The walking (digital) dead – Final: Zombie-avoiding recipe

What happened previously (see episodes 1, 2 and 3): "Digital transformation" is nothing else than a full fledged industrial revolution – the storm of the century. Without acknowledging that fact, many large companies build up "good weather" digital business without having neither culture nor governance nor skill to do so. Those businesses are doomed to become digital zombies, i.e. digital products without real customer value creation nor customer demand. Ultimately, it turns out that not only the digital products have been zombies, but that the incumbent corporate itself is actually the mother zombie, which is ultimately getting killed (disrupted).

Where are the success cases?

Now that you are aware that digital zombies are out there, you should try to prevent them and even more importantly; avoid your legacy organization becoming a mother zombie. You have a fair chance of doing so by correctly setting up the whole arena for new business development (new business is what innovation ultimately is).

It’s you, who can make the difference!

Do this right and you eventually avoid getting killed in the storm.

Don’t worry if you didn’t set up everything correctly at the outset (most companies didn’t). You still have a fair chance to reset your setup right now. But hurry up, the storm is looming!

We have spent a lot of time experimenting and researching in the corporate innovation arena ourselves. And we have paid our fair amount of teaching money with failed attempts in corporate venture capital, internal innovation and joint ventures. In all our time doing and researching corporate innovation, we have only found a handful of companies and approaches that seem to be working in the long run (it’s early to draw conclusions on an industrial revolution – most of the mother zombies still stumble around – but evidence is starting to grow).

The seemingly successful cases all have a few things in common, out of which the single most important in our experience is the following:

Keep new business entirely separate from your legacy and give it all the degrees of freedom it needs to prosper.

Take a look e.g. at the Viessmann group with its clearly dedicated vehicles such as VC/O, the Otto group with its digital spin-offs such as About you and Project A, or the Migros group's Digitec-Galaxus. All of them have in common, that they have a very clear mission and that their parents leave the teams achieve their mission by themselves.

If you don’t have such a set up at this point, i.e. one that assures you create an environment where new businesses have a fair chance of prospering, that’s where you need to start.

It boils down to a simple imperative for top management:

Assure you have the right mission and governance at the very top. 

This is really something top management needs to care about in the first place, and it’s easy to see why: No one, let alone a whole organization, can move anywhere in a storm without:

a) directions, i.e. a crystal clear mission, vision and strategy, and

b) being enabled to run fast, i.e. the right (agile) culture and independent governance. 

Zombie-avoiding recipe

Given the strategic imperatives sketched out above, there is a simple recipe that you and your top management can apply:

• Get a very clear understanding of what and how big your long term problem actually is. Just accept the facts, as brutal as they may be. Don’t allow for gut feeling.
• Define a very clear set of goals based on the problem understanding (and I’m not talking about stuff like “get more entrepreneurial and agile”); We’re talking hard goals in terms of ROI and/or EBIT here.
• Define a crystal clear strategy how you are going to achieve those goals. A strategic diversification is almost always part of this.
• Set up a dedicated governance and leadership structure, directly attached to the CEO and/or president, which a maximum amount of autonomy.
• Enable a highly performing, highly independent agile culture within that clearly dedicated governance.
• Establish a high-performing process to create a deal- and innovation-flow, meticulously managed by people who really know their business.
• Start building your portfolio of future business. Not all of your bets will succeed. You actually do have to account for the occasional zombie. But as long as you don’t feed it for long, that’s perfectly fine. Just kill it once you recognize it, so you can focus your resources on scaling the bets that do play out.

That’s it. That’s how you create new business, not zombies. And that’s how – to all our best knowledge and experience – you can gain resilience against the storm of the industrial revolution.

Let’s create a better (corporate) world without (digital) zombies! 

Get in touch directly if you're interested in hearing our take on "digital transformation".

BTW: You can read the full season on stryber.com.