My Digital FootPrint

I have just finished a series of 4 calls with a total of over 70 Managing Directors, CEO’s and senior executives organised by Google Cloud and Appsbroker .  The purpose of the series was to explore what is emerging in oversight and corporate governance for a Board Director in light of data becoming a critical business requirement for growth, performance and decision efficacy.   Each of us is on a journey from “ no data ” to “ lots of data ”, as we know that data will help and support our businesses to become more relevant and valued, leading to thriving and growing.  The variation of data expertise and knowledge is understandably wide given that different verticals have had to embrace data at different times, with some only just starting.  Therefore, what can we all learn from the early pioneers of data in decision making for better outcomes?  We are starting to organise series 2, if you are interested in joining the community, drop me a note, and I will add you. This post is a summ

We are revisiting the Peter Principle , again.   I am assuming that, in terms of performance within an organisation,  KPI’s form the baseline for all measurement.  The principal is that the additional complexity in the next role is a step too far for the person, who is promoted again, rather than dealing with the underlying causes which are never the individuals but the process in an organisation.  We promote based on KPI measured performance until it is too late, not considering enough the skills, capabilities and requirements of the next role.  Many books are published on this topic.  More complex is why high performing leadership or a senior management/ executive can perform well until they become a Director and take a board seat.  We know that directors duties focus on governance and oversight, which is not the skill set developed/ tested by KPI’s and measurement.  But how can we determine a persons ability to deal with volatile, uncertain and ambiguous situations that require com

What are the different skills we need as we journey forward? Often we can give out a task, to only find the person does not know how to start.  The requirement is to determine what skills they have and if they know how to discover.  Most often we need to begin by pointing, directing, teaching or training, once going it will not stop.  Early skills become soon become “experience” that knows how to repeat the same task.  There is one way to do something.  Delivery always throws up variation, which means the one way of doing something ends up not scaling to all scenarios.  An early discover skill taught well becomes a skill that finds many ways to delivery.  Discover leads to more connections and vast experience.  The most experience in delivery is capable of seeing, finding and looking for what is missing and preventing the issues before they occur. Skills needed to overcome The majority of skills developed in the next generation (which I was once)  are known and then shared.  Let’s now

Directors  Before taking the first board position, senior executives should be coached and trained on what it means to be a Director.  At a minimum proposed, Directors should understand why there is a different contract to the usual employment one for a director and what unlimited liability means. Pre-placement should also focus on what the role is about and the skills that a director needs to have.  At this stage, any gaps should be identified and closed.  Structured training can focus on the 2006 companies act and section 172, directors duties.  At this stage, it would be advisable to be placed as an observer on several external boards to start to become aware of the processes and methods of board life.  Arriving at a board without some form of framing that being a Board Director is very different from being an employed executive.  A functioning board and Directors depend on an open mind-set and continual learning.  All directors should have an on-going plan of development which wil

Based on the original post  https://www.mydigitalfootprint.com/2020/07/wisdom-is-nothing-more-than-new-data.html interuption provided by Gam Dias Data is First in First out.   What you just learn you can recall. It is not tested checked or known to be true.  It is why we all share things we find without knowing how true of biased it is.  Often why we share data that is not as true as we think. DATA > I carry my smartphone in the car. Smartphone has GPS on and I am running Waze. The data stream is a timestamped set of GPS locations with each userID and possibly some device details. A simple stream of table entries. As you say... data is data and it cannot be refuted. FIFO > data comes out exactly as it goes in with no value added, maybe data is incorrect and incomplete. The processor will take the data as it comes to create information. Information is First In, Last out.   This slows the immediacy of response and allows us to gather much data before we start to determine.  It is

"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.    Picking up an interesting phrase " understand anything " which has become framed to mean language and its translation, “ said to you in any form of language” however, did Douglas Adams mean more as he did have uncon

When you hear or read the list that ends in Wisdom, starting from data, we are framed into imaging triangle, with wisdom at the top.  Yes, there is undoubtedly less wisdom than there is data, but that does not mean anything more than there will be more data will than wisdom if we consider volume as a metric.  We do love the triangle as a shape. The pinnacle. We love to imagine that wisdom has more value than data, somehow it is more noble and worthy as only a few will get wisdom, and therefore if I obtain it I will be at the top of the tree.   Let’s unpack this thinking. Starting with Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.  The first thing is that in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" Maslow's present is a theory for motivation. Maslow's hierarchy of needs was suggested as a framework to study how humans intrinsically partake in behavioural motivation.  Interestingly he did not draw a triangle but a square block with each layer as a rectangle. “Hierarchy” was taken