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Wanting to Transform your Business – Change the Logo? 
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

Wanting to Transform your Business – Change the Logo? 

Digitally enabled business transformation may be pervading our discussions at the moment, but in reality, this conversation theme is at least as old as the Internet, and more likely older. It was therefore with interest that I read a recent HBR article by Scott Anthony and Evan I. Schwartz which noted how often significant transformations fail. They then followed on by listing the transformations that their research identified as most successful and why. On top of the list were Amazon and Netflix; but also on the list well-known brands like Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. In reading the profiles of the companies on the list, virtually all of them had achieved their successful transformation through digitally enabled interventions. For Amazon it was the addition of their cloud services which helped grow their profitability. Netflix was able to take advantage of burgeoning and cost effective bandwidth, to introduce their popular streaming service. And of course Apple’s addition of the iPhone, iPad etc. revived their fortunes from a struggling computer manufacturer into the world’s most profitable company today.

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Facilitating Organisational Change with SWOOP
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

Facilitating Organisational Change with SWOOP

Just take a moment and think about the last 2 or 3 major organizational change programs that you have been party to (or a victim of). Invariably the change will have something to do with wanting to change the way people work and interact with each other in your organization. Perhaps it was triggered by a significant structural change, a merger, or acquisition. Perhaps it was around a major technology refresh. Or perhaps even a significant change in company strategy, triggered by a disruptive change in the marketplace. Whatever the reason, invariably you will be asked to adapt your behavior to become more adaptive, responsive and collaborative; because change has now become a constant.

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Formulas for Success
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

Formulas for Success

There is something about ‘Formulas for Success’ that can be both appealing and irritating. The appealing part is of course the simplicity of it. If I could boil down the complexity of my life into a set of simple algorithms, then life would all of a sudden become much simpler. The irritating part is that we generally don’t believe that the world can be described simply as a set of formulas. What formulas do well, however is to cut to the chase. They remove the clutter and identify what core elements you need to concern yourself with. That is why I was attracted to this little excerpt from Adam Grant’s recent newsletter:

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The Tide Has Finally Turned – Networks Eat Hierarchy for Breakfast 
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

The Tide Has Finally Turned – Networks Eat Hierarchy for Breakfast 

Apologies to Peter Drucker for hijacking his famous culture versus strategy statement, but for us, the recent 2017 Deloitte Global Trends  tome signals a tipping of the scales that we have been anticipating, frankly, for decades. The Deloitte survey of some 10,000+ business and HR leaders across 140 countries voted “Organization of the Future: Arriving Now” as the number 1 human capital trend that concerns them most.

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Getting Jobs Done Theory
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

Getting Jobs Done Theory

It’s not the sort of labelling that we have come to expect from our academic theory makers. But it’s just the sort of ‘down and dirty’ language that can help us break out of the ‘business speak’ rhetoric, that we tend to turn off from, the moment we hear it. “What is the ROI?”, “Where are the hard tangible benefits?”, “Have we done a cost/benefit on this?”, “How can you demonstrate customer value?”.

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How far are you willing to Trade Personal Privacy for Personal Benefit?
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

How far are you willing to Trade Personal Privacy for Personal Benefit?

We were recently interviewed on the topic of the impacts on personal privacy that human centred analytics might have. Of course personal privacy was front of mind at the very inception of SWOOP; and we quickly adopted the privacy tag line that we are “SWOOP not SNOOP”. That said, we are also mindful of the very power of the insights that can be drawn about individuals, from what might look like innocuous data, which presents a very grey area for privacy protection.

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The Social Network Map
Laurence Lock Lee Laurence Lock Lee

The Social Network Map

This post continues our series on key SWOOP indicators. The ‘Social Network Map’ is prominently displayed on the Personal Tab, as a personal social network map. A second social network map representation is available at the Enterprise tab level, to identify how business units or offices, or the like, are connected via inter-group connections.

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Smart Collaboration = Smart Money
Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

Smart Collaboration = Smart Money

Smart Collaboration’ is the title of Harvard’s Heidi Gardner’s latest book. The book builds and expands on her well cited HBR article  “When Senior Managers Won’t Collaborate” , where she presents some compelling data demonstrating that collaboration does pay, big time. Her network representation comparing the networks of two lawyers, with Lawyer 2 responsible for generating much higher revenues from her larger and more diverse network, may seem quite logical. 

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