A full stack approach to corporate culture change

Avoiding the usual pitfalls of culture change means focusing on coherence and meaning.

Even when most of the “right” ingredients were implemented, most corporate culture changes fail anyway. And the quintessential trap is always the same: the culture of a company is a multi-layered assemblage. Work on one layer at a time (such as the behaviours) and you’ll have results. However, after a while, other layers that were unchanged (values, vision…) will collide and counteract the initial results. These various elements of corporate culture move at different speeds. They don’t even have the same plasticity and are driven by factors that can be very counter-intuitive. In the end, avoiding a full-stack approach to corporate culture change is a rookie mistake. Let’s see then how to deal with it…

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4 Keys to boost your reverse mentoring programme

Ask junior employees to mentor senior managers on the digital transformation. Such an obvious and bright idea. What can go wrong?

After a few years designing and supporting reverse mentoring programmes, many of the same issues keep coming back. Reverse mentoring is often a great strategy to support the digital transformation of an organisation since it connects senior decision makers with junior digital natives. The idea is simple, by encouraging cross-generational discussions and experience sharing the organisation gains in agility in the digital era. However, in reality, many issues cloud this simple logic and we are going to explore why that happens and how to get over it.

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Why culture change fails

Companies are making many different attempts to change their cultures as they realise that it has become critical if they want to survive in their rapidly evolving markets.

When dealing with corporate culture change, companies usually choose among three main strategies. Every one of them has obvious benefits but often is badly implemented because the overall logic of culture change is not understood. One of the usual trap is that culture change is often too directive, and directing hundreds or thousands of people to behave differently, to think differently, to make different decisions, to have risk mindset… becomes an impossible task. Here we’ll explore the three usual ways to change organisational culture follow, see their benefits, and why they fail. This will lead us in a follow up article to open a different approach more rooted in how the organisation’s DNA and its culture intertwine.

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Trading risks keynote

If you’re in Darmstadt on May 17th, you can join me and the wonderful team of the Merck Innovation Center at 5:30pm for a keynote on Trading Risks. We’ll discuss how startups and multinationals should recalibrate their relationships after years of fumbling around, and why building no-bullshit synergies matters more than ever.

Follow this link for further details.

Let’s grab a sake in Tokyo

I’ll be in Tokyo from May 22 to 26. As usual, I’ll be working with customers, but if you’re around this is also a good time to grab a coffee or a bite and exchange on business, innovation or other things. Just connect with me on Twitter or through the ‘Contact us’ menu above. I might also have spare time for a keynote or an event in case you’d be interested.

How to explain your business

We tend to use overly complex or simplistic tools to design or assess businesses. The middle-road of simple to understand, yet weaponized tools is always hard to get to. Ask any any executive or entrepreneur to explain his company and you usually get a mess.

Two weeks in Shanghai working with dozens of MBA students holding managerial and executive positions in various industries always ground me back to the basics of business. One of the most basic questioning that managers, innovators, or would-be entrepreneurs are asked is: can you explain your business? The answer is always a mess.

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The book on ‘La Fabrique des Mobilités’ is out

La Fabrique des Mobilités is a European acceleration program dedicated to transportation and mobility projects.

A large part of my work in 2016 was helping the French Environment and Energy Management Agency to develop a better, more effective action on the tremendously complex mobility market. There is now a digital book that explains how this collective endeavor has been achieved and where the ‘FabMob’ collective is in 2017.

Hopefully, there will be an English version at some points (especially given the fact that there are more and more international partners on this platform), but for now, it’s 80% in French.

 

Emotions augmented leaders

For many years Emotional Intelligence has been in the many leadership development agendas of HR and training program managers. In this series about emotions, I’ll endeavor to offer leaders a new way to understand emotions so they can develop their emotional and self-awareness as well as their capacity for empathy.

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Being market ready is not all about strategy

Market readiness is key when launching new businesses. Too soon and you burn money without onboarding customers, too late and you become an overnight commodity.

When I deal with leaders considering new strategic options for the future of their organization, they very often stay cautious and declare “the market is not ready”.

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Things on my radar as I get my plane today…

I keep on saying that 2017 is the year where the rest of the world should take notice of the tech powerhouse that China has become…

Check my 2017 innovation radar here.

How much sharing is there left in the sharing economy?

We all lag behind understanding how technology and new businesses change society. Maybe it’s time we start to collectively wake up on a few hot topics.

From time to time there is an article that I was about to write and I find it the very next day already put online by someone else; except it is way sharper than what I would have ever produced. Having said that, you probably should stop reading me and jump to Reversing the Lies of the Sharing Economy from Brett SCOTT.

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Growing within when company is growing out

When companies grow by acquisition, the company culture and what keeps it coherent might be lost along the way. Mentoring is one practice that can help people continue growing within the company more smoothly as it is expanding and becoming more complex.

Since 2014 I’ve been working with Worldline on designing, implementing and supporting two mentoring programs (traditional and reverse). They clearly support their growth and transformation strategies which need a good attraction, development, and retention of talents as well as a capacity to rely on and learn fast from each other. “Growing within the company” is key to avoid unstable workforce which could hinder the fast growth path they’re walking.

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Can iPhones have a soul?

I’ve had a long-lasting reflection on luxury and technology. This very slippery subject is somehow fascinating because we instinctively understand why an Android tablet is anything but luxury; it’s not so easy to pin point why Apple couldn’t get there.

There is no denying that the younger the demographic is, the newest the technology should be. And whatever your age, when you love technology there is no way to escape the endorphin rush coming from unpacking a new gadget. And that’s fine. But getting older we progressively shift our values away from short-term.

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