Hewlett and Packard: the difference

Posted by mattpoy on March 24, 2017March 24, 2017 Posted in Culture, People, Technology Tagged Future of work, People, Skills, Talent

I blogged about Intel a couple of posts ago and today I will blog about another IT-industry stalwart, Hewlett Packard.

Quite simply, this is a brand that I have always liked. I have only ever bought HP printers and I like the story of the founders, William Hewlett and David Packard (take note, no shortening of names taking place here – the two gentlemen deserve full name spelling). They started HP in 1939 out of a garage in Palo Alto where the company was born.

What really stands out, however, is their reaction to the market soon after the war began. Not surprisingly, the government labs were shutting down and the engineers leaving their employment. But Hewlett and Packard saw the opportunity. Although they were going through staff layoffs themselves, they realised that the greatest opportunity their company ever had wasn’t that of technology.

So instead they went out and hired those engineers.

Digital transformation: voice and choice

Posted by mattpoy on March 10, 2017 Posted in Uncategorized

Following my story about the legendary Andy Grove and how he transformed Intel, all companies are now encountering the six stages of digital transformation, according to research by Altimeter; and right at the top of the list of key drivers is customer experience.

It is important to understand ‘digital’ here: it is the application of information and technology to bolster human performance.

The customer experience is also more than just marketing to your audience via different media; it is building the most personalised customer journey across sales, service, apps, communities and channels and even the huge opportunity that is the connectivity of every device defined as the internet of things.

It also includes learning and getting to grips with this is really important. The next generation will “consume” on the devices they are glued to all day – they will digest news, connect, network and purchase in this way, and they will insist on learning in the same fashion: when and where they want.

Technology has given the customer a voice and choices. The tables have turned. Customers are defining the marketplace and with 75% of our workforce being next gen by 2025, we had better listen if we want to be a part of it.

Be the disruptor, not the disrupted

Posted by mattpoy on January 12, 2017January 12, 2017 Posted in Ideas, Small Business, Talent Tagged Future of work, Ideas, influencers, People

Here is a great story from one of pioneers of the IT industry, Andy Grove, former Chairman and CEO of Intel. It comes from his book Only the Paranoid Survive and is well worth retelling.

In a discussion with then Chief Executive Gordon Moore, he asked what would happen if the board kicked them out and started anew. They agreed that a new CEO would no doubt leave the past behind and detach them from their memories.

So Grove and Moore decided there and then to do that themselves. They left the business of chips behind, moving into microprocessors and thereby set the stage for the next generation of the Intel business.

It was, and remains, a lesson in management: leave the past behind, don’t let a single line of business define you and be the disruptor, not the disrupted.

It’s about people, it always is

Posted by mattpoy on December 19, 2016December 19, 2016 Posted in Future of Work, People Tagged Future of work, Next Gen, People

Here’s an interesting clipping from a newspaper. As funny as it reads, there is an underlying message that however technology is helping and enhancing how we communicate, work and do business, ultimately it is about the relationships we build with people that create loyalty and the long-term partnerships we crave.

Business isn’t about B2B or B2C, but about the human-to-human relationships we build and nurture over time.

Tech has given us an excuse to think short-term. Life and real success isn’t like that.

Make our jobs better

Posted by mattpoy on October 24, 2016October 24, 2016 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, People, Skills, Talent, Technology Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, People, Robots, Skills

The General Manager of Deloitte UK, said “We should automate work and humanise jobs; give the mundane to the machines and the purpose back to people,” as part of Deloitte research called Essential Skills for Working in the Machine Age.

We need to make our jobs better (different) and add more value to the human side of what we are truly good at. It is not simply a case of putting technology in place of people; Starbucks could quite easily replace people with robot coffee machines in its outlets, but the conversation that takes place in a Starbucks shop, the smell of coffee beans and even the individualisation of your name written on a cup, is part of the carefully crafted Starbucks experience.

We must learn to understand what technology can do for our business and then use it to enhance the customer, but also the employee, experience. Every company has the opportunity to apply technology to make it better.

No question that both customers and employees will be better engaged.

Humans: a case for the opposition

Posted by mattpoy on October 14, 2016 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, People, People Skills Talent, Skills, Talent, Technology Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, People, Robots, Skills, Talent

The Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum highlighted that over 7m jobs will be lost to redundancy, automation or disintermediation, although they did also state that some of this loss will be offset by 2m jobs in new areas.

We know that as industries evolve and technology puts its arms around a business model and disrupts it, that jobs are created elsewhere, just as retail and services have replaced the factory and manufacturing, so the message to us as employers is invest in the skills of our people, rather than hire more workers, as the key to managing disruptions to the labour market long-term.

