Only Dead Fish

On Blogging

I realised the other day that early this month marked the tenth anniversary of this blog. The quietude with which this anniversary slipped past belies the sizeable impact that blogging has actually had on my life. I began writing this blog at a time when the social web was really kicking off. At the time I was working for one of the large media owners in the UK and had already been involved with the digital side of that business for around seven years. Back then everyone was talking about this thing that had come to be known as 'Web 2.0' (a term which seems tragically quaint now). I was part of a team working on a new digital media product and we were trying to better understand how we might apply some of the thinking that underpinned the burgeoning social web. And so, in an attempt to find out more about what this blogging thing was all about, I started a blog.

This act began a chain of events that would ultimately change my life. When I began writing, I found that I enjoyed the process and wrote more. I connected with other blogs that I discovered (we used to have blogrolls back then). People started posting comments on the posts that I put up. And I realised that there were whole communities of fascinating people writing about the amazing or funny things that they had discovered on the web, or ranting about the ills of their industry, or posting the kind of wonderfully insightful opinion pieces that you just couldn't read anywhere else. There was discussion, banter, creativity. There was real community.

But blogging also taught me useful things. It taught me how to put ideas out there, even if they weren't fully formed. It taught me about the value of continuous feedback. It taught me about the value of surrounding yourself with people smarter than you. It taught me how to write. Looking back, I recall that some people I worked with at the time were a bit snobby about what I was doing. They couldn't see the point. They semi-joked about the amount of time I must spend blogging instead of working (without realising that most of my writing was done outside of work on the train home or in the evenings).

But I kept going because I was starting to find it immensely rewarding in other ways. I found that blogging helped me to think aloud, and make sense of the rapidly changing environment in which I found myself. It enabled me to explore new ideas. It helped me form new strands of thinking, some of which expanded, adapted, and took on a life of their own. Through blogging I made countless real-life connections. I think many of those early blogging cynics missed the point that one of the most wonderful things you get from it is the opportunity to get to know and then often meet some of the most inspiring and amazing people. There were meet ups, coffee-mornings, informal gatherings of all kinds. Many of those early blogs that I used to love reading so much are now sadly gone. Much of the discussion that used to happen in comment sections has now moved to Twitter and other places. But there's never been more access to such a quantity of great writing as now, and I'm fortunate in that many of the people I met back then have been my friends for the best part of a decade. Ultimately, writing a blog set me on a different course that would result in me leaving corporate world and doing my own thing.

Ten years, and almost 2000 posts later and I'm still writing. The photo of me on my biog page is taken by Mario Cacciottolo who I met via this blog and who at the time was running a lovely side project called Someone Once Told Me. He's taken pictures of thousands of people around the world, each revealing something that they've been told or have read that has been important to them. Mine is this quote, from the famous Creative Director Paul Arden:

'Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know and more will come back to you.'

It was, and still is, one of my favourite quotes. It seems to capture the philosophy that has underpinned this place and from which I've derived so much value.

Writing this blog has impacted my life in a multitude of important ways. It has enabled me to have amazing experiences. Without it I don't think I would ever have been able to start my own business, and continue it for over seven years in the way that I have. Without it I don't believe that I would ever have arrived at the point where my first book is about to be published. Without it, I know that I would be much the poorer for not meeting the wonderful people that it has brought me into contact with. As is so often the way, the benefit of doing it has come in multiple indirect ways but it's no exaggeration to say that for me, blogging has been life-changing.

So that's what this little corner of the web has done for me. And as long as I still enjoy the process and get value out of it I'll still write it. My thanks to all of you for reading and contributing.

