3 Lessons Learned Changing Companies

It was a nice honor to receive "CDO of the year" recognition from the CDO Club, the largest global community of digital and data officers. Even better to be back in my hometown of NYC to share a few words with the audience during the event at Columbia University. 

It's no secret there's a great re-wiring of large incumbent companies underway. This goes by many names, often referred to as digitization, though it's more fundamental than that. 

The constant for any leadership role in the C-suite is a lot of re-wiring of how the company works.

So as my CDO days come to a close (I go back to my P&L roots with digital / tech being one aspect), I took the opportunity to share 3 lessons learned. 

These lessons will continue to apply to my next chapter; I've summarized them from my talk at the CDO Summit here.

Lesson 1

I've been asking this question of teams frequently during the last few years....

“What does good look like? ”

"What does good look like?" gets the right mindset in place because it starts with the customer and is a more objective question than you think.

It’s a better question that asking "how will our app to do more orders for us this quarter than last?", or "since our competitors launched loyalty, how are we going to respond?" 

Those questions need answers, but benefit from a level of clarity above them. There’s often little disagreement on "What does good look like?" It places the main things in focus, and that speeds things up.

Lesson 2

Survival requires shifting from an execution to a learning culture. I would submit most incumbent companies are good at execution. Over decades it’s repeated execution and scale advantage that helped them grow. These are codified in their ways of working, and bureaucracy (of which you always need a little).

A learning culture starts with accepting ambiguity, and then focusing on it to reduce it. Not shying away from "new unknowns" that are growing in relevance to the world, in favor of the "known things" that create less and less value. Learning to dance with unknowns is where value is created.

Bureaucracy represents how you manage things the organization is already quite good at, but they are no longer the master.

They need to bend to serve the needs of the new problem solving priorities, with curiosity and questioning as key leadership behaviors. Be more curious, ask more questions. 

The difference is profound.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, has distilled it well. He says:

"I'd rather be a learn-it-all than a know-it-all." 

He's produced results the last few years so his words matter.

It’s the rate of learning that defines progress not the quality of governance or planning ..those are just bureaucractic hygeine.

Lesson 3

Change is more effective when we have "one camp, one ambition" for everyone . What I mean by this is an inclusive way forward. A way to rally change and continuous pivots in how the machine works that is inclusive.

I’ll give a small example. When I joined Volvo Cars, I assumed responsibility for the IT organization (previously managed by a Global CIO). And I was brought into to start new consumer initiatives to really push the envelop on the business model and the product. Instead of creating two separate organizations (one old school and one new school), we created one. 

Sometimes people talk about two twitches...a fast and slow. I didn’t feel that was right. Everyone needs the same ambition, even though they may have different starting points. Rather than place artificial limitations on how things are supposed to move we let it unfold naturally. 

So I killed the notion of IT and created a group called Consumer & Enterprise Digital (CED).

There would be no digital vs IT.

Just digital.

Whether it’s for the consumer or a user within the enterprise .. we are creating technology products to serve users.

The idea was to support the same steps towards digitization, while acknowledging different starting points. 

The same idea is necessary across Fortune 500 enterprises. It's not that everyone is working on digital products. It's that everyone is starting with the customer, asking the right questions, being clear and what's known vs. unknown, and obsessed with creating more and more clarity. 

Companies need hunger for problem solving with a sense of urgency in everyday behaviors. That's when we know it's working. 

It was nice to receive the award yesterday. It's even better to see what you learn in action, producing more effectiveness and speed in the company. Hope you received some benefit from these quick reflections!