living with change

Living with Change

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Corporate transformation isn’t a one-time thing; it’s a
constant, ongoing process. Companies that can adapt to
change, or create change in their marketplace, will survive,
even thrive. Companies that remain static won’t. This paper
introduces the process of corporate transformation, and
lists resources for leaders who are reshaping their companies
to be agile, flexible organizations that can prosper in these
dynamic times.


It’s a cliché to say that the pace of change has sped up dramatically over
the past few decades. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. Moore’s law predicted
that the speed of integrated circuits would double every 18 months—which has
held true for a surprisingly long time, so that modern laptops easily outperform
multi-million dollar supercomputers from the 90s. But life isn’t as simple as faster
computers. As computers got faster, communications got faster too, along with
the ability to collect and analyze data. That inevitably meant that the pace of
change for businesses got faster. Upstart companies could outcompete stable,
wealthy industrial giants, some of which (like Amazon, Google, and Facebook)
became giants themselves.

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Businesses need to transform to survive in this environment. And it’s not just
one transformation, one re-org that will set you up for the next decade. Leaders
need to adapt to constant change, to create and implement new strategies to
survive. If you’re not agile, flexible, and constantly reallocating capital to make
use of new and emerging technologies, you will stop being competitive and
ultimately will fail.


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These companies don’t just sell products; they build
platforms that enable networks
They don’t replace workers with technology; they use
technology to augment workers
They don’t just build and market products; they create
amazing user experiences
They don’t use technology to make minor changes to
existing products and services; they redesign the way

services work
They don’t stick to the status quo; they transform the
structure of their industry
They don’t exist in a vacuum; they create an ecosystem
where many players can prosper

Many companies show some of the features of the evolution
of technology—some show the principles more clearly than
others. For example, every company now has learned to
apply big data and predictive analytics, but 15 years ago,
Google was the best Silicon Valley exemplar of this trend.

To flourish in our constantly changing economy,
businesses must make the following changes:
Businesses must use data to make better decisions. We
are entering an age where devices and sensors collect data
continuously. With increased computing power, this data
can be processed faster and easier. With the advent of
smarter computers, smaller devices, and more precise
algorithms, businesses can automate some of this decision
making. However, not all data-driven decision making is
done by a machine. Humans, therefore companies and
cities, will be smarter and able to do more because
machines do the heavy lifting.
Businesses must invest in talent. Data-driven decision
making doesn’t eliminate humans; it augments them, and
enables them to make better decisions. To succeed,
businesses need to attract and retain the best talent
available. Attracting and retaining talent isn’t something static
that you do once, expecting the employee to remain until

retirement. To retain the best talent, you need to enable
them to build new skills and work with new ideas. Bored,
stagnant employees will leave your company and move on to
the next challenge. Talented employees who are presented
with new challenges, and the resources to help them learn
and meet those challenges, stay for the long haul. They are
the ones who will build your future.

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Here are the principles that define and drive the
companies that will dominate the 21st-Century economy:


Businesses must be agile and flexible. They must be organized in ways that
allow them to make changes quickly; they must decentralize decision making
and trust their employees; they must have communication patterns that are fast
and efficient. Understanding the need for change doesn’t help if you’re locked
into a hidebound structure that prevents you from making those changes.
Businesses must focus on customers.
Data makes it possible to discover
Understanding the need for
what customers want to a degree that
change doesn’t help if you’re
was never before possible. But data by
locked into a hidebound
itself isn’t enough. Henry Ford said “If I

structure that prevents you
had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.”
from making those changes.
The transformative insight comes from
thinking about customers from the
beginning: not just what they want, but what they really want that they can’t yet
express. In your business, who represents the customer? Who does the design
thinking that creates products that surprise and delight?

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The following resources will help you transform your company so that it can
prosper in the face of constant change.


Companies can talk about change all they want, but if they
aren’t organized in a way that lets them respond to change,
they won’t get anywhere. These resources tell you how to
transform organizations so they can adapt to change, rather
than be defeated by it.
Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations
Innovate at Scale: How well does your organization respond
to changing market conditions, customer needs, and
emerging technologies? Lean Enterprise presents principles
and patterns to help you move fast at scale—and
demonstrates why and how to apply these principles

throughout your organization, rather than with just one
department or team.
Creating a Data-Driven Organization: Practical Advice
from the Trenches: What do you need to become a datadriven organization? Far more than having big data or a crack
team of data scientists, it requires establishing an effective,
deeply ingrained data culture. Being truly data-driven
involves processes that require genuine buy-in across your
company, from analysts and management to the C-Suite and
the board.

