How to Navigate the Digital Tsunami

Digital Tsunami

The Age of Surge

What do Netflix, Spotify, and Google have in common? They all learn, innovate, and continuously adapt better, faster, and cheaper than traditional companies. Moreover, they use digital technology to innovate, disrupt, and grow in radical and dynamic ways. That’s how they surge ahead of traditional companies.

In THE AGE OF SURGE: A Human Centered Framework for Scaling Company Wide Agility and Navigating the Tsunami of Digital, organizational experts Brad Murphy and Carol Mase show how companies can leapfrog the competition by transforming not only how they develop products and services but also the organization itself around the digital paradigm.

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“Leaders need to nurture a new value system that says your value to the organization should no longer be anchored to your job title or role.” -Brad Murphy and Carol Mase

 

How to Use Surge to Your Advantage

What is “Surge” and how do you use it?

SURGE is a framework that provides the tools for navigating complex adaptive challenges in large corporate businesses. The digital marketplace continues to be highly disruptive to the ways that companies engage with customers, innovate, and remain relevant. The traditional approach to navigating disruptive change has been to seek out a prescriptive formula and apply it to the whole company. The journey of transforming to a digital enterprise, however, is not a process upgrade or best practice adoption problem.

In our work with large companies, what we saw as a consistent point of failure is them seeking a paint-by-numbers formula—agile process frameworks being a classic example. Despite making significant financial and organizational investments, they’re still not producing the customer experiences we expect from digital native companies like Amazon, Netflix and Google. We saw a clear need to help leaders recognize that this is a journey, not a reboot. Digital has changed the dynamics of the marketplace forever.

 

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“Digital has changed the dynamics of the marketplace forever.” -Brad Murphy and Carol Mase

 

How do traditional companies versus digital native companies differ when they view impending change?

The most profound difference is that digital native companies are designed for change. Traditional companies are not. If you are Amazon or Google, one of the fundamental principles is that the space you are seeking to deliver products and services into is subject to continuous change. Therefore, the organization itself needs to be competent in enabling this change to occur. Companies can no longer accurately predict the future. They must learn to co-create products and services with their customers by evolving rapidly with them.

Contrast that with most traditional companies that have built a legacy based on a physical experience. Banks have branches, car companies have manufacturing plants, retail stores have buildings. Physical things take a long time to plan, build, and establish. As consumer preferences have increasingly shifted to adopting digital platforms, these companies have bolted on the veneer of a digital experience. Their preference is to avoid change. So you have a conflict between consumers who have gone digital and the fundamental structure of the business, which was built for a physical world.

 

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“The ability to role shift is essential to a successful business in a digital world.” -Brad Murphy and Carol Mase

 

Thrive in the Midst of Uncertainty

The Compelling Case for Cross-Generational Conversations

you can't google it

Generational Conversations

Many people who write me express frustration about dealing with a different generation. Often the emails I receive are full of sweeping generalizations and accusations. Some are less frustrated, but sincerely baffled, wondering how to bridge the divide.

You Can’t Google It: The Compelling Case for Cross-Generational Conversation at Work by Phyllis Weiss Haserot is a book written to help companies, their leaders and personnel of all generations work harmoniously together to understand each other and achieve their common goals faster, profitably and sustainably.

I recently spoke with Phyllis about her research and book.

 

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“Some individuals in every generation exhibit what’s popularly called entitlement.” – Phyllis Weiss Haserot

 

Achieve Generational Harmony

Tell us about this word you coined: GENgagement™.

I’ve defined GENgagement as the state of achieving harmony, mutual involvement and cooperation, flow, and ongoing absorption in work with people of different generations.

GENgagement means getting all of the generations to understand each other, their influences, and their worldviews so they can work collaboratively, loyally, and productively. It is integral to the mission of transforming workplaces into engaged and productive environments for solving problems and being great places to work.

Benefits to organizations when workers are harmoniously engaged include desired talent retention, development of new skills, competitive intelligence, innovative ideas, and smooth transfer of external relationships – and increased profitability. According to an Aon Hewitt study, a 5% increase in engagement can generate an increase of 3% in revenue growth the following year.

 

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Research: 5 percent increase in engagement can generate a 3 percent increase in revenue.

 

What are a few of the obstacles to achieving GENgagement?

Is Your Company Ready for the Next Cyber Threat?

digital threat

Are You Prepared?

Security incidents are up 66% year-over-year since 2009. Despite this alarming statistic, 80% of CEOs report that they are confident in their company’s cybersecurity.

Cybercrime is on the rise.

Are you prepared? 

Cybersecurity expert Ray A. Rothrock shares the tactics used by hackers and then arms management with the tools to prevent these hacks in his new book Digital Resilience: Is Your Company Ready for the Next Cyber Threat?

 

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76 percent of respondents to Cyberthreat Defense Report indicated that they were successfully compromised by a cyberattack.

 

Why Leaders Must Pay Attention

Ray, your book is compelling. It starts by scaring us beyond belief. For those who haven’t read your book yet, would you go ahead and scare our readers…

By the end of 2016, one category of cyberattack on business —ransomware infection– topped 4,000 instances per day. One publication, CSO, recently posted an estimate that cybercrime damage will hit $6 trillion by 2021 and, by 2022, the human attack surface, the potential victim pool, for cybercrime will reach 6 billion, which is 75 percent of the projected 2020 world population of 8 billion.