Shipped in 2016

What can you say about 2016? A strange and disconcerting year in so many ways. But there is also lots to be grateful for. Every year around this time I write myself a kind of end of year review listing all the main things I've been involved with throughout the year, as a way of taking a step back and looking at the shape of what's been going on. A kind of 'yearnote', I guess (like weeknotes but longer). Opportunities to look at the bigger picture of what I've been doing are rare, but it's been seven years now since I launched my own business, so it's a valuable thing for me to do. 2016 has been a bit scrappy, but I'm fortunate in that it's been another busy year and one in which it feels as though some important things have moved forwards. So in no particular order:

• We ran another ten Google Firestarters events this year and covered some fascinating themes including the future of digital advertising, artificial intelligence, and 'fast' in planning. Speaker highlights included some great talks from Adam Morgan, Tracey Follows, Martin Weigel, Ian Leslie, Tom Goodwin, Dr Nicola Millard, Tom Chatfield, Patricia McDonald, James Haycock. Our Performance Marketing strand of events provided a great counterpoint to the planning Firestarters (it's always so interesting to juxtapose the discussions), focusing on programmatic, AI and automation. And we did another two events in Auckland and Sydney which were both enormous fun. 
• I seemed to do a lot of webinars this year. This included my regular talks on innovation and change for the Google Squared programme, and a whole series on a similar subject for a digital leadership programme
• Speaking of digital leadership, my work in this area (which has been growing over the past few years) seemed to take on a whole new level this year. We really have come to the point I think, where the most senior leaders in large organisations are recognising that they need to get a far more intuitive and fundamental grasp of what digital truly means not only in terms of innovation, product development and service delivery, but also organisational agility, culture and working practices. It's really gratifying to see. So in 2016 I ran a whole series of senior leadership workshops for a global FMCG (I really enjoyed travelling to New York, Lausanne, Munich and Tokyo as part of this), and others for a large financial business, one for a supply chain management team in a large services provider, a session for a UK utilities provider, and one for a global telecoms company, and also projects for fascinating businesses such as Camelot and LEGO
• Alongside my work in digital transformation and leadership, I ran a number of digital marketing training and strategy workshops with companies as diverse as Merlin Entertainment (which meant I got to go to LegoLand Florida - yay!), Speedo (which meant I got to go to Nottingham - yay!), another FMCG (which meant I got to go to Brussels and eat my weight in Moules Mariniere), Casio and EDF. I also did a series of public Digital Marketing fasttracks with Econsultancy which meant I got to meet some great people from a whole range of companies, and I did my first Guardian Masterclass this year, something which I hope to do more of next year.
• Digital Transformation consultancy ran alongside a some of the workshop work, including projects for a large sports apparel company helping with structures, and one for a national charity looking at transforming fundraising. 
• I really enjoyed doing the speaking gigs this year, and spoke at the Festival Of Marketing, Travel Tech Europe, Ad Week, Magic IT Summit, International Management Seminar in Madrid, CAMP in Lima, Peru, and MCI conference in Marrakech. I also did a whole series of one off in-company talks and sessions for organisations like TUI, a couple of UK County Councils, the London College of Communications, the IAPI in Dublin, and MC & C
• I've been leading Econsultancy's quarterly trends service Digital Shift now for four years, and this year saw another four reports and associated webinars. Doing Shift has always meant that I need to keep track of (and make sense of) a rapidly moving environment which is a good discipline and useful for my other work as well
• I'm biased of-course but Dots is consistently one of my favourite conferences of the year, not least becuase it means I get to work with Antony Mayfield and the smart folk at Brilliant Noise in curating it. This was the third Dots Conference. Highlights for me included talks by Duncan Hammond from The Guardian, Caroline Webb, Andy Whitlock, Lydia Nicholas, and Dan Shute (you can see the talks here)
• Alongside the client work, there has of-course been some important side projects. Fraggl has continued to grow this year, and we've had some plans in place for a good while to do some upgrades and improvements to the algorithm but if I'm brutally honest we just haven't had the space and time in amongst everything else - but it's not forgotten and we'll rectify this early next year
• My weekly newsletter had it's sixth birthday this year, and there was another 46 editions. The subscriber community grew nicely which I'm happy about. It's always difficult to judge the return on the time invested but that's not really the point in doing it - I enjoy it, people seem to get a lot from it, and there is a real and growing community around it. 
• I wrote 104 blog posts this year - a bit less than last year which I guess is not surprising given the other writing I was doing. And I still haven't moved off Typepad. But blogging still gives me enormous value. It's my thinking aloud. I couldn't do what I do without it. So I am of-course going to continue 
• And speaking of writing. 2016 was of-course the year in which I wrote a book. I've been writing about organisational agility for over five years and putting all my thinking into a published book has been a long-term ambition. It was something of a marathon trying to write it amongst all the mortgage paying work but I'm very happy with the result and it will be published by Kogan Page in early April next year. As I've said before, I see this as the start of a conversation and a community around the whole topic of agility and digital transformation - it's such a focus for so many businesses right now and there's plenty of new, challenging and useful thinking in the space. I'll be writing more about it here of-course, but our starting point is a Medium publication and a subscriber list where we'll be sharing our thinking and some exclusive content ahead of the launch. So do give us a follow, sign up, and let us know what you think. 