The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into
Your Competitive Advantage: The methods that enable
marketers to meet this challenge are emerging from an
unexpected place: the world of software development. The
Agile methodologies that once revolutionized software
development are now revolutionizing marketing.
Us vs. Them: Redefining the Multi-Generational
Workplace to Inspire Your Employees to Love Your
Company, Drive Innovation, and Embrace Change: Learn
about the root psychological causes of generational tension
at work: causes based in the hardwired human tendency to
see others as “one of us” or as “one of them.” This dynamic
has existed forever, and it always will.
The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile
Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data,
Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business:
Innovative businesses large and small are discovering new
opportunities, strengthening customer loyalty, and mastering
real-time buyer satisfaction.
Why services aren’t enough—Jeff Immelt, Chairman and

CEO, General Electric: Big companies need to think big and
execute big ideas. Learn about how GE is leading the way—as
CEO Jeff Immelt says in this conversation with Tim O’Reilly,
we need to “transform that function” of the CIO to move
beyond help desk and be strategic.

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Building a Company that Can
Respond to Change


Empowering Employees

learn where to start, what to prioritize, how to commit to a
personal plan of action…and how to make it happen!

Employees are the heart of any organization. If your
employees think they are only cogs in a machine, and can’t
creatively engage with the future you’re building, they won’t
grow and they will leave. To build the best workforce,
businesses need to encourage their employees to learn,
empower them to make decisions, and participate in building
their careers. You need to help your staff reach their full
potential, for their good and your own.

Creating Engaged Employees: It’s Worth the Investment:

Engaged employees feel recognized, encouraged, and
supported—they demonstrate enthusiasm, inspiration, and
pride in their jobs. Despite work demands and pressure, they
successfully achieve their individual and team goals.

Driving Career Results: How to Manage Self-Directed
Employee Development: Expert tips for leveraging
strengths and improving development in areas such as
judgment, problem-solving, creativity, trust, influence,
teamwork, planning, business acumen, customer focus, grit,
technical savvy, communications, collaboration, integrity,
accountability, curiosity, innovation, courage, and more. You’ll

Deciding How to Decide: Companies’ futures and executive
careers are defined by key strategic decisions. Most
executives over-rely on basic tools and don’t match the tools
to the situation. This is problematic because in highly
complex, uncertain contexts, traditional decision-support
tools can be useless.

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Engaged: Unleashing Your Organization’s Potential
Through Employee Engagement: Engaged explains what
employee engagement is, why it matters, what the benefits
of it are, what helps and hinders it, how to measure it, and
how to put theory into action when trying to create it. It

offers real solutions to managers and business leaders who
want to enhance performance and increase productivity.

Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through
Collaboration: Even among people who have spent decades
learning the technical side of their jobs, most haven’t really
focused on the human component. The authors share their
insights on how to lead a team effectively, navigate an
organization, and build a healthy relationship with the users
of your software.


Embracing Technology
How do businesses respond to changes in technology?
Companies that have understood how to take advantage of
new technologies have been able to disrupt established
markets. A few years ago, that meant e-commerce; today it
means data analysis and cloud computing; tomorrow, it may
mean AI, robotics, and virtual reality. You need to understand
how technology is changing the business world, and how to
use those new technologies to innovate.
The New IT: How Technology Leaders are Enabling
Business Strategy in the Digital Age: With the onslaught of
cloud solutions, the consumerization of technology, and
increasingly tech-savvy business people, it’s time for a
manifesto for leaders who recognize—and are nervous
about—the demands of the digital age. Whether you’re an
executive, department head, or IT manager, The New IT
provides an action-ready blueprint for building and
strengthening the role of IT in your company—and

prescribing IT’s future.

Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of
Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean:
Roberto Verganti introduces a third strategy, a radical shift in
perspective that introduces a bold new way of competing.
Design-driven innovations do not come from the market;
they create new markets. They don’t push new technologies;
they push new meanings.
Mobilized: An Insider’s Guide to the Business and Future
of Connected Technology: Mobile has now become such an
integral part of how we live that, for many people, losing a
cell phone is like losing a limb. Everybody knows mobile is the
future, and every business wants in, but what are the
elements of mobile success?
Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Business: How does
your company become a data-driven organization? Mainly, it
means making decisions based not on opinion, but on what
the data is telling you. And that usually requires a shift in
company culture. In this collection, four data experts
demonstrate different ways that companies have
experimented with change, often with surprising results.

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The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining
Successful Growth: Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor

expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can
and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work
shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in
today’s hyper-accelerated business environment.


