Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Week 07, 2022

The Weekly Pulse is my content curation and my highlights from readings, books, podcasts, insights, and everything I discovered during the week.
The Weekly Pulse is my content curation and my highlights from readings, books, podcasts, insights, and everything I discovered during the week.

So, let’s go with some discoveries from the week!

#1 – Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change
#2 – Enterprise Agility: Buzz or Business Impact?
#3 – When Data Creates Competitive Advantage
#4 – 11 Realities About Being Productive
#5 – People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much


Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change

Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat and Bert Spector

Summary: Two years after launching a change program to counter competitive threats, a bank CEO realized his effort had produced…no change. Surprisingly, he and his top executives had reviewed the company’s purpose and culture, published a mission statement, and launched programs designed to push change throughout the organization. But revitalization doesn’t come from the top…

3 Highlights:

“… Revitalization starts at an organization’s periphery, led by unit managers creating ad hoc arrangements to solve concrete problems…

“… Remove functional and hierarchical barriers to information sharing and problem-solving—by changing roles and responsibilities, not titles or compensation...”

“… But while senior managers understand the necessity of change to cope with new competitive realities, they often misunderstand what it takes to bring it about…”

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Enterprise Agility: Buzz or Business Impact?

Source: McKinsey
Author: Wouter Aghina, Christopher Handscomb, Jesper Ludolph, Dániel Róna, and Dave West

Summary: Enterprise agility was desirable and is now becoming essential. Many organizations are racing to become agile. New research suggests that agile transformation can have a powerful impact on the bottom line — in addition to other widely recognized benefits.

3 Highlights:

“… Although cost savings is seldom the primary objective of an agile transformation, it is a natural consequence of the improved operational performance and ability to provide the same outcomes with fewer people…

“… Agile organizations can quickly redirect their people and priorities toward value-creating opportunities. A common misconception is that stability and scale must be sacrificed for speed and flexibility…”

“… Using enterprise agility to meet rapidly changing customer needs can result, unsurprisingly, in a better customer journey…”

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When Data Creates Competitive Advantage

Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright

Summary: Nevertheless, under the right conditions, customer data can help build competitive defenses. It all depends on whether the data offers high and lasting value, is proprietary, leads to improvements that can’t be easily imitated, or generates insights that can be quickly incorporated. Those characteristics do give firms an advantage. 

3 Highlights:

“… Even when customer data does confer a competitive advantage, it gives rise to network effects only infrequently. And that advantage may not last…

“… In the decades ahead, improving offerings with customer data will be a prerequisite for staying in the game, and it may give incumbents an edge over new entrants…”

“… In many cases nearly all the benefits of learning from customer data can be achieved with relatively low numbers of customers…”

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11 Realities About Being Productive

Source: Carl Pullein Blog
Author: Carl Pullein

Summary: The reality is there are no shortcuts and there are no magic apps out there and there is never likely to be in the future either. If you need to do the work, you have to do the work. Becoming more productive is not difficult, but you do need to be very clear about your work.

3 Highlights:

“… The only way to get the work done is to do the work…

“… Complaining about disruptions and distractions is not dealing with the problem…”

“… Not knowing your outcome before you start will result in failure and delays…”

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People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much

Source: The Atlantic
Author: Ian Bogost

Summary: A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. 

3 Highlights:

“… Your social life has a biological limit: 150. That’s the number—Dunbar’s number, proposed by the British psychologist Robin Dunbar three decades ago—of people with whom you can have meaningful relationships…

“… To constrain the frequency of speech, the size or composition of an audience, the spread of any single speech act, or the life span of such posts is entirely accordant with the creative and technical underpinning of computational media…”

“… Online media gives every person access to channels of communication previously reserved for Big Business…”

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