The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age (Columbia Business School Publishing) by David L. Rogers

Author:David L. Rogers [Rogers, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BUS103000, Economics/Organizational Development, Business &#38, Economics/New Business Enterprises, BUS048000
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-04-05T06:00:00+00:00

Be Fast and Iterate

The second key principle of experimentation is speed. John Hayes, American Express’s global chief marketing officer, spoke to me about his company’s focus on learning through experimentation. He explained that one of his primary goals as a leader is to get his teams to learn faster—in iterative cycles of days rather than weeks or months.12 For a nimble organization like American Express, institutionalizing that kind of faster learning can be a real source of competitive advantage.

Hayes’s insight echoes that of an earlier famous experimenter, Thomas Edison, who proclaimed that “the real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.”13

When John Mayo-Smith was chief technology officer for R/GA, he worked on numerous innovation projects with brands like Nike, including Nike+, FuelBand, and other early wearable technology successes. “Our goal at R/GA was always about building something quick. If you were our client, we didn’t spend four months scoping out a project. We aimed to have something built in two weeks, to start showing to real athletes, and getting their feedback.”14 Mayo-Smith’s approach to building technology as successive stages of workable iterations has been adopted by teams from Caltech to NASA.15

Increasing the speed of experimentation may require infrastructure, too. When Edison built his lab in West Orange, New Jersey, the physical layout was designed to facilitate speed in moving from any insight or hypothesis to a quick working test of it. Supplies of all kinds—tools, chemicals, ores, minerals, filaments—were stored in stockpiles in close proximity to every experimental lab so that delays in procuring equipment would not slow down the exploration of any new idea.16

To speed up its own innovation experiments, global snack maker Mondelez (formerly Kraft) uses a “garage” that is designed to get any new idea from concept to prototype and into the hands of visiting customers within two days’ time.17 Design firm IDEO places its prototyping shops in close proximity to its development teams so that physical product ideas can be fabricated in days or even hours.

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