Leadership isn’t just telling people what to do; it’s enabling
them to be productive. That requires rethinking your
relationship to your staff. How do you build teams? How do
you protect them from administrative trivia? How do you
keep them challenged so they don’t become bored and
leave? These resources help you transform your leadership
and build productive, empowered teams.
Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment:
A detailed look at the evolution of employment and its farreaching implications
The New Rules of Management: How to Revolutionise
Productivity, Innovation and Engagement by
Implementing Projects That Matter: A guide for modern
organisations about optimizing productivity, creating a
culture of innovation, and building high-performing teams.
Harvard Business Review on Finding & Keeping the Best
People: If you need the best practices and ideas for winning
the race for talent—but don’t have time to find them—HBR
gives you 11 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place.
Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can
Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions:
Multiple studies have shown that, if people have the proper
training and experience, they will make better decisions in

emerging situations while in a flow-state. How can your

organization help your people experience flow more often,
thereby improving their decision-making?
Team Turnarounds: A Playbook for Transforming
Underperforming Teams:In today’s uncertain economic
environment, teams are asked to do more with less. As
sports fans already know, behind every great underdog story
is a leader who roots out the competitive advantage that will
propel the team to victory. Learn how the fine art of the
turnaround really works, from how to inspire the team to the
actual tools for change.
The Four Mindsets: This is the key to significantly increasing
productivity, performance, and revenue in your organization.
Developed as a guide proven to help all levels of managers to
connect, focus, align, and activate their teams to elevate
results, you will find a range of resources and tools to use and
become a “best in class” leader today.
Leadership: A Master Class—High Performance
Leadership: A former hostage negotiator and current
professor reveal the latest research and practice behind
high-performance leadership, bonding, and managing
conflict. Lessons include negotiation, building trust, and how
positivity matters for leaders.

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Leading in a New Era

Business leaders need to create value: how do you make
decisions that expand possibilities and create new
opportunities? Business is not a zero-sum game. Too much
business thinking has focused on capturing value, rather than
creating it. These resources show you how to make decisions
that are informed by data, and that enable you—and others—
to thrive.
Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business
Decisions: Few things are as valuable in business, and in life,
as the ability to make good decisions. Can you imagine how
much more rewarding your life and your business would be if
every decision you made were the best it could be? Decision
Quality empowers you to make the best possible choices and
get more of what you truly want from every decision.
Data-Driven Leadership: Meet the challenges of high-stakes
accountability, build performance-based organizations, and
improve outcomes. This advice show you how to transform
data overload into a data-positive culture. You’ll learn the
difference between “data-driven leadership” and “datainformed leadership,” and how to use distributed leadership
to inspire collaboration and guided analysis.
Finding the Decision Making Sweet Spot: Scott Berinato,
HBR senior editor, explains the opportunities and pitfalls of
making decisions in a social context.

Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Business: How does
your company become a data-driven organization? Mainly, it
means making decisions based not on opinion, but on what
the data is telling you. And that usually requires a shift in
company culture. Four data experts demonstrate different

ways that companies have experimented with change, often
with surprising results.
Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better
Execution: To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate
your organization’s competitive strategy into day-to-day
actions that will enable your company to win in the
marketplace. By posing provocative questions, you identify
critical gaps in your strategy execution processes, focus on
the most important choices you must make, and understand
what’s at stake in each one.
Before You Make That Big Decision: All leaders know that
decision making is a critical part of their job. And most
executives are aware they need to be on the lookout for
biases that will distort or mislead and cause their
organizations to make the wrong decisions about
investments of time and money. Yet research shows that few
executives actually use their knowledge about bias to
improve their own decision-making practices or that of their
organization. Follow these guidelines for confronting bias and
improving bottom-line decisions.

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Creating Value


Telling Your Stories

You can’t transform a business if you can’t communicate your
stories. But communication is much more than branding and
advertising. Learn to build content that your customers want,
and understand how all of your company’s actions are a
reflection of its brand and values.
Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build
Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful
Businesses: This is a new model for developing valuable
content, building an audience round that content, and
creating a product for your audience.
True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to
Transform Your Business: The old way to market a business
was storytelling. But in today’s world, simply communicating
your brand’s story in the hope that customers will listen is no
longer enough. Instead, your authentic brand must be
evident in every action the organization undertakes.

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Using Storytelling to Effectively Communicate Data: Learn
from this framework to overcome common deficiencies in
visual communication, as well as how to leverage a story
structure to introduce complex graphics in ways that entice
and engage your audience.


You won’t succeed if you don’t satisfy your customers.

Period. Gaining new customers is a losing battle if you’re
bleeding old customers because of inattention. As you work
through your corporate transformation, learn how to work
with customers as partners: how to engage them, how to
satisfy them by making them awesome.
It’s the Customer, Stupid!: 34 Wake-up Calls to Help You
Stay Client-Focused: Speaker and salesperson Michael Aun
shares these secrets and many more in It’s the Customer,
Stupid!, a guide to growing any business by gaining new
customers, and, more important, by keeping the ones you have
happy and coming back for more. Most businesses think they’re
customer-centric, but they just aren’t. Get beyond common
myths about sales and customer satisfaction, and find out how
to really keep your customers satisfied.
Competing for Customers: Why Delivering Business
Outcomes is Critical in the Customer First Revolution:
Delivering customer success means radically changing the
way you engage with customers—from sales, to marketing, to
engineering and support. Step by step, you’ll learn how to
make sure your customers are achieving business outcomes
from your offerings…now, next year, and for years to come.

