Links for this week (weekly)

  • “n 2007 Brian the-airbnb-storyChesky and Joe Gebbia were broke and looking to raise money to make their rent in San Francisco. They decided to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to attendees of a conference because all the hotels were booked. They called their service “Air Bed and Breakfast.” “

    tags: hospitality cases airbnb disruption

    • basically by renting out space in their own apartment — was obviously a unique way to launch something.
    • One was when they first rented out their apartment when a design conference was coming to town. They needed to make their rent
    • [The next pivot point came] when they got accepted into Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up accelerator program. They didn’t even want to do that. They had to be pushed to applying, because they thought, by that point, they’d already launched their company.
    • Well, Airbnb really was different: It was urban. These other sites, they were for beach houses or mountain town
    • And they did other things, like made the profiles really reflect people’s personalities
    • n my book, at one point, a CFO of one of the biggest hotel chains was asked about Airbnb in 2013 — not that long ago — and he said, “What’s Airbnb?”
    • Most people either wouldn’t travel, or they’d stay with friends and family [if they didn’t use Airbnb]. We’re not really replacing hotels.” But the data shows [that Airbnb taking market share is] increasingly starting to happen; this is a company that’s doubled [in growth] every year.
    • Airbnb pitches it as, “We are helping the middle class stay in their homes.” That’s a very popular and very strongly worded line that they use, and it’s true. … Anyone can make extra money and do whatever they want with it.

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    Building a digital culture might be the most difficult issue companies face. Using a “digital factory” is one way to get there. “

    tags: digitaltransformation digitalfactory culture digitalculture change

    • The factory models a new way of working to develop new products, which are then introduced and integrated into the broader business.
    • The way the factory works is defined by a set of standard operating guidelines and methodologies that lay out the required deliverables, governance steps, and working processes—such as which decisions can be made by factory leaders and which require escalation. The goal is a balance between the structured predictability required to transform a large organization and the flexibility and agility required for a rapidly changing digital world.
    • The process of introducing a new way of working and actively integrating new products into the existing business—which in turn requires people to adopt new ways of working to work with the new product—is a conscious effort to shift the culture of the entire organization.
    • Act like venture capitalists. Taking a venture capitalist’s approach to the digital factory means fast decision making driven by clear objectives and criteria. If the business case for funding each journey takes months to approve, the digital factory isn’t going to work
    • Get creative to attract top talent. Digital factories require skills that are in high demand and often in short supply at large established businesses, such as customer-experience design, mobile-app design, agile-development coaching, analytics capabilities, and more
    • Build ‘squads’ of working teams. Success in a digital factory relies on the ability to staff a small group of people (generally 8 to 12) with the right set of complementary skills to work on a given project.
    • Model collaboration in your workspace. The space a business devotes to a digital factory matters. The company must create an environment that signals that the work done there will break new ground.
    • Build with clear purpose. Enterprises are made up of multiple functions. When a company embarks on transforming its internal processes and customer journeys, it first needs to decide whether its primary goal is to reduce costs, increase revenue, drive customer satisfaction to beat the competition, or something else
    •   

      Invest enough for impact. The speed at which a company can digitize and scale its key journeys will depend largely on how much it is willing to spend

    • Develop a change-management plan to incorporate the new product into the business. One of the trickiest phases of a transformation is the process of integrating a newly developed product into the business.
    • Measure the change. If an organization is to systematically change its way of working and keep track of what’s happening, its management systems will need to evolve, starting with KPIs. Nontraditional metrics focused on digital adoption—such as new customer registrations on digital channels or digital-engagement levels for a particular product or service line—are often more useful than traditional metrics
    • Find leaders with the right combination of skills. The executives who run the digital factory must be seen as credible by other organization leaders.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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