Month: August 2014

My first private sector job was with an insurance company. Part of the induction included familiarizing myself with the Equal Opportunities Policy and learning about the products and services the company offered: one of these was life insurance. I learned that smokers were charged a higher premium than non-smokers, the company did not allow smoking in the workplace and there were policies and programmes in place to discourage the habit. I also learned that the company had an executive dining room where senior staff could eat away from their subordinates but subordinates were allowed to invite guests to lunch there with permission and if the guest was special enough to warrant it.

My first (and only) time I got permission to take a guest we enjoyed a pleasant meal at the end of which the waiter came to our table and offered my guest (a man) a cigar. I said nothing in the moment but was struck on two counts: I was not offered a cigar because I was a woman – thus a contravention of our Equal Opportunities Policy, and second the company had a policy of discouraging smoking so another contravention. (I decided that taking on the notion of an executive dining room was a bridge too far.)

Later that day I wrote a note to the Chief Executive describing the event and asking whether in tune with our policies we should stop the cigar passing. A couple of days later I was summoned to my manager's office. He was beside himself with rage a) that I had written to the CEO without his permission b) that calling into question the practice showed I wasn't demonstrating the 'right' behaviours c) my behaviour reflected badly on him demonstrating he could not control his staff.

I was not put on a performance improvement plan (PIP) – in fact in the UK this can only legally happen if you are not carrying out work to a satisfactory standard – but this incident came to mind last week when I was talking with someone who'd just been put on a PIP. He was furious and very upset because it was for an incident entirely outside his control (to do with a third party contract) and he was doing his best to sort it out. His manager asked him 'How will I explain to my managers that my staff can't solve this problem?' One of his colleagues told of a similar event.

These stories, combined with a report received and similar stories heard in the prior few weeks, led me to wonder if PIPs are less about supporting employees and more about a managerial tactic to cover their backs and protect their own interests.

What I found was not encouraging. There was the thing about managers' self-interest additionally PIPs seem to be:

• Associated with cultures of fear
• Used as excuses for not engaging staff in supportive performance conversations
• Taken as a pathway to lay-off someone with a formal audit trail
• Demonstrations of a managerial 'look tough and thus good' activity
• A disincentive to staff to try out new things, be curious, or give quality service (particularly in call centres where call targets are set)
• Feared as a part of a staff ranking systems where pay awards are made on a forced distribution system so each manager has to have a 'bottom 10%' of staff
• Symptomatic of lack of supervisor/subordinate trust
• Devoid of recognition of the contextual factors on performance
• Perceived as unfair

Looking at the list above it would be easy to assume that in general PIPs seem to be part of a disciplinary process, a penalty and a disincentive to improve performance, rather than a helpful and supportive way of engaging and motivating employees in a culture of trust, mutual respect and open-ness. This reflects in the language and approach of the PIP template forms I looked at. For example, the UK's CIPD template for performance improvement plans (following ACAS guidelines on managing performance) is both formal and daunting in its language e.g. 'What is the employee required to do now'.

Even those in favour of them said they should be used cautiously, judiciously and with the accompaniment of meaningful supportive conversations, useful and achievable objectives, and an honest intent to develop the employee. See the Institute of Employment Studies suggestions.

Contrast PIPs with Daniel Pink's view on what drives engagement and performance:

1. Autonomy – our desire to be self-directed, to direct our own lives.
2. Mastery – our urge to get better at stuff; we like to get better at stuff.
3. Purpose – the enjoyment we get from making a contribution and a difference.

You can see him talking about it in a delightful RSA Animate 'Drive'. The transcript of the talk sums up with Pink saying, 'And I think that the big takeaway here is that if we start treating people like people and not assuming that they're simply horses, you know, slower, smaller, better smelling horses, if we get past this kind of ideology of carrots and sticks and look at the science I think we can actually build organisations and work lives that make us better off, but I also think they have the promise to make our world just a little bit better.'

PIP and Drive are two very different routes to performance improvement. In retrospect these show in my cigar incident outlined above. I was in Drive mindset and my manager was in PIP mindset. I acted as if I had the autonomy to make the comment, I thought it would be helpful to the organisation's image to point out an inconsistency between organisational statements and actions, and I wanted to improve the organisation and make a difference. It didn't occur to me that as a consequence of my well-intentioned memo I would reprimanded by a furious manager and threatened with 'further action' if I ever did anything similar.

