Silicon valley adventures continued...

What a marathon day at the Israel Deal Makers Summit! There have been panel events, speakers and pitches, with each session lasting no longer than 20 minutes and covering a wide range of subjects, from organisational culture, blockchain, cryptocurrency, AI, venture-capital media and the start-up scene – not to mention plenty on cyber-security! Below are my key take-aways.

Amazon Web Services

Whether you’re a start-up experiencing exponential growth, or a large corporate undergoing business transformation, Tatyana Mamut, tech executive from Amazon, firmly believes that corporate culture will fast become a board-level concern. Planning for cultural risk should already be a key priority for all of our executive teams, and if it isn’t, our boards are likely to insist on it in the near future.

Mamut outlined how cultural risk can be grouped into key categories:

Scaling risk – How will you ensure your organisational culture remains as you intend as the business grows and the number of people increases?

Fragmentation risk – When subcultures appear in different teams, how do you ensure that this is an advantage, rather than a detriment, to the business?

Attrition risk – How will manage you keep hold of your best talent as the business evolves and grows?

Conformity risk – How are you ensuring your people are in touch with customer needs and have a diversity of thought?

Stagnation risk – How are you ensuring that the culture encourages continuous improvement and innovation?

The encouraging thing is that these are not new concepts. As corporates, we are already managing our cultural risk by creating and modelling our organisational values and agreed behaviours. While technology can be put in place to help reinforce desired cultural norms, it is up to ultimately up to our leaders and teams member to be role models, ensuring that these are lived principles throughout the whole company every day.

GE Ventures

Marianne Wu from GE Ventures talked about how entrepreneurship and innovation are no longer ‘nice to haves’; they are now embedded into the ethos of many of the Silicon Valley giants. If this is something we going to entrench here in New Zealand corporates, which parts of the organisation should be focused on it? How do we build it into our operating models?

The pace of change in business today is exponential, and there are no signs of it slowing down anytime soon. So how do we create a new culture in our workforce, that can work at some serious pace, work with increasing levels of ambiguity and uncertainly?

Google Engineering & Artificial Intelligence

This was a real highlight of the whole day. Google realises that the start-up culture is one that they cannot lose as they grow. The Google employee value proposition (EVP) now includes encouraging their engineers to take a one-year sabbatical to work with start-ups. Wow!

The speak from Google explained that artificial intelligence (AI) is going through the same pathway as all the other game-changing technologies. The hype and misinformation are followed by denial, and then there will be a mainstream breakthrough. In went on to overlay the use cases for AI on top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The goal of Maslow’s theory is to attain self-actualisation or self-transcendence. AI use cases are already enhancing many parts of our lives, it is only a matter of time when this technology will enable us to reach top of pyramid, allowing us become ‘super-human’!

Venture capital viewpoint on start-ups in data, digital and media

A key differentiator for today’s start-up businesses seems to be whether they use real-time data. Venture capitalists are asking what data is your business process capturing that no one else is. This means that data quality and data cleansing can be a significant hindrance to a start-up’s growth. In fact, some small businesses rapidly become data pipeline companies if they have not considered data management basics up-front. However, if you have not clearly worked on your data management plan, then it could be all your company ends up doing.

The venture capitalists reminded the audience that machine learning is not magic. It does need significant amounts of useful quality data. The term; “Rubbish in, rubbish out” has never been more valid. You can have all the horsepower, latest cloud technologies and unique algorithms you want, but if you don’t have good data to feed in, you will have a slim chance at success. Music to data professionals’ ears everywhere!

Private Q&A with David Sable

I was privileged to be invited to attend a private Q&A with David Sable. David is the Global CEO of Y&R, a world-leading marketing and communications company. He is incredibly personable and an excellent storyteller, a real role model for communication clarity. The conversation was highly engaging and varied.

He had fantastically simple advice for companies wishing to optimise for mobile: Do not consider digital first, consider people first. If you walk in the shoes of your customer, you quickly see that it is not a mobile device, it is a mobility device. If you want to optimise for mobility, think about the situations in which your customers will be using their devices, and in what way. Focus on that.

When asked what young people should be encouraged to learn, David’s advice was to read the classics. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, the Koran, Shakespeare and Harry Potter! When you learn about the power of stories, you are learning about speaking to people’s humanity.

Storytelling is not rocket science; set the context, be exciting up front, speak in plain English and use pictures, anecdotes and analogies to bring the story to life.

Ngā Mihi for now.

I have had such a fantastic time here at the #IDS18, there are so many exciting ideas to follow up and implement back home in NZ.