The problem is that so many people switch from waterfall legacy systems model, to agile and fail (most “failures” in business are relatively minor – but failure to successfully adapt to agile can cause maintenance costs to spin out of control and halt delivery cycles – unchecked that’s lethal to most businesses).  The rub is that there are several reasons for these failures.

One of the things that is more complex than it seems is the vision for the end state.  You might think everyone needs to share and understand – grok the end state.  But that’s not the case.  Particularly with large transformations, only a few need to share the vision for the end state and the interim success milestones.  Here are some images to illustrate the point.

Sometimes something is completely obvious to you but other people don’t see it, and it’s easy to show them, like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

Then there are things you can see that others can’t, even if you circle it, like the number 15 in the diagram below that you can probably see if you are not color-blind.

Color blindness test

The image below is called a stereogram and it also contains an image.  Some people can see it right away, others need to stare at it for a while – and others may never see it.  I haven’t seen it yet otherwise I would tell you what’s in it – I will spend some more time looking at it and update this post if I see it.

Stereogram

Leading any change in an organization requires a vision of what that organization will look like at the end of the change. Bill Barnett wrote this really insightful piece on disruptive change – but not all transformational changes in an organization lead to an external disruption.

Sometimes the change is small having the vision for that end state is straightforward like the FedEx logo.  Banks allowing customers to withdraw cash using ATMs instead of going to a teller is an example of a change that’s pretty easy to picture.

But the pace of change in business has accelerated across the board and to keep up and stay competitive, most organizations need to restructure, even refactor if they are to continue to achieve their goals. One area where major change is needed is in how they manage technology.  When organizations migrate from supporting a few legacy software systems for things like CRM and ERP that might have quarterly or annual release cycles to a model where they now need to release software every month, or every week or even every day as some do now – it can be a lot harder to picture what changes are needed.   So as changes get more complex and become transformations, chances are the end-state vision will be more analogous to a stereogram where not everyone can see it.  That’s because complex transformations often require significant changes in three things – the structure of the teams, the governance model that is used to manage what work is done, and the metrics used for that work. Major transformation in structure, governance, and metrics can be very hard to imagine.

Especially when teams aren’t used to going through a major transformation, and all they know is the way they have been doing it for many years, it can be even harder for everyone to see the image in the stereogram.  Transformations can be a lot like innovation in that if that’s all you do, you get really good at it, and the odds of your success go up every time you do it because you get better and better at it.

Because few organizations are in a constant state of transformation – they often hire people who do it all the time to help not only create the vision – but also help them execute the transformation to help them be successful.  In our experience – success for a large transformation has to excel in the three areas mentioned above – governance, structure, and metrics.  Absent rigorous and disciplined change in governance (making sure people are working on the right things), structure (the way teams are organized and the skills they have – which are often very different from the skill needed in legacy/waterfall team), and metrics (delivering working, tested software that meets the needs of the business), organizations will fall short of their transformation needs and goals.  If you are considering a transformation  – make sure you have these three bases covered in your vision and your execution.

It is very tempting to want to get everyone on the same page and make sure everyone can see the vision before moving forward.  This is not necessary.  As long as the leaders of the transformation have a clear vision on the end-state of the transformation (agreeing that it’s the number 15 to use the simplistic color-blindness test example above) – that is what is required.  We would go so far as to say it’s smart to assume that not everyone can see the future state – and that is part of the structure, governance, and metrics needed to ensure success along the way.  If there are people who don’t share the vision – they won’t know if they are off track for the work they are doing, so communication among team members needs to be disciplined – even explicitly baked into the 90 day plans that should be in place for a transformation of this scale.  We have seen many examples of cases where organizations have successfully defined and achieved their vision – and even more cases where organizations have stumbled.

Contact us and we will share our lessons learned with you.

I recently read an article about declining rental car usage and it was blamed on Uber.  Like a lot of people, I use Uber often, even where I live, so the article did not surprise me.  Thrifty has a plan to fix that and it’s smart.

Last weekend I went to Atlanta for a work trip.  Having experienced really high rates from Hertz and Avis in the past, I have mostly used Thrifty in the last five years when I have needed to rent a car.  Now I realize Hertz owns Thrifty, and in the same vein that Old Navy, Gap, and Banana Republic are owned by the same company, I get that there can be several brands and markets (low, medium, and high-end) within a given industry.  VW is also part of the same company as Porsche and Audi, but that’s very different (VW doesn’t make any money – by design) and I will  blog more about that some other time.

I will start by telling you what happened.

I went online, starting at Trivago and learned that wasn’t the right place to start even though I do love that site.  Then I went straight to Thrifty.  I entered my airline information and told them my pick up/drop off dates and it offered me a car for $50.  At first I thought that was a daily rate – and then I realized that was the total price for a three-day rental.  It was $13 per day plus taxes.  I couldn’t believe it.  And like most rental car companies, you can book a reservation without even entering a credit card (that’s bound to change soon), so there’s never a penalty for a no-show.  So I booked it.