So do PIPs smack of the command and control organisation and Drive of the new 'social' organisation? And in an organisation that is striving to transform from command and control to social (see the graphic analogue to digital – exhibit 1 – in the report Building a Digital Culture which is a neat if overly simple summary of this) does one have to take a path from PIP to Drive, and if so what is the path and how easy would it be to take?

Looking at the graphic surely the answer must be 'yes' – if an organisation is promulgating the attributes of 'digital' which anyone who has a smartphone, Facebook account, or similar is meeting in their non-work lives – then the work frameworks need to adjust similarly. There are several examples of organisations recognizing this. Read Donna Morris of Adobe talking about performance reviews – just dropped by the company, "We were aggressively moving from being a boxed software company toward having a strong subscription service for our digital media business. The business all around was changing, but the mechanisms to manage and support our employees were stuck in a time warp." And in 2013 both Microsoft and Expedia dropped their forced ranking system of performance reviews. But now, I hear some people say, those organisations were already digital.

OK, even if an organisation is not that interested in adopting the attributes of digital, the external social, demographic and technology context is changing so rapidly that analogue organisational frameworks are unlikely to be fit for purpose for very long as in their non-work lives employees steep themselves in digitally enabled collaboration, comment and input to private and public sector organisations in their roles as customer, community member or citizen. Organisations have to keep pace with the context.

Granted the challenge of moving an analogue organisation's performance (and other) systems into ones more appropriate for employees in a digital society is big. But most people like challenges – they call for autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Do you have any examples of established analogue organisations that are setting off down PIP to Drive path whether or not they are heading for digital? Is your organisation? Let me know.

This week I'm in Dakar, Senegal and have just been to see the African Renaissance Monument . It's very odd, dramatically impressive, cost a fortune, and excited many complaints on its commission. At the time of its unveiling in 2010, the then deputy leader of the Senegal opposition Ndeye Fatou Toure described the monument as an "economic monster and a financial scandal in the context of the current [economic] crisis".

Slate Magazine describes it as The Controversial Senegalese Monument Built by North Korean Propaganda Artists: At 160 feet tall, the bronze African Renaissance Monument is over one-and-a-half times the height of the Statue of Liberty. It depicts a man with a bare, ripped torso holding an infant aloft in one arm and guiding a woman with the other. The infant points ahead to indicate the glorious future, while the woman extends her arm behind to acknowledge the troubled past. Her hair is swept back by the wind, as are her scant, gossamer-like garments.

You travel in a high speed lift to a viewing platform in the man's hat – except we didn't because the tiny capsule-lift shuddered to a halt between floors, the doors opened and all we could see was a concrete wall. It was terrifying. There is a permanent 'pompier' (fireman) in it operating it and there to guide the 3 additional people the lift can take down the ladder if the lift or the electric power fails – apparently both a common thing to happen. We didn't have to clamber down the ladder but when he got it started again we got out at the first possible floor that had stair access. The first two floors (essentially the statue's base) house an exhibition and stories of black leaders.

What the monument reminded me of (apart from the folly of monuments – have you read Ozymandias, a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley?) was a meeting I was in last week. It was one where one group of people seemed to be talking in one language and a second group was talking in another but where we finally got to a third language that we all understood. It was thoroughly enjoyable and I'm hoping I'm beginning to learn the new language of common ground. (It's not one found on DuoLingo where I'm learning French but maybe it should be).

What was fun was that we were all making big efforts to understand the other – there wasn't any heat in it. One side in the room was talking big ideas and 'transformation', and using words like 'digital', 'lean', 'agile' essentially presenting the idea of building the expensive monument pointing to the future. The other side was making a plea to forget the 'ideal state vision' and '2020 end-state', to use normal language and to just help them fix the basics: not quite the clean water, consistent electricity and sanitation needed in Senegal but certainly IT tools that are fit for purpose, don't require the patience of Job and are free of the numerous work-arounds currently needed.

I was rather convinced that they were on the right track. It takes colossal will and charismatic leaders to make case for a future vision when in the current day-to-day the basics are lacking. It's a simple but powerful idea – on the lines of 'don't run before you can walk' and it makes sense. Backing up this thought is the evidence that the track record of successful transformation effort is not great. I've just re-read the classic article by John Kotter – Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail which in my experience is as valid today as when it was first written in 1995 and republished in 2007.

So I'm now wondering about 'transformation'. The organization I'm working with has been down the 'transformation' route more than once in the last decade and there's a certain amount of weariness (and amusement) from the long-service staff who are wondering what will be different in this 'transformation journey' that will result in the visionary promises being kept and whether the basics will be fixed this time around. And I'm asking myself whether an organizational 'transformation project' is on the same lines as building a vastly expensive and ultimately divisive and controversial monument that fails to achieve its symbolic intent.

