My Digital FootPrint

Physical retail has driven its staff to become more disengaged in a drive for efficiency over effectiveness.  The leadership team drives for speed of service rather than nicer. Income favours support.  It is a response to digital, margin erosion and believing that price is the driver in a commodity world.  It has resulted in a dumbing down of staff to a point where the check out is a process, and as a customer, I am self-service. Retail has mirrored digital, which is also cold and transactional.    In the digital world, Amazon wins as it is more convenient, and I am self-service.   In this new digital world personalisation, gamification and loyalty are now just cold and transactional engagement demanding attention.  AI can try to be something better, but I am sure I will feel the same.   Physical Retail can do something digital cannot.  Physical retail can do togetherness, human connectedness and community.  Perhaps #covid19 has shown where physical retail should be going and not retr

Is a fossil an immutable memory? An immutable object (in coding) is an object whose value cannot change. A more generic definition of “immutable” is that it is unchanging over time or unable to be changed.  Again, in code, what does immutable mean behind the scenes in terms of memory?  An object is created and given a value, is then assigned some space in memory . The variable name bound to the object points to that place in memory, and as long as the memory is not changed, it is immutable. As long as the memory is not changed, it is immutable. The risk is that something writes over that part of memory and the immutable is lost.   However, human memory is not immutable. Human memory is all rather made up.  We are poor at recall, and we can easily be biased to focus on one thing and miss the obvious ( remember the gorilla experiment on selective attention). At the same time, we don’t know how our memory works, and there are a lot of theories, the overall agreement is that it is weak

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