Digital Value Creation

A few months ago I had an episode about the 3 questions CEOs should ask. Why do anything, Why Now and Why You?  Some clients and friends used that approach for months and here is what they learned from it

Is your digital team energized or deflated? If they were in a competition, do you think your team would win? Do they show up unstoppable and ready to conquer? Oh, yeah. We are here to talk about the softer side of value creation. Having seen a lot of transformation teams in my career, I can often predict how the team will perform based on how they show up every day and in every meeting.

I obviously love digital transformation and clearly believe that AI, automation and machine learning will help create amazing digital businesses. However way too often I see companies solve the wrong problem with the right tools and the right problem with the wrong tools. Here's what I mean...

2020 turned out to be the year with massive adoption of digital transformation. Some companies used AI and automation strategically to transform their business models, while others used bots and machine learning to deal with business disruption. Some companies had great tangible value creation as a result of their digital projects and others are not sure about the value. How can we make sure that...

We're slowly settling into the new year. Businesses started their new fiscal years, operating on new budgets. And all the assumptions and learnings from the pandemic show up in very different ways in their digital transformation plans. While there are a lot of challenges in many industries, 2/3rd of the companies seem to be as well or better off than before the crisis.

I think the adage in 2020 is that years of digital transformations get done in WEEKS. Every day I notice massive new innovations moving to the mainstream. Here are some recent highlights.  - Digital Currency in China - AI Language Processing with GPT-3 - More Driverless Cars - MIT report of future of work - IMF report of future jobs and more.

As we're looking ahead to 2021 there are strong trends emerging in the world of digital. I looked at the global impact of AI on labor markets during the pandemic and also at surveys reading the minds of Boards and CFOs as they set the digital goals of companies. In this second edition of "looking ahead", I will be discussing the longer-term shifts of digital investments and how to p...

This is budgeting time for most companies. Budgeting like no other. Budgeting without a safety net. As companies compare their original plans for 2020 with the results, they realize that something fundamentally needs to change about planning ahead. What assumptions can we make about technology investments and returns? How far ahead can we realistically plan? What should we change?

It is all too easy to assume that everyone has the same assumptions as we do. So, I spent a long weekend looking through over 50 recent digital research reports and surveys on what companies are doing in the crisis and how they plan to move forward. Some I expected and others surprised me. Here are the highlights:

Most companies claim that the pandemic accelerated their digital projects. Others say that digital projects were the only that have not been put on hold. As we’ll learn it’s a lot more complicated than that. Some digital programs are going faster and others are sidelined. Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.

Several studies have shown that less than 20% of digital transformations deliver significant value. Multiple researchers claim that hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted every year on IT projects that don't produce any business benefits. Is there something we can learn from private equity' value focus to ensure our digital project will be one of the winners? I sure think so. I alway...

We’ve all gotten so busy in the last couple of months. The time spent working actually went up, productivity actually increased too but we are all looking for ways to be more efficient. 30% of our time is spent on emails, the other 40% in meetings, preparing for them, holding them following up taking activities and tasks. How can we use AI tools to save 10% of that time and add 200 hours a year ba...

One of the areas the pandemic disrupted in the last few months was how companies source and deploy talent. It is true in most industries with remote work but especailly true in sectors still growing like digital technology. Access to talent in the crisis is more critical than access to capital, which is still widely available.  There are global trends emerging that may shift how we work for a long...

Some digital projects create millions in enterprise value while others struggle to make a tangible impact. A recent Accenture research shows that only 13% of digital transformations delivered their targeted value. What makes high impact projects so different? Over the last decade I've seen endless examples of both scaling and struggling digital transformations in private equity portfolio comp...

There's a lot of talk about how the crisis accelerated digital projects. So what is the long term impact of the new speed of digital transformations Projects that were previously on hold for months, or sometimes longer, got approved, and in production in weeks. Teams made design decisions in days that otherwise used to take weeks or months. Companies not only found this new agility, but they...

My discussion with Peter Bartek, President of Focused Technology Solutions at Marmon Berkshire Hathaway. In addition to successfully selling his company to Berkshire Hathaway, Peter is also a technologist and holds 18 patents on sensors and transportation safety. We discuss how sensors and IoT are evolving to improve industries, smart cities, and the quality of data available for businesses. We ge...

I'm here today with Kyle Garman. Kyle is an SVP of global business development at SAP, and he's also a bestselling author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset. He also won an Author of the Year award from Amazon.  Kyle and I discuss how a new mindset is needed for the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders as the digital transformation is accelerating post-Covid. In this wide-ranging dis...

My conversation with Dave Noonan, RSM's Head of Private Equity Strategy. We discuss how PE firms and their portfolio companies weathered the storm and how technology helped them get back to normal. We look ahead beyond the crisis on how businesses will likely come out much stronger as they learn from this experience. We also look at where digital technology really adds value and where it may...

Many project teams struggle with creating compelling business cases, and CFOs are often skeptical about whether they will deliver the value targets. There are great learnings from PE value creation plans that would make your business cases better. Here is how. A private equity firm once told me they believed there were two kinds of business cases. One is the check-the-box business case where you h...

I recently polled a few of my collaborators about lessons they learned from their digital endeavors. I wanted to hear unusual lessons beyond the cliches, like have an executive sponsor and align business and IT priorities. In the end, we had 20 ideas and voted on the top five. Lesson 1) Decentralize innovation, centralize scale Lesson 2) Have someone own the results Lesson 3) Share the success wit...

My interview with Thomas Rasmussen, who's operating at the intersection of marketing and finance. We talk about how to attribute value creation to marketing strategies and whether digital marketing truly outperforms traditional marketing techniques.  We cover the relationship between the CMO and the CFO, exploring traditional and digital media. Also how strategies that are measurable are not...

I recently interviewed Alex von Gramatzki. Alex is a serial entrepreneur with 40+ M&A transactions and dozens of early-stage investments across real estate, tech, health, and digital rights.  Alex has a unique perspective on value creation, digital automation, and disrupting various sectors that refuse to innovate at speed. In a wide-ranging conversation, we cover his approach to leveraging ma...

I had a great discussion with Peter Fader, who is a Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School and best known for his decades-long research in customer lifetime value. Peter is also a serial entrepreneur and in 2015 sold his customer analytics company, Zodiac to Nike. We discuss how the new frontiers of customer analytics help us better understand not just the value of the customer but true ente...

My guest this week is Stephen Messer, co-founder and Vice Chairman of Collective[I], an AI-driven B2B sales network platform. Stephen was also instrumental in creating the affiliate marketing category with Linkshare in 1996. He comes from an entrepreneurial family and spent his life trying to reimagine and disrupt the way business historically operated and to find ways to create outsize value. Ste...

An investor asked me last week: what questions should they ask about their companies’ digital projects? I thought wow, what a great question. I told them I actually would have a great answer to that because as a weird habit I write down every question executives ever ask me  So I went back to dozens of old notebooks to find the answer. Do digital leaders ask better questions? Here’s what I learned