I think it could be if those involved in the transformation programmes forget that showing they are fixing the basics – simply helping people do a good job: one without re-work, duplication, inconsistent processes, etc – is not included in their work from the beginning. Of the 8 things that Kotter suggests need to be in place for transformation to be successful two of them could be instrumental in showing that 'cracking the obvious' as one of my colleagues called it is a clearly communicated and integral part of the plan: creating short term wins, and consolidating improvements and bringing still more change.

Putting on my yellow hat of optimism (see Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats – a very useful tool) I don't think that transformation efforts are necessarily doomed to failure, but I do think they are significantly more likely to fail if the basics are not being fixed as the transformation work proceeds.

What's your view? Do transformation projects need to fix the basics as they go? Let me know.

Last week I went to the Gilbert and George exhibition that's on in London. It's called Scapegoating and is brilliant at taking 'a controversial subject and just putting it out there, making it everyone else's problem'. The show is billed as unflinchingly describing 'the volatile, tense, accelerated and mysterious reality of our increasingly technological, multi-faith and multi-cultural world. It is a world in which paranoia, fundamentalism, surveillance, religion, accusation and victimhood become moral shades of the city's temper … [the pictures] consolidate and advance the art of Gilbert & George as a view of modern humanity that is at once libertarian and free-thinking, opposed to bigotry of all forms.'

What it got me thinking about was organisational values partly because earlier in the week I'd been in a leadership meeting and asked why the four values that were part of the obvious visual paraphernalia of the organisation a few years ago seem to have sunk with only the faintest trace. I have seen them on certificates on people's notice boards but the latest date I've seen is 2010. When I've asked about them people have drummed up from their storage (and given me), thank you notes, mouse mats, notepaper and even a small 'silver' cup and many talk fondly of the value of having the values. The only evidence of their years of visibility is that they still appear on the performance management forms and people are appraised against them.

I didn't quite know what to make of the answer that one of the leaders gave to my enquiry, 'what do you think about the four values'? He said that people could see leaders (and others) behaving in a way that did not role model living the values so in his view it was better not to have them in plain sight as senior people (in the hierarchy) flouted them and this was noticed by their subordinates. A second leader endorsed that view. I've been thinking about this during the week because on the one hand not having written/codified organisational values because members can't stick to them seems sensible, on the other hand it seems that this response might be an outcome of some kind of organisational disability. Of course it could be signaling all kinds of other things but that immediately sprang to my mind.

As I've mulled this over I've recognised that I'm steeped in the notion that organisational values are 'a good thing'. I'm constantly reading (and writing) stuff about them: there's a never-ending stream written about 'values driven organisations' and many organisations lay great store on their values. So what I've been seeing this week is a counter view on values. A view that a friend I was talking with described as a 'values are propaganda' view. That's worth thinking on – which is what the scapegoating exhibition forced for me. Gilbert and George 'have never left us in any doubt about their atheism — they want to ban religion because they think it segregates people and causes them unhappiness'. Yet each religion is based on specific values with a set of 'operating principles', which from what the world is currently witnessing do seem to result in divisiveness, unhappiness, and entrenched positions.

Paradoxically Gilbert and George themselves have a set of principles that they developed in 1969. "The Laws of Sculptors":
1. Always be smartly dressed, well groomed relaxed and friendly polite and in complete control.
2. Make the world to believe in you and to pay heavily for this privilege.
3. Never worry assess, discuss or criticize but remain quiet respectful and calm.
4. The lord chisels still, so don't leave your bench for long.

Additionally they have ten commandments

I. Thou shalt fight conformism
II. Thou shalt be the messenger of freedoms
III. Thou shalt make use of sex
IV. Thou shalt reinvent life
V. Thou shalt create artificial art
VI. Thou shalt have a sense of purpose
VII. Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it
VIII. Thou shalt give thy love
IX. Thou shalt grab the soul
X. Thou shalt give something back

These seem remarkably close to values and also like the type of thing that could give rise to very scapegoating behaviours they are commenting on in their work – which doesn't leave me much further in my musings on the question of whether a set of values that are imposed on people or required by organisations are 'propaganda' and it would be better not to have them pinned up or spoken about because they may be difficult to adhere to, to behave in line with, or to use as a yardstick with which to measure others against (but, in some highly public cases, not yourself). However, Gilbert & George are not expecting other people to adopt their principles or commandments.

