Transformation 101 - Part II

August, 2024

I am now 6+ months in my CTOO role and I already had some quick learnings in my first 3 months. I now have more. Thoughts mostly.

I have been processing the following 2 thoughts:

1. Does Transformation need a strategy?

2. Fixing vs. Transforming

(In my previous article I wrote about fixing vs. transforming and I have given this a lot of thought)

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1) Does Transformation need a strategy?

In short…NO. There is definitely no playbook on how to go about Transformation in the form of a sequential process, where 1 action specifically precedes another or Step 2 follows Step 1.

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And there is definitely no plan that you can copy/paste from 1 company to another.

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I think the best way is to 'go with the flow'. Observe and detect the quick wins (which are likely to be different between companies) and then move on to the deeper and more difficult transformation projects. So in short...I don't believe you can pre-plan a transformation strategy. Go from easy, quick fixes and then move on to the larger-scale projects. The projects you can probably plan in advance are the larger IT projects. They also need budget approvals so that's something you need to work towards with a planned approach.

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What is KEY and is often underestimated is the organisation's ability to absorb all the changes. It's important to evaluate the 'adaptability' of the organisation and to understand how many changes it can take at any one time, be it small or larger initiatives.

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What IS possible is to slice transformation into categories and the way I see it, is that Transformation comes in 3 categories/layers:

a) Digital

This (according to me!) refers mostly to IT transformation, moving to the cloud, upgrading legacy applications, leveraging AI etc. The only challenge here in most companies is to convince about the business benefits to justify the investment. The more visionary company owners will understand the need to upgrade one's IT infrastructure and modernise its business applications because they know that sooner or later it's a survival of the fittest.

I recently attended a Microsoft presentation where I came across the evolution of the super over-used term of digital transformation ==> 'AI Transformation'. Hold your horses! Of course Microsoft is ahead of the game and sets the vision of where companies need to be. First, it was all about migrating to the cloud, now it's all about AI. Of course it's about AI.

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Enter the Greek SMB. AI? What the…??? That's like 1,000 steps ahead of where we are today. Most Greek SMBs don't even have the basic modern technologies in place, let alone the capability to adopt AI. And it's not about the will, because many are already intrigued and/or fascinated by AI and understand the need for its adoption. But so much housekeeping needs to precede the adoption of AI, if it is to work effectively. Most AI needs data otherwise it's shit in <-> shit out. So for a smaller company to move to the phase of AI transformation, there needs to be a big development in capturing and maintaining data in such a way so that AI can be fuller and correctly leveraged.

I recently stated 'I'm on an AI Mission'. This is the carrot, the motivation by which we can act quicker to get all our housekeeping in place, so that we are finally in a position to adopt and leverage all the benefits of AI.

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b) Business

The way I see it, 'Business Transformation' is all about the creation of efficiencies that impact our daily tasks, the introduction of newer business applications that do what we've always done but in a much more efficient manner and the introduction of automations/workflows that result in quicker and smoother everyday operations.

From the position of CTOO, it's impossible to deep dive into the daily tasks of every department and every person in the company. But what you CAN do is establish a 'RAISE YOUR HAND' culture where you encourage employees to flag areas that they think have room for efficiencies. In other words, you’re not asking your people to come up with the solution, they just need to tell you 'I think that our forecasting methodology can become faster and more precise'. Ta raaaa….That's all the info I need. This is now something I can start working on!  Encourage employees to come running to your office to tell you that in their opinion, the manual input of incoming customer POs is something that is a burden and causes a lot of manual work. Ta raaa…another area for investigation. And THAT's how you surface all the activities that are can be investigated for automation and efficiencies.

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(This last example is a real case of how we are looking to integrate AI that will, through image detection and text recognition, 'translate' customer POs in pdf format to automated order entries in our ERP system!)

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c) Cultural

Whatever you do in the upper 2 layers, if this base layer is not worked on, isn't massaged and fixed, the other 2 layers are doomed to fail. The cultural transformation of a company is at the core of any transformational success and is for sure the SLOWEST transformation of all.

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The first 1 layers are simple. They simply require an investigation into the need, an committed budget and a implementation plan and a team. However, when it comes to people, you can't budget for and go out and buy cultural transformation.

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Cultural transformation is not an off-the-shelf product that you simply add to your shopping cart.

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You have to deal with people of perhaps old-school mindsets with old habits that 'work just fine' and resistance to change. And this shift my friend, takes time…as well as a lot of effort, a lot of massaging, coaching, mentoring and REPETITION (something I talked about in my previous article on transformation). Nothing happens just because you said so, or just because you presented it in an All-Hands meeting in a PowerPoint slide.

(I will come back with a more detailed article on Cultural transformation when I will have been at least 1 year in this role. I foresee a long article coming!)

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2) Fixing vs. Transforming

Now…Here are my thoughts on this 2nd subject matter. When I first joined Globalsat, even in my first few weeks, I saw some gaps that needed immediate fixing. And 'fixing' is exactly what I thought I was doing.

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But some fixes in smaller companies are in fact transformational. Just because fixing is something that might seem 'basic' in the world of Multinationals, it doesn't mean that it's not transformational for smaller companies.

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Here are 2 examples:

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1. BUDGET-FIXING: It's January 2024 and the company is finalizing its FY2024 budget. I am exposed to it for the first time. The ex-Finance in me stared in surprise at how simple the budget was for a company of its size. My ex-Finance instincts awakened and I was on a mission to 'fix' it. It needed a much (much!) more detailed analysis and a new method for monitoring costs. The ex-Finance in me considered this a 'basic fix', yet 6 months down the line, this new budget structure has completely changed the entire way we monitor our P&L, the way we monitor and control our costs and more importantly how we take more informed decisions. A basic fix that turned out to be truly transformational (and highly impactful).

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2. RECRUITMENT-FIXING: A conflict in recruiting as early as my first month in the company (not a good character fit vs someone who can deliver the numbers) was all the trigger I needed to understand that a structured, clearly stated set of recruitment rules and criteria needed to be introduced. The end result - if you were to see it in a PowerPoint presentation - is super super simplistic. You might think ...'Daaa…yeah'.  Yet by introducing a clear flow of who interviews at which stage of the process, the criteria with which we hire (character over skills) along with a strict methodology of how we aggregate and summarise all the evaluations of the candidates, we have undoubtedly raised the standard with the recent 10+ hirings. This 'fix' has radically changed the way we approach staffing, the personalities and characters we wish to have in the company and the future proofness of our hiring decisions. This is a 'fix' that has and will continue to significantly contribute to the cultural transformation of the company.

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Both easy, basic fixes, perhaps even no-brainer fixes yet with transformational impact (and btw…zero costs fixes too!).