Jobs aren’t going away, they’re just changing. We know that softer skills like empathy, communications and prioritisation are essentially human. The future of work is not about jobs going away, it’s about redesigning what we do to make better use of the tools and technology at our disposal.

My point? Robots and technology are already in place. They trade on the stock markets, they drive cars in some cities and they are persistently recommending what we buy next. What they can’t do is serve the delicious loaves of bread in St Albans market with a chat on a Saturday morning or provide that extra bit of care and attention when you’re not feeling at your best – so work with the humans in our teams to find the things they are good at, the tasks and roles that require thinking, judgement and emotion.

Finally, is Nike really launching self-tying shoelaces on sneakers/trainers? Isn’t learning to tie a shoelace an important step in our childhood?

Technology and impatience

Posted by mattpoy on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 Posted in Big Data, Customer Service, Future of Technology, Technology Tagged Customer Service, Data, Engagement, Future Technology, Futurology

We are losing patience with technology and it is putting pressure on companies to provide services at record speeds, yet it seems as though it is never enough.

I always felt one of the greatest wonders of technological change was how organisations put services into the hands of the customer and we marvelled at this as great service – for example, checking ourselves in for a flight and printing our own boarding passes. They made us do the work and we thanked them for it.

I use a 10-second video to make my case of a young girl less than a year old who is given a copy of a magazine to keep her occupied. Within moments she is swiping the magazine because she thinks it operates like an iPad and when the magazine shows no sign of responding, the girl is crawling away having lost interest.

Today, the tables are turning on technology and we are becoming ever more unsatisfied – I thought technology was supposed to be the next utility but when Wifi was down for a while at the house this weekend it caused much consternation and one of kids declared they “couldn’t function.” When networks are down, we criticise the technology, when a store runs out of a product, we complain that they haven’t mastered big data and when online banking is not available we ask why they couldn’t update their systems when we are asleep.

I have seen “internet”, “wifi” and “phone battery” all added to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and it isn’t always in jest. It is one thing technology progressing leaps and bounds to give us new ways of working and shopping and learning – but can it match our ever-increasing standards?

A 60-year career

Posted by mattpoy on August 16, 2016August 16, 2016 Posted in Future of Work, Learning, Skills Tagged Education, Future of work, Learning, Skills

Gladys Hooper, the oldest person in the UK, recently died at the age of 113. This raised further interest in the population living and working for longer and it seems we have the potential to live much longer than generations before us and way beyond 100 years old.

If that becomes the case and we do live to that ripe old age, then we will need work careers of 60 or so years just to be able to support ourselves. Furthermore, if technology continues to develop at the current pace, and the likelihood is it will as there are no signs of a slow down, then we will experience several cycles of work and will have to re-skill in order to keep ourselves relevant.

Throw in to the mix that by 2030 as many as one-third of jobs in the UK could be at risk of being automated, according to research by the University of Oxford, where do we turn? Our learning will be down to us as individuals to own, to continue to update our portfolio of skills, plus as companies contract at the core, people telecommute and we move from project to project and job to job, we will have to learn on an almost constant basis – for new tasks, new models and new work environments.

I quite like this idea – it sounds more interesting than Nintendo brain challenges that the doctor recommends.

Be a hedgehog

Posted by mattpoy on June 21, 2016June 21, 2016 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, Ideas, People Skills Talent Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, People, Skills, Talent

The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff said “Speed is the new currency of business.” It certainly is, and the rate of change continues to disregard political upheaval to drive ahead.

The adoption rates for recent technologies are almost vertical – social media, smartphones, tablets to name but three – and the pace of disruption staggering. For every 100 people in the world there are now 95 mobile phone subscriptions and 40 internet users, plus new apps are reaching 100 million users increasingly quickly WhatsApp in 3 years and Instagram in 2).

So how do we take control of this change? We do it via filtering and through our people. Angela Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry and now head of Apple Retail, states:

“The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the more we need to go back to the basic fundamentals of human communication”

It is very easy to get distracted and pulled from pillar to post, especially as we suffer from information overload, overflowing Inboxes and streams of messaging via apps. So my route to handling this, which applies both to myself as well as my team, is to be a hedgehog.

The hedgehog only does a few simple things, but it does it with a laser focus. The fox on the other hand, changes plans and strategy to try and catch the hedgehog, but almost never does.

So be a hedgehog: define what you are good at, and deliver it with increasing quality and a bucket-load of passion.