One of the exhibition reviewers noticed the phrase written on the wall of the exhibition "We want our Art to bring out the Bigot from inside the Liberal and conversely to bring out the Liberal from inside the Bigot." Do organisational values serve to bring out the bigot or the liberal or both/neither? Read an interview with Meg Whitman formerly of e-bay and now of HP for her view on organisational values and how she came to value them at e-bay. She makes the point that it takes two sets of values for organizational success -— the hard-nosed business values and the "softer," ethical values and that 'eBay's success proved that values are not abstract ideals but essential tools'. So neither a bigot or libertarian view from her.

But are organisations that promote certain listed values and who expect people to 'live' them, actually manipulating – subtly or not so subtly – their workforce with the intention of controlling their behavior or at least channeling behaviour into an organizationally acceptable way? I'm now wondering if it's feasible to have a value set and simultaneously to 'value diversity' if the diversity of the workforce includes having members who had a different value set from the desired one? (I did once bow out of a working party on diversity that I was supposed to contribute to because I felt that the organisation 'valued diversity' only up to a point and my colleagues on the working party were unwilling to explore what that point was and make it clear to others).

So if not values, what? Years ago I studied the writings of George Orwell. He advocated 'common decency', which involves the willingness to treat other people, their concerns, and their ideas appropriately in line with their humanity. It is having an unselfish attitude that acknowledges the interests of others. See Anthony Stewart's book: George Orwell, Doubleness, and the Value of Decency for more on this.

So maybe having a list of organisational values that we expect people to subscribe to is not the way to go. Maybe it is sufficient to expect all organisational members to treat each other with 'common decency'. But what is the penalty for those who don't? Is that too difficult a question to answer – should we just let 'indencent' behaviour go?

What's your view on organisational values and is expecting common decency enough? Let me know.

NOTE: For some good quotes on common decency look here.

A couple of weeks ago I emailed an 18 year old and heard nothing back. It was about a job which she'd applied for. But last week I did hear back from her. She said 'I haven't been checking my email recently and have only just received this so I understand if it is too late now.' We met and I found out that she doesn't really use email. She uses text messages and Facebook to interact with people.

Coincidentally last week someone set me a short Don Tapscott video where he talks about the way workplaces will have to change if they want to attract and retain this 'net generation' – those born between 1977 and 1997. It's well worth listening to. He paints a picture of multitasking that I can't get close to mimicking. Net people are simultaneously texting incessantly, surfing the Web, finding directions, taking pictures, making videos, collaborating, using Facebook, instant messaging, skyping, playing on-line games, and all with the TV as background muzak. Email isn't even on the radar and they're not actually talking face to face as I read it.

This maybe why that experimental Faraday cafe in Vancouver with walls that don't allow signals to penetrate might be extremely successful – but perhaps not with the net generation? In that cafe 'Conversation is possible (or forced) because there is no cellphone service or Wi-Fi at the cafe. Customers sit in a carefully constructed dead-zone, an eight-by-16-foot cage made of wire mesh. Phone and Internet signals can't pass through the cage walls. The coffee is freshly ground, and patrons pay by donation.'

But given that one cafe in Vancouver is not going to change the social norms of an entire generation, let's make assumption that the net generation lifestyle is going to be the 'new normal' for people entering the workforce. On this, I think Tapscott lays out a good challenge to all organisations. He asks how to design organisations that provide more learning opportunities, frequent feedback, greater work/life balance, stronger workplace relationships, replacement of job descriptions with work goals, tools to do the job and the latitude and guidance to get on and do it in their way. He posed this challenge in 2008 – the challenge has got bigger and more pressing since then as more of the net generation, at least those with the skills employers want, are entering the work-force. (Take a look at this World Bank blog for figures on youth unemployment.)

If it's true that a growing proportion of the workforce is not using email in their personal interactions what happens when they join an organisation where email is the principal channel for information flow? Does the organisation have to be redesigned to eliminate email or do the net generation members have to be taught to just buckle down and use it? Or is there some middle road?

The vice-chancellor of Exeter University takes the view that email is as good as dead. That organisation realising that 'most students no longer checked their emails regularly and were choosing to tweet for help rather than wait for a response in their inbox' introduced a 'round-the-clock team of press officers and graduates savvy with social media,' to monitor questions and give immediate responses because responding by email is 'too slow'. What I couldn't find out is whether the university employees still communicate via email amongst themselves, and the social media approach is just to their customers, or whether the whole University operation is weaning itself off email. If anyone knows I'd be happy to hear from them.

