Culture Shows Up Again as the Thing Driving Agility

Forbes Insights and the Scrum Alliance have got together to publish a recent report on Organisational Agility, drawn from interviews with over 1,000 C-suite executives from around the globe.

A key theme which runs through the whole report is how important Culture is to Organisational Agility. (Something which I emphasised in "The Way of DAU"). Additionally, there are some compelling findings about the benefits of organisational agility. Over 50% of respondents identified benefits in the areas of:

• Time to Market
• Speed of Innovation
• Employee Morale
• Ability to Attract Talent
• Competitiveness
• Financial Results
• Ability to Manage Across Geographies

To re-inforce these findings, the report focuses on the performance of leading Agile Organisations and Laggard Organisations. Whilst they represent similar proportions of the overall survey population (16% and 19% respectively), twice as many Leader Organisations enjoy annual growth of over 20% as Laggards do.

In all probability, the CxO community that the authors consulted, probably included a pool of organisation most interested in Agility, as an earlier report by McKinsey suggested that only 4% of organisations have completed an organisation wide Agile transformation.

The report looked at a number of things, including whether organisational agility was End-to-End or siloed in functions. Based on the opinions of the respondents, it appears that Operations and Technical Functions tend to be the most Agile (79% and 75% respectively), followed by the usual suspects in Sales and Marketing. Interestingly enough, Finance achieved a credible 64% vote of confidence, but HR was amongst the laggards with only 56% of respondents considering it an agile function. Considering that HR is often thought of as the "Guardian of Culture" this is a worrying gulf and should be a wake up call to HR to re-vitalise its mission.

One area that I would have liked more analysis on, was whether Leading Agile organisations already had positive innovative and collaborative cultures before they embraced Agile or had to focus on it as part of Agile Adoption.

Anyway, the take away is that all CxOs, irrespective of function, need to work on fostering the right culture.

Should Your Next Startup be in Sao Paulo

A decade ago, everyone was waxing lyrically in the received wisdom of the BRIC phenomena. The 4 fast growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. After a while I started to notice that Brazil was sending representatives to IT conferences and other fora to promote Brazil's tech industry.

So why is this important? Well Sao Paolo is known as the manufacturing centre of South America and Brazil with a population of over 200 million is considered the 8th largest economy in the world. Against this ranking, Brazil's IT industry representatives present Brazil as having the 7th Largest IT industry in the world. So it should be important.

This leads me to the question of why don't we hear more about Brazilian Startups and why isn't there a stampeded of people from the UK and Europe trying to invest in or partner with Brazilian startups? So I decided to  enquire further.

It appears that investment in Brazilian startups is healthy. A Financial Times article, places Sao Paolo 11th in the world of any city attracting startup funding rounds greater than $100M. This places it behind London, but ahead of Tokyo, Paris, Seoul, Austin, Seatle, Tel Aviv and Mumbai inter alia. So Brazil's reputation for high costs and bureaucracy is not putting anyone off (a lesson for Brexit remoaners perhaps).

So why don't we hear more of this in the UK. One answer could be that Brazilians are notoriously conservative and don't like to do business with people with whom they do not have a long relationship. Additionally, they like quid pro quo partnerships, so want you to bring something more to the table than just cash. The other may be that traditionally they are quite insular in outlook and compare themselves with the United States only. So startups like Pipefy and Psafe have looked to the US rather than Europe. 

I think it's time that UK entrepreneurs started to explore the opportunities available in Brazil, as there is a huge talent pool there and loads of innovation. Personally, I think it's time to do a duolingo course on portuguese.

Are Businesses Still Missing the Point About Digital Transformation?

The other night I was talking to the Head of Product Management for a company who run several Dating Site brands (facing into differnet market sectors: young, old, gay etc. and across over 50 countries). He was really keen on the term "Digital As Usual" (DAU), because it encapsulates the culture and thinking needed to sustain a Digital Business Model.

So I was quite disappointed to see Raconteur's recent article on Digital Transformation, which shows just how badly many companies are still addressing their move to a Digital Business model. The usual collection of issues showed up: It's an IT problem, its a siloed CDO problem etc. Though, to some extent I think that the authors and experts quoted in the article got it wrong too as they keep talking about Digital Transformation, implying that you get there in a relatively short period of time. The whole point is that you never get there. It is a continuous journey and requires the whole business to act as a team who enjoy voyaging. So instead of transformation programmes, they should think Star Ship Enterprise and understand that what they are really pursuing is organisational excellence and customer delight. Getting that right will move the dial on meaningful organisational measures of performance and deliver revenues and profits (or whatever relevant Value that applies to their organisation) as a byproduct of operating a successful Digital Business Model.

What was interesting in the article was the criticism of organisations who think about digital as just being IT. Whilst in Asia Pacific, a recent survey looked at Digital and IT Transformation. Companies in this region belivve that they are leading the world in digital transformation. Its finding was that where businesses had addressed IT Transformation, they were over 39 times more likely to make better faster decisions than competitors and 13 times more likely to complete application deployments ahead of time, whilst running their critical applications at less than half the cost of competitors (who had not transformed). This is despite the fact that IT leaders are less likely to be involved in critical business decisions that in other parts of the world.

So, IT and lean capabilities are essential enablers, but the senior management team needs to work as a team and not a series of siloed prima donnas. However it is difficult to find anyone who works maturely across all aspects of digitalisation. The Head of Product Management that I talked to (above) freely admitted that his organisation, although growing successfully, does not put enough attention into data quality and avoiding technical debt. And the Strategic Busines  KPIs that they work to are not perhaps the best in optimising customer experience. However, they were very storng on identifying tangible market opportunities, product thinking and lean delivery, whilst enjoying a positive collaborative and innovative culture. They recognised that innovation does sometimes mean learning from failure, although they don't have a strict measure on how much failure is acceptable. But they were doing enought to prosper and continue to learn and grow on their journey. And that is the point.