The Social Business Imperative: Adapting Your Business
Model to the Always-Connected Customer: Company
leaders and professionals must seek to personally grasp the
tectonic changes arising from the always-connected
customer, and then rethink traditional business models,
business practices, and even their own job responsibilities
and careers accordingly.
Customer-Centric Marketing: Build Relationships, Create

Advocates, and Influence Your Customers: As customers
evolve, smart companies evolve with them, and, with a track
record that speaks for itself, putting the customer at the
center of strategic thinking is the key to a winning plan.
Consumer evolution is happening more rapidly than ever
before, and keeping your organization out in front has never
been more important.
Badass: Making Users Awesome: Success isn’t about
convincing customers that you have a great product. It’s
about making your customers great at what they want to do.
Customers who have become great through using your
product are much better marketing than all the advertising
you can buy.
Data-Driven Marketing: How to Engage Your Customers:
Take a fresh look at data-driven marketing and learn how the
roles and potential of integrated processes and individualized
insights can better engage customers.

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Working with Your Customers


Corporate transformation sounds like cutting-edge new
ground. But you aren’t pioneers. Many companies have
reimagined themselves over the years, and built something
better as a result. As you lead your own transformation,

stand on the shoulders of the giants who have already been
through this process:
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause
Great Firms to Fail: Christensen explains why most
companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter
the industry, he says, a successful company with established
products will get pushed aside unless managers know how
and when to abandon traditional business practices.
A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for
Leadership Effectiveness: Peter Drucker was the original big
thinker. His ideas on management, innovation, leadership,
effectiveness, and adapting to change formed the
foundations of modern business wisdom. Drucker was also a
mentor to many notable leaders in business, government,
and nonprofits—a role he valued tremendously. In A Year with
Peter Drucker, you will get to experience his mentorship
process firsthand.
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the
World’s Greatest Manufacturer: Toyota was one of the first
companies to radically reinvent itself—and in doing so,

became a major power. Learn the management principles
and business philosophy behind Toyota’s worldwide
reputation for quality and reliability.
Design Like Apple: Seven Principles For Creating Insanely
Great Products, Services, and Experiences: Apple sees
design as a tool for creating beautiful experiences that
convey a point of view down to the smallest detail—from the
tactile feedback of a keyboard to the out-of-the-box
experience of an iPhone package. And all of these capabilities

are founded in a deep and rich embrace of what it means to
be a designer.
Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer
Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way: Filled with exclusive
front-seat insights from Mercedes-Benz employees, eyeopening testimonials from passionate Mercedes-Benz fans,
and solid nuts-and-bolts advice for creating your own
consumer-aligned road map, Driven to Delight will help you
retool your strategies, reignite your customers, and refuel
your team for the long haul.
The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and
Performance: Today’s leaders know that speed and agility
are the keys to any company’s success, and yet many are
frustrated that their organizations can’t move fast enough to
stay competitive. The typical chain of command is too slow;
internal resources are too limited; people are already
executing beyond normal expectations.
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Learning from the Greats


Gamechangers: Creating Innovative Strategies for
Business and Brands; Lessons in Innovation from Those
Winning the Game: Gamechangers are brands that have
turned the world of business upside down. They win through
ambition and innovation rather than legacy and scale, outthinking the competition, focusing on the growth markets,
and embracing technology in more human ways.

The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the
World’s Most Disruptive Company: Rossman introduces
readers to the unique corporate culture of the world’s largest
Internet retailer, with a focus on the 14 leadership principles
that have guided and shaped its decisions and its distinctive
leadership culture.

A few years ago, we said that every business is a software
business. That’s true, now more than ever. But being a
software business means a lot more than having a website
and adding some e-commerce. It means collecting and using
data; it means augmenting your human staff with data-driven
capabilities; it means making informed decisions that
combine data with human vision and insight. It includes
staying on top of the newest technologies, including artificial
intelligence and virtual reality, to make sure you’re the
disruptor, not the disrupted.

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The Most Powerful Brand On Earth: How to Transform
Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners, and
Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and
Social Media: Brands that thrive and profit from employee
and customer empowerment generate significantly greater
awareness and revenues, while also decreasing the costs of
marketing, selling, and customer service. However,

employees must engage in public, real-time conversations.
And most people are not professional communicators.