So, if you want to be scared, chew on the incontrovertible fact that you and your business are being attacked today, and you will be attacked tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Obviously, you need excellent cybersecurity—firewalls, antivirus software, antimalware software, automatic downloading and installation of the latest security patches for all your software, and a workforce educated in basic digital hygiene. Yet the hard truth is that even the best cybersecurity will be penetrated. Some of those daily attacks will pierce your perimeter defenses.

Mediocre security will stop some attacks. Good security will stop more attacks. The best security will stop even more. But, whether mediocre or exceptional, all security will ultimately fail. You will be breached, and, if you depend on security alone, the effects of the next breach—the next inevitable breach—may be annoying or may put your business at great risk. This is why you need both excellent digital security and excellent digital resilience.  In short, you need to be prepared because you will be attacked.  Resilience starts with preparation.

 

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“Resilience starts with preparation.” -Ray Rothrock

 

Shore Up Your Resilience

Think Like a Navy SEAL to Achieve Greatness

navy seal

Think Like a Navy SEAL

This is not your typical career: after graduation, start as a CPA with a prestigious accounting firm, then go back to school at night for an MBA at NYU Stern School of Business, and leave it all behind to become a Navy SEAL. After full-time active duty, show your entrepreneurial side by co-founding Coronado Brewing Company, NavySEALS.com, and then other businesses like SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind.

That’s the unconventional career of Mark Divine.

I love to learn from people with varied experiences, and Mark is in a rare category. Of all the people I’ve met, no one has quite this type of resume.

His book, The Way of the SEAL, caught my attention a few years ago, and he is now re-releasing it in a second edition.

Truth be told, I’d much rather read his book than go through his brutal training program!

I recently caught up with him to talk about his work and his new book.

 

You were already a successful consultant when you decided to join the Navy and become the best as a SEAL. What drove you to make this decision? 

Shortly after starting my job as a CPA and consultant with PriceaterhouseCoopers (I was with Coopers at the time), I began a practice of Zen meditation with a martial arts grandmaster. Though I was a competitive athlete growing up and in college, meditation was new to me, and at 21 years old it had a powerful neuroplastic effect on my mind’s development. What I experienced as a result of extended practice over several years was increasing clarity and ability to see how the choices I had made subconsciously had driven me into this career that I did not feel inspired by. So I began to challenge all of my assumptions and see them as biased. Then I pondered different questions, such as what is my true purpose or calling in life? I found that what I was called to do was serve as a warrior and leader… and the SEALs became my new focus. This experience taught me the powerful truth that we must all align with our calling, or what Buddha called “dharma,” to find true fulfillment in life.

 

Think Like an Elite Warrior

The subtitle of your book is “Think like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed.” A powerful statement. How is our thinking directly tied to leadership?

We are all leaders and followers… leading our family, our corporate tribe or ourselves. Whether we do it well is another issue. To think like an elite warrior means to train your body-mind to be able to excel in an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. All Special Operators become masters in “VUCA” environments, and the business world is becoming a lot like the battlefield of the Spec Ops warrior (albeit less risky). If the corporate and entrepreneurial leader can learn to find clarity amidst the uncertainty and take powerful action in spite of ambiguity, then they will lead and succeed at an elite level.

 

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Leadership Tip: Find clarity amidst uncertainty. Take action in spite of ambiguity.

 

Lead from the Front

How to Build an A Team

a team

Build an A Team

Those who aspire to be successful quickly realize that individual performance isn’t usually enough. Only a team of committed individuals can accomplish great things. So a leader’s job turns to finding, selecting, and cultivating an amazing team.

If you wonder whether you are performing at your best, look at your team. My philosophy has always been that, if they are growing, your company will follow.

 

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“Successful business leaders prioritize talent-development as a recruitment tool in the same way top athletic coaches do.” -Whitney Johnson

 

One way to tell whether you are growing is to look at where your team falls on the S curve. Based on Whitney Johnson’s proprietary research around disruption, every organization is a collection of individual S – or learning – curves. You build high performing team by optimizing these individual curves, including yours. In her book, Build an A-Team, you will learn how to manage people all along the S-curve and what to do when they reach the top of the curve. As employees are allowed, even required, to surf their individual S-curve waves, disrupting themselves, you will not only be less vulnerable to disruption, you’ll also be a boss people want to work for.

 

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“The mind and skill-expanding opportunity motivates great engagement more than money or accolades.” -Whitney Johnson

 

After the release of your last book, Disrupt Yourself, you traveled and met the leaders of many organizations. As you spoke with them, what surprised you most?

Many people feel stuck, like a genie corked in a lamp; if somebody (usually their boss) would just pull that cork, they could make magic. They say, “I’m ready to disrupt myself. How can I persuade my boss to let me?” Or, “How can I get my team to disrupt themselves? How can I get my boss on board with that?” In Build an A Team I answer these questions and address the fact that, in most cases, fear of failure is the cork. We may be the cork in the bottle—our own, and our employees’.

 

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“Want to know if you are about to be disrupted? Take the pulse of your workforce.” -Whitney Johnson

 

Be the Boss People Love to Work For