There are pros and cons for redesigning email out of the organisation. The Economist had a piece last week on Decluttering the company making the case for fighting a 'relentless battle against bureaucracy' which they think is induced by three forms of clutter:

1. complexity which includes tiers of management, co-ordinating bodies, and too many corporate objectives
2. meetings
3. emails

On emails the point is made that 'the number of external communications that managers receive has increased from about 1,000 a year in 1970 to around 30,000 today. Every message imposes a "time tax" on the people at either end of it; and these taxes can spiral out of control unless they are managed.' So emails are hugely expensive.

An HBR blog makes a similar cost point but in relation to the drive to constantly monitor the emails 'Shifting our attention from one task to another, as we do when we're monitoring email while trying to read a report or craft a presentation, disrupts our concentration and saps our focus. Each time we return to our initial task, we use up valuable cognitive resources reorienting ourselves. And all those transitional costs add up'.

So what about the collaborative platforms that software like Sharepoint, Huddle, and Asana say is more effective and less costly than emails? Facebook's co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, now CEO Asana is somewhat persuasive on the death of email. Also he has, in my opinion, the right attitude to organisation design. Asana 'embraces the notion that companies should be organized around the "work graph" not the social graph — around the work that needs to be done, not the people. The nodes in a companies' network should be important tasks, not employees.' Because email is person to person it reinforces a people as nodes approach to getting things done and not a work as nodes approach to getting things done.

I've just participated in a Huddle work project. (See a comparison of Huddle and Asana here). It worked well in that the project arrived to time and with good enough levels of participation. What I found interesting was that some of the participants actually did the work outside the Huddle platform and via email!

This is where the defenders of email are loud and also persuasive. Read the piece Need a Collaboration Tool? Try Email. The author is Jeff Mackanic. (Take a look at his photo. Do you think he was born between 1977 and 1997?). He is of the view that Email 'is still the best collaboration tool. Nothing else is even close'. Another defender (whom Mackanic refers to) is Barry Gill, author of Vision statement: Email not dead evolving. He tells us that

Periodically you may hear digital hipsters claim that e-mail is dead. Don't believe them. People still spend half their workday dealing with it, they trust it, and overall they're satisfied with it, according to our 2012 survey of 2,600 workers in the U.S., UK, and South Africa who use e-mail every day. … And for all the love social media get, e-mail is still workers' most effective collaboration tool. It's far from perfect: … But it remains the mule of the information age-—stubborn and strong.

Hmm, are the 'digital hipsters' the net generation, and the email defenders the 'stubborn and strong' executive managers? Or maybe there are vested interests at play. After all the CEO of Asana is trying to sell a collaboration tool to use instead of email (but he was born on May 22, 1984 so is of the net generation) and Barry Gill author of the quote above works for Mimecast – an organisation that helps other organisations manage email. (Barry Gill's photo is on the Mimecast website if you want to guess his age).

On the survey Mimecast did I'd like to know the age profile and hierarchical position of the 2,600 respondents. Because if they were the older finance or IT guys, for example, those who'd grown up with email they'd realize that, as Marcus Wohlsen says in the Asana piece "in a corporate culture where upgrading Windows can be an epic undertaking, few companies have the wherewithal to let go of something as basic as email, let alone reimagine the basic premise of how they function in order to move ahead without it." they'd probably prefer to stick with email than invest in the many high costs of designing it out.

So we have defenders of email, and defenders of collaborative platforms who say email is dead. We also have the net generation who are in the workforce and entering it who apparently don't use email out of work and wonder why they should use it in the workplace. So should we be designing out email? What's your view? Let me know (by text or Twitter).

Think about a world where the first interaction a customer has with your organisation is via a small screen – smartphone, phablet, smartwatch or similar. How are you going to give, via that small entry point, an experience that is expansive, engaging, meaningful and rewarding – to your organisation and to the customer? That's the challenge that the 'digital transformation' strategists wrestle with. And reading between the lines of the Altimeter report The 2014 State of Digital Transformation it is not plain sailing. They define digital transformation as 'the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touchpoint in the customer experience lifecycle'. They surveyed 59 organizations on the topic and found that although 88% of respondents say they are digitally transforming 'the details of their efforts report the contrary … digital transformation as an integrated and official endeavor is something many strategists are truly just beginning to understand and pursue.'

