digital culture Archives

Building Better Organizations: How to Fuel Growth and Lead in a Digital Era by Claudy Jules.

Claudy holds an MS in Organization Development from American University, an MS in Management from University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University.

Initially he led Google’s Center of Excellence on Organizational Health and Change. He moved to Managing Director at Accenture Strategy, then jumping back as an advisory for Alphabet’s CapitalG. Today is a Partner at McKinsey.

Here, Claudy reveals a rather essential read for organizations to discover or better understand how a playbook can help drive success when deploying well designed digital strategies that positively impacts the organization, employees and ultimately their customers regardless of market.

Regardless of the length of engagements with digital transformations, organizations simply must get their elements planned correctly. This obviously begins with strategy. The organization must have the right leadership in place to drive digital transformation. They must also have or develop employees with the talents to make the transformation a success. Much of this can fail if the organization’s culture will not support change. This is especially true in today’s new digital transformation by AI.

Regrettably the Vancouver Olympics interrupted my reading pattern and its been a slow recovery. I blogged about this book as soon as I learned it was in production back in August. Yikes!

I have been following Larry Lessig‘s work on copyright and our digital culture for some time, reading his positions online, previous books and keynote addresses at TED, Wired and last week to Italy’s Parliament among others. His work on Creative Commons is a direct action from the creative limitations of copyright.

His latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a very easy read for anyone who has also known his work. He tells an important story about how new technology is clashing with old money.

Lessig illustrates how copyright’s old money (the big media empires) are clashing with today’s society and technology. Old money is winning financial amounts here and there, but ultimately they are cutting their own throat as they can no longer control content. Their motto: since we cannot have it our way anymore (due to the easy distribution of digital content) we are going to sue as many people as we can and take outrageous amounts of money along the way.

Lessig simply points out the two different camps: Read-only versus Read-Write. Look at popular consumer phones and computers. Today anyone can create a short video and post it to YouTube. And by today’s “standard” in social networking — your somewhat expected to post multimedia content on Facebook and YouTube for example.

But post a 29 second video of a baby dancing to Prince’s Lets Go Crazy and Universal Music (they own Prince and his music) files a lawsuit claiming copyright violations. Its old money trying to control society and Lessig points out it clearly no longer works.