yet another CEO, plagued with low risk-taking, scheduled decision-making meetings at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings! “Not surprisingly, teams started making more decisions for themselves.”
Q7. Do you know what it takes to scale an agile culture? Worth the price of the book—the components of an agile budgeting process. Plus: “…the CEO of one of the world’s largest banks spends a day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the C-suite to do the same.”
Q8. Have you hired digital stars? Whew! “Get comfortable with bigger pay gaps” when hiring top digital staff. But they will be “magnets for successive waves of high-quality talent.” The authors quote Red Adair, the American oil well firefighter, internationally known for extinguishing and capping oil well blowouts. “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” Warning: the tenure of digital workers is 36 months—and shrinking.
Click here to visit the Fast Times website and complete the “Digital Transformation Health Check” on your organization’s digital program. You can also read Chapter 6, "Have you made it safe to fail?"
Q9. Is your workforce up to the task? The trend: customized and individualized continuous learning—in bite-size segments. P&G created an enterprise-wide Digital Genius Academy (DGA). Warning: when you’re successful, other companies will be recruiting your digital stars! (The book suggests how to “rethink HR.”)
Q10. Do digital stars consider your organization a graveyard? “…a RiseSmart study found that 84 percent of employees would consider moving to an employer with a fantastic reputation even without a big jump in salary.”
Q11. Do you know how to use new tech to rebuild your core IT and data platforms? Oops!
“Imagine a modern-day Formula One team that chooses to seat its driver in a race car from the 1990s.”
Q12. Are your own people developing your most important tech? Re-think outsourcing. “This ‘build-it-here’ approach is a key characteristic of successful digital companies.”
Q13. Is cybersecurity part of your IT transformation team or simply a control function? The authors note a popular axiom. There are two types of companies: “those that have been hacked, and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked. And things might be getting worse.”
ADOPTION AND SCALING
Q14. Is your transformation team filled with change bureaucrats or builders? The Western Union Way team—WU Way—created “capability-building teams” with 10 high-potential team members from around the company. Transformation began with 10, then to a first wave of 50, then 200, and ultimately to all 12,000 people.
Q15. Can everyone in your company easily access everything your people have learned? Are you good or guilty? “All that learning isn’t worth much if no one can find it.” Another axiom: “If my company only knew what my company knows.” P&G launched a video platform called “Fastest Learner Wins”—five-minute or less “snackable” content. Amazon has an internal wiki site and an internal video site, “Broadcast.”
Q16. Does your commitment match your bold statements? Are you gutsy enough to pull the plug on new projects run by stars? Check out the five questions under “A Litmus Test for Commitment,” including “Are you spending at least 20 percent of your working day on your digital transformation?” Also, have you made any big bets? (However, let me push back a bit. Don’t discount the wisdom of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries. Read my review.)
Q17. Are you communicating in a way that’s meaningful to your people? I’d encourage every major city mayor and state governor to read this chapter. During COVID, I’d give our political leaders a C+ (at best)—on their communication competencies (preachy, incoherent, inconsistent—yikes). The authors quote Virgin’s Richard Branson, “Communication is the most important skill any leader can possess.” Plus, read why one CEO invests an hour per week calling former customers.
Q18. Are you ready to see your transformation through to the end, no matter what? Warning signs: transformation fatigue, devising too many metrics, absence of explicit buy-in from the board, and not hitting the tipping point for a successful transformation (10 percent must hold an “unshakable belief”). And this: “We had more people talking about coding than actually coding.” LOL!
Suggestion: pick one of these 18 questions and pilot-test a short “Fast Times” segment at your weekly staff meeting. If it engages your team to think differently about the digital landscape, you’ve got the fixin’s for 17 more weeks. Plus—don’t skip the innovative final two pages. Rather than impress readers with co-author bios, each McKinsey senior leader shares his “parting thoughts” in a brief personal perspective. Brilliant.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Fast Times: How Digital Winners Set Direction, Learn, and Adapt, by Arun Arora, Peter Dahlstrom, Klemens Hjartar, and Florian Wunderlich. And thanks to Fortier Public Relations for sending me a review copy.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) “Failing is not always acceptable” in the pursuit of speed, say the Fast Times authors. They list three times “it’s plain wrong” including when “the thinking is lazy or flawed.” What is our team’s culture concerning speed, competencies, failure, and risk?
2) On July 9, 2004, Amazon banned PowerPoint presentations at the core executive team level—and honed the “Six-Page Narratives” (sometimes two pages) approach. Click here to read my review of The Amazon Management System. What’s our approach for vetting new ideas and enhancing speed?
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Systems That Serve People—Not the Bureaucracy!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
Here’s the core competency in the Systems Bucket: “We are passionate about systems thinking and process management. We encourage systems people to use their gifts and mentor others for the benefit of our Cause and our Community arenas. We are careful not to tinker or over-tweak, yet we are tenacious about tickler systems. We have a heart to create systems that serve people, not the bureaucracy!”
Nick Nicholaou of Ministry Business Services says there are three reasons you should never create your own software solution: 1) it will never be completed; 2) it will be difficult to support (and maybe your developer will die, without leaving any documentation); and 3) it will be very expensive.
That’s from my 2016 review of his book, Church IT. Good news, the publisher, Christianity Today International, released an updated edition of Nick’s book last year.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Church IT: Using Information Technology for the Mission of the Church, by Nick B. Nicholaou (2019).
For more resources in the Systems Bucket, click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Nick Nicholaou says there are “four disciplines” of church IT, including web and graphic design. Do you have the right person leading all four disciplines? Ask Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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