Then on Friday night I got to the rental car counter.  The discussion started off pretty predictably with the woman behind the counter asking for a driver license and a credit card.  Then she started explaining some of the insurance options.  Now I have been told for over 20 years that you always decline insurance on a rental car, especially when it’s for work and you are paying with American Express, which I was.  But today she was very convincing and I actually thought about it – she pointed out some specific coverages for accidents with people who don’t have coverage and I really thought about it.  Part of my thinking was – well it’s only $13 a day, maybe another $25 for insurance isn’t such a bad idea.  She told me their gas prices are really high and that if I was planning to drive a long distance (which is almost inevitable in Atlanta) it might make sense to pre-buy the tank.  These are questions I never think twice about and always decline, but today, I was really thinking about it – because the way she asked the questions was different.  And again – my base was $13 a day, so I kept thinking, what’s the harm.  But in the end I said “no” to everything and went on my way.

As I was driving up North, it hit me what had just happened, and why Thrifty is so smart (I am guessing – I haven’t spoken with them about this).

They don’t want to fight the battle for your business online.  They want to get you face-to-face for the real selling.  So they completely undercut the competition online – $13 a day is nuts – and that’s probably a marketing expense for the people like me who make it to the counter and don’t bite.  If I came that close to caving, I bet more than 50% of people buy some of the insurance, car seat, GPS, gas, or other add-ons, and by the time it’s over – they are right back at the $50 per day I have come to expect with a car rental.  Paying $13 per customer is a high marketing cost in a vacuum, but if that’s what it takes to get someone to go all the way from Seattle to the Atlanta rental car counter – that’s smart money.

On the spectrum of smart, smarter, smartest,  Thrifty gets my Smartest Company award for the month.

I will admit that I expected to pass a gas station on the way back to the airport and there wasn’t one, so I still got stung on the not filling up gas charge, but next time I will know better.

P.S. The punchline on VW is that they sell large volumes, which helps drive down the cost of their parts.  Audi and Porsche use a lot of those parts and that’s why it makes sense for VW to operate at a black zero in terms of profit, and how Audi and Porsche are hugely profitable.    And Thrifty doesn’t offer any of those cars.

It’s a sign of the times, from The Times.  The New York Times Sydney Ember published this article about the future of the news business.

I have been giving this subject a great deal of thought over the years and am delighted to learn that they have invested in figuring out a plan.

As I see it – the issue is that large volume news is all about targeting large audiences (to get large ad dollars) and to do that they need to produce information their readers didn’t know.  Before the internet, and after the telephone, there was a long period of time where 24 hours was usually plenty of time to stay ahead of most readers in terms of what they didn’t already know.

If the telephone was invented in 1849, and the above graph says it took 70 years for 50% of the population to have one, that takes us to about 1920.  So then if you figure Internet adoption happened at around 2000, that’s an 80 year window of smooth sailing for media.

The obvious crisis is that most of us already know the big stories within an hour or two of when the news breaks on CNN or ESPN or Geekwire, we all get news from a few places.  Sports was the first casualty – people who really follow sports figure out all of the sports scores an hour or so of when they happen – so for a print paper like The New York Times – to have a section the next day, the information has to be pretty obscure – things that are not on the front page of those online news sites, and I give The New York Times a lot of credit.  Especially over the past five years, their sports section has really gone to the edges and struck a very careful balance between the nugget and the “who cares”

But this isn’t just about the print version of The New York Times.

This is about the ongoing role of the media.  They can either go for a lower volume of people who still don’t know the news – and inform them, or they can continue to target the higher volumes and add details most of us have missed – either with more obscure facts (which risk having the mass appeal) or adding more opinions, which is a shift in their expected objectivity – but clearly places like Fox News and CNN have thrown objective reporting out the window.  One frontier that is interesting is to move the timeline to focus less on what already happened, to more on what’s coming.  There’s still a way the media can stay ahead of what information we are taking in – by telling us what’s coming, and what could happen.  In a sense the media could all become more like weather people – meteorologists – saying here’s what’s probably going to happen today – and watch out for what’s coming later in the week.

This isn’t limited to news and large audiences.  The same applies to our LinkedIn, Facebook, and other, smaller circles of information sharing.

I haven’t read all of Ember’s report yet – but I am looking forward to it and I am eager to hear what’s coming.  Because I suspect that’s a big part of the future role of the media – to focus more on the future, than the past.

I am not the first to observe that the so-called Sharing Economy is a terrible label for what’s going on.

Derek Bacon came up with this image of what it means:

Uber and Airbnb have become the poster child examples of the Sharing Economy, where the notion is that individuals who need something can buy something from other individuals who want to sell a product or service.  Up to that point the label Sharing Economy holds up.