It's no exaggeration to say that 2016 has been an extraordinary year, and not always (outside of work) in a good way. But as always I'm grateful for a steady stream of interesting projects, the great people that I've met along the way, and the continuous learning which has been a consistent feature of my work life, especially since I gave up corprorate world to go it alone. The book will be a real focus for 2017, but I'm also looking forward to more varied and interesting work along the way. My thanks to all those with whom it's been so great to work with this year (you know who you are) and to those who also took the time to meet up. As always, it's been fun. 

The Agile Business Manifesto

I've always stressed in my writing about agile my belief that the principles that underpin agile working, as well as the culture that surrounds it, have far broader application than just technology teams and the way in which software is built. This is at the centre of the organisational agility that we describe in the book. I thought it would be useful to pull together these fundamental conventions, and show how they have been inspired by the agile manifesto, which was written over fifteen years ago. So this presentation does just that.

The Agile Business Manifesto from Neil Perkin

We believe that business success in the digitally-empowered world needs an fundamental reorientation of how organisations work. These twelve principles set out critical components for achieving that change.

For exclusive content relating to my upcoming book on organisational agility, you can sign up here.

Why Change Management Needs to Change

Over on the Medium publication that I've created for my upcoming book on Building the Agile Business I've posted some thoughts on why, in the context of digital transformation and the significant amount of change that many organisations are undergoing right now, we need to reinvent traditional approaches to change management. In the book, a key theme is how digital transformation is far from being the linear process with a beginning, middle and an end that many take it to be. Instead the transition that needs to happen is one towards creating a new type of organisation that is in itself designed around continuous change and the ability to respond to rapidly changing contexts. So we are, more than ever, in the business of continuously managing change. And rather than the traditional, fixed and linear change management processes we need far more fluid and adaptive approaches to better account of a rapidly and continually changing operating environment. I listed some fundamental ways in which I believe that change management itself needs to change which I thought were worth repeating here:

