There are of course many tools that don't require any specialized skills. Still, it would be a mistake not to think about who should be operating them. With modern content management systems, for example, it is easy to update the content of a website. But should the person who wrote a blog post for the organization's website also be the one to enter the text into the system? Perhaps not, because there is a huge opportunity cost of asking a talented writer to fiddle around with the website, both in terms of their time but more importantly in terms of whether they find enjoyment and fulfillment in their work.
Knowledge workers can be divided into two groups: the more creative ones who are good at abstraction and the more detailed-oriented ones who are good at implementing. So find out what your employees' superpowers are. There are different ways to go about it, but I particularly like the Strengths Finder test by Gallup.
Alexander: What are your favorite apps, tools, or software that you can't live without?
Florian: I'm a little biased, because I work for the company that makes it, but I am a huge fan of Tableau Prep, which is a tool for cleaning, restructuring, and integrating different data sources. It allows you to see the changes that you are making to a data table before you run the script. I am a curious creature and like to dig into all sorts of different data sets, so this tool has become a real game changer for me.
Another app that I recently discovered is Notion. I use it for my to-do lists, to keep web snippings, and to jot down ideas. But it has many other functionalities, including Kanban bords, and calendars, timelines, and it can be used by teams too. It is like a Swiss Army knife for organizing content and tasks.
Alexander: Do you have a smart productivity hack or work-related shortcut?
Florian: This is going to sound funny, given the topic of this book, but there are two hacks that I use, and they both involve protecting myself from digital content!
The first is that I have blocked Twitter, Facebook, and most news sites on my work laptop. In his book Indistractable, author Nir Eyal explains how these sites are designed to keep you on them for as long as possible, for example, by suggesting ever more content for you to check out. So I try my best to avoid tripping into one of these time sinks. Nowadays, I get my daily news update mostly by listening to the radio, and I try to stay in touch with friends mostly by phone and text message.
The second hack is that I try to avoid looking at any type of device after 10 p.m. The blue light emitted by screens suppresses the rise in melatonin that is required for us to feel sleepy at night. From the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, I learned that most people who claim they can get by with less than seven hours of shut-eye are lying and are hurting not only their productivity but also their long-term health.
Alexander: What is the best advice you have ever received?
Florian: When I worked for the World Economic Forum (WEF), I was involved in several projects creating digital offerings for the WEF community, including what was essentially a social collaboration platform for the world's foremost leaders and thinkers. A colleague there introduced me to the P-O-S-T framework for thinking through new project ideas like these:
People: Define your audience.
Objective: Define what you want to do for your audience.
Strategy: How will you achieve that objective?
Technology: What technology do you need to implement the strategy?
This is extremely useful, because when we get excited about a new technology, the temptation is to try it immediately, without having really thought through whether it makes sense in the given context. With the T being the last step in the suggested process, the P-O-S-T framework is a nice forcing function to counter this inclination.
Key Takeaways
Companies that don't use cutting-edge digital technologies to create value for their customers will lose out in the “experience economy.”
Technologies like AI will become ubiquitous as they become commoditized, but managers will need to learn how to harness the creativity of their knowledge workers alongside the machines.
If the requisite regulatory frameworks can be put in place, the digital transformation will help to address major societal issues, including healthcare, traffic, pollution, and corruption.
Endnotes
1 1 Pine II, Joseph B., and Gilmore, James H., “Welcome to the Experience Economy," Harvard Business Review, 76, no. 2 (July/August 1998): 97–105.
2 2 Christensen, Clayton M., The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.
3 3 Pofeldt, Elaine, “Full-time Freelancing Lures More Americans,” Forbes, October 5, 2019 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2019/10/05/full-time-freelancing-lures-more-americans).
4 4 Cotgreave, Andy, “Find Hidden Insights in Your Data: Ask Why and Why Again,” InfoWorld, September 16, 2016 (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3120513/find-hidden-insights-in-your-data-ask-why-and-why-again.html).
Chapter 6 Corporate Social Network to Drive Collaborative Culture as Key Enabler for Modern Work
This real-life example is based on an engagement at a pharmaceutical company.
The pharma company's communication and collaboration were limited to emails. Teams were working in silos, using various consumer tools such as WhatsApp to connect and to share information. Without a central platform for collaborating and sharing knowledge, employees had a difficult time finding the information they needed. They had to send documents and spreadsheets as attachments to work on them together.
Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS), was used as knowledge storage, but it was poorly maintained and the information was usually out of date. A platform for video calls was used only for external purposes, as its limited usability and the lack of integration were not attractive to the employees.
Best-of-Breed vs. Best-of-Suite
In choosing solutions for improved communication and collaboration, the pharma company followed the best-of-breed approach. A best-of-breed approach means that the organization must invest time in each individual product's upgrade cycle for integration and testing. Some components even lack a proper integration, which makes workarounds (with scripts or additional integration tools) necessary. In a best-of-suite solution, this is typically not required, as the suite's components usually follow the same release cycle and are already well integrated.
If companies can cover this investment, best-of-breed is a very flexible approach that might cover niche use cases better. This was, however, not the case for this pharma company. Therefore, the pharma company's (chief information officer) CIO decided to migrate