But that oversimplifies what’s really going on and why it’s a big deal.  It’s a big deal because it has turned supply/demand economics on its ear.

The enabler of the sharing economy is increased visibility or transparency of supply and demand at the individual level (whereas supply used to only be from big companies with marking budgets and 2 degrees of separation word-of-mouth) and demand was in most cases faceless (that is Nordstrom knew how many people bought the shoes they advertised in the Sunday newspaper insert, but they had no idea who the buyers were).

Today supply has come down to the individual level and instead of only having 2 degrees of separation communication (telling your neighbor they can borrow / rent your lawn mower), it is now global.  But what’s key is that the supplier doesn’t have to know the buyer.

That’s because demand is no longer anonymous. What the Sharing Economy really has done, is to add a layer of structure/infrastructure to the communication at that individual level.  20 years ago we could send an e-mail asking our friends if they knew someone who wanted to rent their spare bedroom – today airbnb is a structured way of linking that supply and demand for that specific need.

In that sense match.com was one of the killer apps for that linkage of supply/demand linkage at the individual level, where we came to trust communications between two people who don’t know each other.  So we shouldn’t focus as much on Airbnb and Uber as the bow wave of the Sharing Economy – we need to go farther back – to companies like Match.  Update – Sonya “Swipe Right” Schwartz did this really thorough write up on match that’s a must read.

So then a company like Jet.com is simply a logical extension of that new transparency, back “up” into the supply chain to increase transparency of costs.  Internet of things, IoT, is a similar increase of transparency at the post-transaction experience level that we are learning to expect because everything is specific and structured at the individual behavior level.

So now that we have this transparency, in a structured way, and we trust – even expect it at the more specific way that Airbnb and Uber have offered – we expect it everywhere.

So should it be called the Transparency Economy? The Power to the People Economy?  I don’t know.   That’s not really my department.

I think the bigger question is that now that people see this happening, with Apple, Google, Netflix, Amazon as the untouchable tech companies (Farad Manjoo is on the right track with his thinking on this article – though he stops short of actually calling them untouchable) – is that why companies like Under Armour are sprinting to stay ahead of them.  This article in Geekwire about Kevin Plank has the right idea.

What it boils down to is that now that Match, Uber, Airbnb have turned supply/demand on its ear, as the owners of all of the data – which informs a lot of behaviors, will Apple, Google, Netflix, Amazon come and and take control of this new supply/demand universe as the new order of things settles down.

I don’t think it’s going to be quite that simple.  I do think we will see some unlikely M&A going on where Google might buy the Ford Motor Company.  If nothing else it would be a fascinating turn of events relative to what Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase predicted (basically it made sense for Ford to grow to be so huge when it did in the 1920s, because the search cost of finding a company to perform a service like growing rubber for tires or hiring ships to move cars exceeded the cost of hiring someone to do it internally – the internet seemed to flip that upside down – proving Coase again correct as search costs plummeted – suggesting a company should never get big again because search costs were so low – you could always find someone to do it better/faster/cheaper instead of hiring someone).

The question is whether it once again makes sense for companies to get huge again?

Serendipity is close but not quite the right word.

And it’s something we are losing when it comes to information.  It’s “finding what you are not looking for” and thinking we need a new word for that – that which we are losing our ability to do because of the way we now access and consume information through sites like Google, Bing, and others.

Some of the most amazing information I have in my head is from finding things I wasn’t looking for – and several of my favorite examples of all time are below.

Would my life be worse off because I hadn’t stumbled on those articles? Doubtful.  But from a pure quality of life perspective – I can’t tell you how many times these stories have brought a smile to my face, or how many times I have shared them with friends as well as little kids, even co-workers.

These are the articles that I would never in a million years have searched for, and they would probably never show up on some of your favorite destination web sites like Linkedin, Geekwire, or CNN in my case.  These are articles that in some cases are more than ten years old, but I still talk about them often.

There’s no big call to action in this post, just really wondering out loud, as it were, how our kids will be able to stumble on these gems in the future.  As print news goes away, and we have fewer opportunities to “stumble” on pieces like these, people will miss out. I think in some cases it would change their lives.  If I had found that article about bird migrations, or the one on squid camouflage, I might have actually made some different career choices because they are that cool – to me.

So here are some of the best ever.  If you have some similar favorites – I’d love to see them.

This is one about the platypus that’s full of incredible information (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/science/08platypus.html).  This is another one about camouflage (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19camo.html).  And this one combines insanely long nonstop bird migrations with internet of things technologies and more (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25migrate.html)

Sometimes it’s not even an article – even a graphic that tells an unbelievable story, like this one. (http://freakonomics.com/2008/08/21/usain-bolt-its-just-not-normal/).  Sorry this graphic isn’t bigger – go to the link to see it better.

There you go.