Category: Leadership

Escaping the Day Two Trap: How a Robust Data Strategy Can Reignite Your Day One Mindset

In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Amazon founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the concepts of Day One and Day Two. Day One is a metaphor that includes perpetual innovation, urgency, and a zealot-like customer focus, while Day Two is a metaphor for stasis, irrelevance, decline, and the eventual failure of an organization. Bezos argued that for an organization to stay vibrant, energetic, and relevant, it must embody a “Day One” mindset.

The Day Two mindset is dangerous for organizations because it symbolizes stasis, irrelevance, and ultimately, the death of an organization. It manifests in slow decision-making, bureaucratic processes, prioritizing internal politics over customer satisfaction, and reluctance to take risks and explore new opportunities. When an organization is stuck in Day Two, customers suffer the most.

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. Jeff Bezos

The Blockbuster/Netflix saga has been used so many times to highlight the incumbent losing to the startup that it verges on becoming a cliche. It has mainly been used to support Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” thesis, and I agree it does, but I also think it serves as a simple heuristic for the Day Two mindset. One of the reasons Blockbuster was unwilling to expand their streaming service was the dependency of their profits being linked to customer late fees. According to a 2010 NBC News article, “In 2000, Blockbuster collected nearly $800 million in late fees, accounting for 16 percent of its revenue.” By the time of the article’s posting, those numbers had dropped to $134 million. Slow decision-making, bureaucratic processes, prioritization of internal politics over customer satisfaction, and reluctance to take risks and explore new opportunities led Blockbuster first into stasis, then irrelevance, and ultimately, its death via bankruptcy.

Bureaucracy – Prompt by George Estrada, Image by MidJourney

So, how does an organization get out of Day Two if they are already there? An organization will need to create a mechanism that will allow it to generate enough escape velocity to propel itself back into a Day One mindset. One such mechanism is developing a leadership team (C-suite) with a robust data strategy.

A symptom of the Day Two mindset is siloed data. Where there is siloed data, there is a bureaucracy that justifies the need to keep it siloed, followed closely by internal politics that prioritize ownership over customers. See how it is all woven tightly together? If you are stuck in this Day Two mindset, you most certainly do not have a robust data strategy. While organizations can operate and function with siloed data, bureaucracy, and politics, with every day that passes, they risk not being able to anticipate, adjust, and remain relevant to their customers.

To escape the Day Two mindset, organizations must develop a robust data strategy. It has to be organized and led by the C-suite and complement and support the organization’s overall strategy and mission. A robust data strategy will be customer-centric, focused on innovating for the customer. It will improve the organization’s agility by providing its leaders and staff with the information they need to make quick decisions. It will take outside trends and help identify new opportunities while allowing for continuous improvements measured in efficiencies, increased productivity, and reduced costs, all while improving the organization’s posture on compliance requirements and risk to the business.

Data can be a real game-changer in helping drive change in an organization. It has the power to give you insights that make you rethink what you know, identify new opportunities, and guide you in developing strategies. By making data your starting point, you can:

  • Understand your customers’ needs
  • Improve operational efficiencies
  • Innovate new products and services
  • Increase speed to market

But here’s the catch: for your data strategy to be effective, you need your leadership team to be fully committed. Your C-suite needs to be the biggest cheerleaders for a data-driven culture. Just wishing or saying you want to be a data-driven organization doesn’t make you one. Leadership has to put the resources behind your data initiatives and ensure that everyone in the organization treats data as a strategic asset.

When it comes to building up your data capabilities, you must cover all your bases:

  • Governance and management of your data is imperative
  • Identifying the right infrastructure and technology platforms
  • Developing your staff’s data skills and fostering a data-driven mindset
  • Cultivating a culture that embraces data at every level

Remember, your data strategy isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s a continuous process of improvement and iteration. You must regularly review and refine your strategy to ensure it’s always aligned with your changing business needs and new technological developments.

Finally, an effective data strategy requires collaboration and alignment across all the different functions and departments in your organization. You need cross-functional teams working together to ensure your data initiatives are in lockstep with your overall business objectives and that data is being shared and used effectively across the board.

For organizations that have ambled into a Day Two mindset, I am proposing that they use data as a catalyst for change by developing a robust data strategy that will provide insights and challenge existing assumptions.

Remember, a Day One mindset welcomes challenges to conventional thinking and established norms and is contemptuous of bureaucracy and anti-customer politics.

Previously posted on LinkedIn.

Posted on by George

Speed

Speed is not preordained. Speed is a choice. You’ve got to set up a culture that has urgency and wants to experiment. You can’t flip a switch and suddenly get speed — Andy Jassy

For organizations to stay resilient and competitive, they need to master two interconnected capabilities: speed and innovation. 

That’s the key insight from new research by MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). They surveyed over 700 companies worldwide to understand what drives top performance. Their findings reveal that the highest growth and profitability come from companies excelling at both accelerating time-to-market and continually introducing new products and services.