What digital transformation seems to require is a totally rethought business model, focused on customer centricity and a 'frictionless customer experience', accompanied by a complete organization redesign that includes:

• improving processes
• updating websites and ecommerce programmes
• integrating all social, mobile, web, ecommerce, service efforts and investments
• updating customer-facing technology systems
• researching customer touch points, building competitive social media channels
• creating an executive sense of urgency that this is the way to go
• overhauling customer service.

I was reading the report when I realized I'd left at home a connector I need to connect my laptop to a monitor. I'm now away for the week: so an immediate test of John Lewis's multi-channel strategy. Could I buy the connector from them and get it next day? I chose John Lewis a) because I've read a lot about their digital strategy and b) because they have a Waitrose close to where I am so I could click and collect. They fell at the first post because they don't have a BlackBerry app to enter their portal. But maybe I should abandon my Q10 BlackBerry and get an app heavy competitor smartphone. I am continuously getting ribbed by colleagues on my customer loyalty. Getting side-tracked on this idea I saw T-Mobile tried to get customers to switch to an i-phone by offering a financial incentive. Back to the task and undaunted, I switched to my small screen tablet, entered the John Lewis website, ordered the item, gave my mobile phone number so I get an alert when it is ready to collect tomorrow, so all is well so far. Was it painless and seamless? Yes – assuming the connector arrives tomorrow as promised.

Looking at the John Lewis digital transformation history which began around 2008 it's clear that it has been a long and well thought through journey. They make the investments, line up the organization design behind the omni channel business model, and keep a close eye on their customers' buying patterns. They have seen a surge in on-line sales via the 'small screen'. Mark Lewis, online director at John Lewis in January 2014 reported that they 'had enjoyed a strong Christmas, with online sales up by 22.6% in the five weeks to the end of December. "Online now accounts for around 30% of overall sales, up from 25% in 2012," he said. "Two stand-out milestones for us were the 61.8% rise in Click & Collect orders and a shift to traffic from mobile devices making up over half of traffic to johnlewis.com.'

It is likely that buying through smartphones will continue to grow: as of January 2014 58% of American adults had a smartphone. In the UK it was 68% of adults with 32% of them each month making on-line purchases via the smartphone. Retailers that have a weak online/small screen presence are losing out to those who have a strong presence. Take a look at Morrisons, for example.

But what about non-retail organizations – should they work to the same premise that the way their customers, clients, patients, or whoever interact with them is through the small screen? The sensible answer to this is yes. A July 2014 report noted that 80% of consumers were open to healthcare interactions via smartphones, "The way health care organizations communicate with people is changing, as individuals become more and more sophisticated about using information technology to make health-related decisions," said Stuart Wells, FICO's chief product and technology officer. "People are especially interested in mobile services that can help them manage their personal health and shop for health care services. The leading health care providers are increasingly turning to mobile technologies to meet this demand, and to engage frequently and proactively with consumers."

Similarly the agriculture sector is a big user of smartphone apps to monitor farm performance and to get/give information. The Nosho Navi project in Japan is one such example: rice farmers feed information via smartphone and a cloud server to a research centre and get advice on how much water they should apply to the crop and when in order to improve yield and quality. Partnering in this enterprise is Fujitsu which is predicting a 'green future in cloud-based veggies'

You can see government interest in smartphone/mobile based interactions with citizens is also increasing rapidly. A recent article (July 31 2014) discusses the way US state and local government is getting to grips with it. And it's not an easy task. "All these different devices cause support issues, security issues, etc. It's moving faster than perhaps a lot of places can comprehend or manage. It's going to be a continually evolving process. But mobile is here to stay, and you have to work with it."

Given that smartphone and other mobile devices are here and the number of users is increasing daily (look at an infographic here) what should organisations do to keep up or catch up? Already mentioned are the three main things:

• Have a well thought through digital transformation strategy, remembering that 'small screen' is increasingly likely to be the first customer touch point
• Rethink your business model
• Redesign your organization to deliver the business model

Beyond that are a number of things that support the transformation effort: none of them, in my view, specific to digital, but all necessary if that's what you're aiming for. The more structural ones are neatly summarized in the MIT piece The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation while the more cultural ones are discussed in 10 Principles of Leading Change Management.

However, although in the work I'm involved in we're doing many of the things advocated in this type of guidance to get the organization digital, mobile and/or small screen, we are finding that alongside the orthodoxy of the 'how to' we are in practice, also muddling through the day to day challenges, balancing trade-offs, handling the politics, bridging the say-do disconnects, managing our own different perspectives, and so on. Someone suggested we write a handbook on the way it really is to get to digital transformation. We could even develop a small screen app for it. Would that be helpful? Let me know.