Think Like A Founder To Drive Digital Transformation

As the end of 2017 is around the corner, I reflect on one of the most rewarding periods and experiences of my professional career - driving digital transformation in a large organization. I'll give you 15 seconds to try to write the traits or characteristics you believe needs to be there in the person or the team driving the success of digital transformation in an organization. Once you're done, please read the remainder of this article and I'll share my on the ground perspective.

So how does your list look like? Let me give you this quote from one of my heroes, Eric Ries, who started the Lean Startup movement and the Modern Entrepreneurial Management movement in The Startup Way.

Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.

As I wrote in my previous article "The Culture of Digital Transformation", I always believed one of the foundations of digital transformation is the culture. If I correlate culture with the fundamentals of a company, I needed to find the other foundations. I looked at my organization as a whole (IT Shared Service Center) and had the profound realization below.

I'm creating a new company

According to Merriam-Webster,  Change implies making either an essential difference often amounting to a loss of original identity or a substitution of one thing for another - changed the shirt to a larger size. On the other hand, Transform implies a major change in form, nature, or function - transform a small company into a large organization.

That was my aha moment. I knew that digital transformation was more than substituting business processes or upgrade in technology. It had to fundamentally change the form, nature, and function of the organization. Tying it back to The Startup Way, I saw my role in  digital transformation as the "founder" of a new company within the existing organization with a goal of "acquiring" the old company later on down the line. I had to be an entrepreneur.

So, I had a few questions that needed answering. How do successful founders think? What type of new company am I going to build? Where do I start? What type of strategy will I create? I knew that I could not just count on the classic framework or literature on organizational design. I needed to look somewhere else. I looked at how successful startups grew, innovative companies, and creative design agencies.

Wait, are you telling me that you're founding a startup? I mentioned earlier I had to change mindset from corporate to a startup (entrepreneur). Look at the definition of startup by another of my heroes, Steve Blank - create a temporary organization, designed to search, for a repeatable and scalable, business model. That sounds exactly like digital transformation and the promise it can provide companies. Then, look at what a successful entrepreneur looks like below.

Drive, focused, decisive, independent, genuine, flexible, and knowledgeable. That basically sums up how I want to drive digital transformation to achieve impact quickly and how I will interact with the organization at large - who I see as my venture capital investors (management team), who I see as companies to co-create (my peers), and who I will work with to generate ideas to increase the value of the new company (all the employees in the organization).

I'm a startup founder. I'm an entrepreneur

Another good article to help further embed the startup mindset is this Forbes article by Hollie Slade.  It hit home the 10 additional things I need to realize and be able to accept. Because, being a startup founder is totally different from a corporate strategist, I needed to accept realities of startups. One of my favorite quotes from her article:

There might be no roadmap

There might be no roadmap. I had to accept that but I did believe someone already gave a picture of the company I wanted to build. It was the company founded on the basis of entrepeneurial management that Eric Ries described in detail in The Startup Way. I took inspiration from him and adapted some of the concepts, along with combining it with concepts from Dan Toma and the Corporate Startup.

 Alright, the inspiration is there and the prototype of the company you want to build is there. Looking at the current organization, how am I going to move forward with the transformation? I ended up creating this simple roadmap for myself to capture my thoughts.

People

This pillar is about building up the skills of our people, finding champions who will role model the new entrepreneurial management behaviors, and create a culture that foster creativity and curiosity in people. In this space, my strategies to build people for the "new company" were inspired by a company I admired and consider the most creative company in the world - IDEO.

David & Tom Kelley truly inspired me with their work in the Creative Confidence.

In addition, I took Tim Brown course on Leading for Creativity from IDEO University.

I learned to speak a new vocabulary and how I looked at creative potential in people. I started to establish rituals and communications to move the needle. It is by nurturing and providing avenues for people to unleash their creative potential that I am able to truly build the people. I also had to role model and encourage others to also embrace some new behaviors. Only when we have the right culture and confidence in place, will people be willing to explore new things and build up their skills.

Process

This pillar is about creating the processes that would allow people to unleash and realize their creative potential. What methodology or set of tools do they need to use? I had alluded in my previous article. There were three new ways of working that would build the foundation of the processes in this new company.

Design Thinking by IDEO - Allowing people to adopt a designer's mindset to help solve the problems the see around them from business customers or in their day to day IT work.

Lean Startup by Eric Ries - Allowing people to experiment, analyze, and make the decisions they need on whether they persevere, pivot, or pull the plug on the things they are working on. There is no failure. There is only validated learning.

Business Model Innovation by Alexander Osterwalder - Allowing people to holistically think about the desirability, viability, and feasibility of their ideas as if they were a business. Being able to truly state and, have the courage, to evolve the problem and value proposition of what they are working on.

I learned to apply how we can work in a totally new way that would unleash people's creativity, get clarity on the ideas through experimentation and learning, and having a view of the growth potential of the idea. It is by mentoring and coaching teams as groups of small corporate startups (a term from Dan Toma) that we truly provide the space for people to tap into their potential. And, it is amazing how quickly people can generate results when empowered.

---

I hope by reading this article, you get a sense why the startup founder or entrepreneur mindset is important to drive digital transformation. Think about it as establishing a new company within the existing organization.

For now, I'll leave the story at this point. Another time, I'll explain the remaining two pillars.

 I'd love to hear your comments whether this is interesting or not, and I'd love to know your perspective on the story.