Here are three major takeaways from the MIT CISR study:

1. Speed alone provides minimal boost — racing to market faster doesn’t improve results. The companies with real differentiation couple speed with ongoing innovation. The top performers launched more revenue-generating innovations while also getting to market faster than competitors.

2. Digital capabilities are foundational — leading companies leverage cloud platforms, APIs, automation, real-time data, and other digital technologies. These tools allow them to tap ecosystems, enable collaboration, quickly respond to changes, and rapidly deliver innovative offerings. 

3. Leadership and organization evolve — the top companies shifted from hierarchical control to empowered teams. Leadership focused on communicating strategic vision and coaching, not commanding. Shared dashboards provided transparency on value creation goals and guided data-driven decisions at all levels. Work was organized around outcomes rather than tasks.

The researchers identified four drivers (a framework) for these high-performing organizations:

1. Empowering leadership, while simplifying work

2. Adopting leading-edge technology

3. Using data as a guide

4. Nurturing an innovative ecosystem

The MIT CISR framework provides a blueprint for management practices and digital technologies that enable top performance. I recommend reading the complete research article. It offers an in-depth look at the approaches, leadership styles, and organizational models that allow some companies to continually adapt and lead their industries. And the highlighted case study on Mercedes-Benz is a model to be mimicked.

Note: Originally published as a LinkedIn article

Posted on by George

Apollo 11 Deepfake

Trust is the foundation of any organization or society. In a time where news, opinions, and the public are delivered with a few clicks and without context. Deepfake technology poses a sinister threat to our way of life. The In Event of Moon Disaster project by MIT is engaging and sobering. The six-minute video is excellent! But its pho-thenticity is disturbing and a warning sign of things to come.

There are excellent resources on the site for an in-depth study of Deepfake technology. Governments will need to draft sensible policies around such techniques, and news organizations will need to develop a discipline around rushing to distribute videos without verifying their authenticity.

PREMIERE OF FULL FILM & COMPLETE SPEECH! In July 1969, much of the world celebrated the “giant leap for mankind” that the successful moon landing constituted. In 2020, nothing is quite so straightforward. In Event of Moon Disaster illustrates the possibilities of deepfake technologies by reimagining this seminal event. What if the Apollo 11 mission had gone wrong and the astronauts had not been able to return home? A contingency speech for this possibility was prepared, but never delivered by President Nixon – until now. The immersive project invites you into this alternative history and asks us all to consider how new technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us.

You can visit and access all the resources of this project by going to: https://moondisaster.org/

Posted on by George

A Terrible Dilemma

“Henry Kissinger 4 Shankbone Metropolitan Opera 2009” by david_shankbone is licensed under CC BY 2.0

“Perhaps the deepest problem is the problem of conjecture in foreign policy.  Each political leader has the choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making an assessment which requires more effort.  If he makes the assessment that requires the least effort, then as time goes on it may turn out that he was wrong.  And then he will have to pay a heavy price.  If he acts on the basis of a guess, he will never be able to prove that his effort was necessary.  But he may save himself a great deal of grief later on.  If he acts early, he cannot know whether it was necessary.  If he waits, he may be lucky or he may be unlucky.  It is a terrible dilemma.” — Henry Kissinger 1963

The above quote surmises the ever-present dilemma any leader faces when making choices (or not). We grant too much agency to our leaders and neglect the role luck plays in their leadership outcomes.

Posted on by George

The CFO As Your Ally

Photo by Chahat Sagar on Pexels.com

Perhaps one of the most important relationships, the head of any technology department can develop, is the one with the company’s CFO. (It is important to remember that in many organizations, the head of tech already reports to the CFO for several reasons, one of which I suppose, is that of control over the expenditures in technology). Often, these relationships are usually not as close or tight as they should be. That’s probably a result of decades of senior leadership always thinking of technology as a necessary evil or a cost center. We know now that technology is more than just a cost center or necessary evil, and in the 21st century, if the technology is not at the heart of your business, it will be whether you like it or not. Be it agriculture, a small business, or laundry service, technology will be a core component of your business, and your clientele will be demanding that you’re up to the latest technologies.

So, as a result, the business leaders making financial decisions around technology must understand and help define what the value proposition is that they’re looking for out of their technology investments and what outcomes they want to drive and for that they need to have a level of understanding of said technologies. Conversely, it is essential that whoever runs the tech Department — I’ll keep that as broad whoever– needs to build those relationships and understand the language that the business stakeholders and business leaders speak; specifically around finances, cost centers, and return on investments. These can’t be simple or anecdotal propositions of “people will be more productive.” Build strong arguments by building a good relationship with your CFO. In Redefining AI Leadership in the C-Suite, from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the author addresses the importance of the relationship between the head of the technology department and the CFO.

The article goes a bit too deep down the finance vertical because they’re talking specifically around machine learning and artificial intelligence and all the values that could it can bring to that department. But overall, this article lays out a good case of how you, as a leader of your tech Department, should be thinking about how to engage in conversation with your CFO and making that relationship a tight and mutually beneficial relationship and not one that’s too contentious around costs and vision.

Posted on by George