Bob Herbold on the Pandemic Impact

Former Microsoft and Procter & Gamble exec, and my colleague there, Bob Herbold, writes about the  Pandemic impact:

Bob's Gutsy Leadership Blog

The Pandemic Impact: Massive Change Yielding Winners and Losers!   by Bob Herbold.   Posted on April 5, 2021 

From a business perspective, the past 12 months have been about as wild as anyone could have imagined.  The dreaded pandemic, and the constant CDC alarms, led the consumer to be fearful of doing anything.  This has caused major disruption and risk of survival in many industries.  Let’s take a look at some of the major changes that have occurred:  ..... " 

Leading Large Scale Change

Not about digital, which I see is not even mentioned.  Why not?  But I like some of the points made:

A Better Way to Lead Large Scale Change in McKinsey

In Beyond Performance 2.0 (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), McKinsey senior partners Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger draw on their 40-plus years of combined experience, and on the most comprehensive research effort of its kind, to provide a practical and proven “how to” guide for leading successful large-scale change. This article, drawn from the book’s opening chapter, provides an overview of this approach and explains why it works. Future articles will deal with specific topics such as uncovering and shifting limiting mind-sets during change efforts, as well as how to create the ownership and energy needed to succeed.

Neville Isdell took the helm as CEO of Coca-Cola during troubled times. In his words, “These were dark days. Coke was losing market share. Nothing, it seemed—even thousands of layoffs—had been enough to get the company back on track.”1 Its total shareholder returns stood at minus 26 percent, while its great rival, PepsiCo, delivered a handsome 46 percent. Isdell was clear eyed about the challenge ahead; as he put it, “There were so many problems at Coke, a turnaround was risky at best.”

Isdell had a clear sense of what the company needed: to capture the full potential of the trademark Coca-Cola brand, develop other core brands in noncarbonated soft drinks, build wellness platforms, and create adjacent businesses. These weren’t new ideas, and Isdell’s predecessors had failed to make change happen at scale. No matter which direction he set, the company couldn’t make progress until it improved its declining morale, deficient capabilities, strained partnerships with bottlers, divisive politics, and flagging performance culture.  ... " 

Change, Order, Randomness

Fascinating, technical.  Implications?

Proof Finds That All Change Is a Mix of Order and Randomness

All descriptions of change are a unique blend of chance and determinism, according to the sweeping mathematical proof of the “weak Pinsker conjecture.”

Kevin Hartnett  Senior Writer in QuantaMagazine

Dynamical Systems Mathematics Random Numbers

Imagine a garden filled with every variety of flower in the world — delicate orchids, towering sunflowers, the waxy blossoms of the saguaro cactus and the corpse flower’s putrid eruptions. Now imagine that all that floral diversity reduced to just two varieties, and that by crossbreeding those two you could produce all the rest.

That is the nature of one of the most sweeping results in mathematics in recent years. It’s a proof by Tim Austin, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. Instead of flowers, Austin’s work has to do with some of the most-studied objects in mathematics: the mathematical descriptions of change.

These descriptions, known as dynamical systems, apply to everything from the motion of the planets to fluctuations of the stock market. Wherever dynamical systems occur, mathematicians want to understand basic facts about them. And one of the most basic facts of all is whether dynamical systems, no matter how complex, can be broken up into random and deterministic elements.

This question is the subject of the “weak Pinsker conjecture,” which was first posed in the 1970s. Austin’s proof of the conjecture provides an elegantly intuitive lens through which to think about all manner of bewildering phenomena. He showed that at their heart, each of these dynamical systems is its own blend of chance and determinism. .... "

Outer vs Inner Games. Culture and Code

Good thoughts.

The Inner Game: Why Culture Trumps Code in Digital Innovation

 Bain Brief By Greg Caimi and Elizabeth Spaulding   Excerpt:

" .... While efforts to boost a company's digital competence are widespread, they tend to be long on enthusiasm and short on results. Companies tend to focus on what we call the "outer game" of digital strategy—where to play, which products to pursue and how to bring digital technology to bear. While the outer game is critical, these initiatives generally fail if the company lacks the culture to innovate.

In contrast, companies thriving in this age of unpredictable, high-magnitude change invest in their inner games to support their outer games. Rather than treat digital competence as an end goal that they achieve simply by upgrading their website, they focus on building a more agile, responsive organization that can react quickly to market shifts. They make their cultures more adaptive and innovative, and bring in technology systems that can help them advance their strategies. Digital savvy is important, but technology is the means, not the end. ... " 

Digital Pillars of Change

I taught a class at Columbia University on making change happen ....  This is a digital view:

Evolve Or Die: Why Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever  by Mike Bainbridge  

Digital transformation: The four pillars of change:
"Why is digital transformation so important and topical? Quite simply, if your organisation is not modernising then you'll be left behind, and the threat of disruption becomes very real." Here's a clear-eyed look at four pillars of change: customer experience, product digitization, employee engagement, and process optimization. .... "

Making Transformations Work

Just covered this in my Columbia course, where it was about getting analytics change to work.    Here a much less technical and more organizational view, but still very useful.  In McKinsey:  Transformation with a capital T   By Michael Bucy, Stephen Hall, and Doug Yakola   " ... Companies must be prepared to tear themselves away from routine thinking and behavior.  ... " 

Overcome Resistance to Change by Enlisting the Right People

Just completed teaching a course at Columbia University on Change Management in Analytics.  Used some thoughts from this article.   Good thoughts.

Overcome Resistance to Change by Enlisting the Right People

Todd Warner, September 13, 2016 Harvard Business Review

Change initiatives fail when senior leaders don’t see that their organizations are social systems. Organizations are defined by bundles of local relationships, social expectations, and unwritten rules that exist between thousands of people. These people create tribes — collections of like-minded people who build patterns around how work gets done. This system is highly resistant to change, as anyone who as ever tried to “impose” change on a system knows.

Tribes in organizations tend to be small, and may cut across formal silos; they have their own power structure, and their own ways of rewarding and punishing deviance.  You see this in on-boarding, for example, where new joiners take cues and align with co-workers, replicate work habits, and learn day-to-day, despite organizational attempts to “teach” through formal on-boarding programs.

The secret to changing an organization is to understand the fundamental units that make up the social system — these local tribes — and to invert the change process so that tribes own the change. To influence tribes in organizations, you have to give up control, and recognize that every change always goes through a process of localization as it gets executed.   ....  " 

How Fast are Things Changing?

Potentially very fast,  a simple view  of the rate of change in computing power since 1940 to get to a computer processing roughly to the speed of a human brain ....

Key to Change is Middle Management

In the HBR:  With some interesting hints on how this can be achieved.  A little soft, but useful thoughts.   Middle management is a squishy thing, strongly culture influenced. It can be very influential, or just support staff.