• The balance between vision and iteration:- achieving a new level of organisational agility requires continuous iteration and adaptation but we also need a compelling vision and an understood organising direction. This means that one of the key questions we have to answer is what is fixed and what is flexible. We need to establish the parameters to understand what needs to change rapidly, and what might change far more slowly. And beyond this, to understand how feedback from faster iteration can inform the slower-changing strategy
• Barriers to organisational change:- removing blockers and barriers to change was previously seen as one part in a multi-step process. Now, continuously shifting contexts mean that the barriers to moving fast are themselves always changing and emergent, so we need to work consistently and unceasingly at overcoming them
• Parallel, not linear:- one of the most famous models for change management is John Kotter's 8 steps. In the late 90s when he first described this linear approach, Kotter was setting out what is essentially the waterfall version of change management. Yet, as I talk about a lot in the book, rapidly shifting contexts require far more adaptive approaches, and that includes how we empower change. Interestingly, in his 2014 book Accelerate, Kotter updated his thinking in response to the perceived need to accelerate the change process itself. One of the elements that he talks about is the need to shift from this strictly linear approach to one in which we are enabling change to happen on multiple fronts and where we are in effect running the stages concurrently and continuously
• Fluid, not fixed:- just as planning needs to be constantly adaptive, so the very process of change management should be subject to continuous review and the application of learning as the process unfolds. Many companies may think that they are doing this but in reality few build in the opportunity for regular retrospectives and reflection, and enable enough fluidity for the process itself to be adaptive. I liked how Jason Fried described how they treat their company like a product, constantly iterating and improving. So just as the organisation itself is changing, so does the process of change.
• Open, not closed:- traditional efforts in change management tend to be inwardly facing, focused on the internal structures, cost-savings, efficiency drivers. All of which may well be relevant. But cost-savings and efficiences in themselves do not create a new organisation. Large companies become very inward facing over time and yet in the digital world the exact opposite is what is required. A focus on creating a truly networked organisation (through technology, data and people) creates greater opportunity. Ecosystem is a horrible word but it really is about understanding all sides of the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners, suppliers) in which you exist and the most beneficial connections that you can create. The other side of openness of-course is about transparency in transformation. GDS really did set the bar high in publicly documenting the activity associated with the transformation of services, and their ongoing performance. The government is not a business of-course, but I do think that the value of secrecy in these things is often overplayed and that there is huge value (not least in attracting talent) in demonstrating what you've achieved and what a great place the business is (or is becoming). As can be seen from the Coop digital blog (created, unsurprisingly, largely by the old GDS team). So a rebalance, and a new approach is needed.
• Experience over efficiency:- I believe that the over-arching focus on customer experience which is shaping so much organisational strategy right now can be a powerful driver for change. Truly re-orienting the organisation around the customer means fundamental change for many businesses. Yet alongside the customer experience we need to focus on reorienting employee experience. This is the human side of digital transformation. Without this it cannot succeed. Employees that are intrinsically motivated towards achieving a new vision are a powerful enabler for change
• More leadership, less management:- that word 'manage'. It really is quite unhelpful. It suggests that we can always be in complete control of the process. That the whole thing is top down. The shifts I'm describing may feel slightly chaotic but then I think the reality of true change is that it is always slightly chaotic. And that's why 'lead' is a better word than 'manage'. In Accelerate Kotter talks about a larger 'volunteer army' serving as the change engine, and there's something really powerful about employees who want the change being the ones who drive the change. And there's something equally powerful about a visionary leader with a compelling vision that people who want change really want to follow.

The point about this is that whilst digital transformation has become a buzz-word, the reality is that many organisations are undergoing (or need to undergo) significant and fundamental change in order to be fit for purpose for the digitally-empowered world in which we all now operate. But we cannot rely on outdated approaches amongst rapidly shifting contexts. Change management needs to change.

For exclusive content relating to my upcoming book on organisational agility, you can sign up here

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Building the Agile Business - The Launch of My Book

An important announcement. The manuscript is finished and submitted and we have a publication date for our book on Building The Agile Business. It will be out on April 3rd. I don't mind admitting that it's been something of a marathon to write it but I'm really pleased with the result. I've been writing here and consulting on organisational agility for over six years, so this represents the culmination of a long-term journey for me.

Right from the beginning of the project, our observation has been that there is plenty of material out there that talks about the why of digital transformation, but very little that effectively captures what good looks like, and enables a better understanding of the how. So that's what we've written about.

We see this not only as the publishing of a book but as the start of a conversation around a subject that is surely one of the most fundamental business challenges of today. So between now and the publication date we'll be posting content relevant to the ideas and themes explored in the book and encouraging discussion around some of the concepts, models and arguments. We have built a site to support Building the Agile Business, and will be posting to the blog there. We have even created an Agile Business Manifesto, which captures (in the same way that the agile manifesto did all those years ago for software development) the fundamental principles for a new type of business fit for a digitally empowered world. 

And we've created an email list which we'll be using to give access to exclusive content, occasional updates and relevant thinking related to the book (no spamming - it will likely be a monthly update). Subscribers will also get preferential access and offers at the launch. You can sign up for that here. 

I'm looking forward to some good discussion on the ideas that we've brought together.