Technology alone is just an equaliser: Amer featured in ET
This article was first published by Economic Times.
Author: Yasmin Taj, published September 28 2021
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Technology alone is just an equaliser, it should be augmented to become a differentiator: Innovation Consultant, Amer Iqbal
In an exclusive interview with ETHRWorld International, Amer Iqbal, Innovation Consultant and Author of the upcoming book ‘The 5 ways to Innovate’, talks about certain key factors to be taken into account to build an innovative digital framework and how to use it to achieve better results in these pandemic times. He also stresses upon the importance and the need to build up a thriving workforce under effective leadership.
Yasmin TajETHRWorld Updated: September 28, 2021, 07:02 IST
With the changing times it is hardly surprising that the biggest acceleration was seen at the technology front. Almost all organisations invested most in technologies that were high-performing. But the biggest challenge was how to use this digital acceleration to attain the best results. Acquiring technology is easy but to put it to the right use is the key.
In an exclusive interview with ETHRWorld International, Amer Iqbal, innovation consultant and author of the upcoming book ‘The 5 ways to Innovate’, shares his thoughts on how, and why organisations should invest in technology to gain the most out of it. He says that they shouldn’t just rely on big, monolithic technology architectures, rather let their teams experiment with lean, just-in-time cloud services that focus on getting work done. According to him, by balancing investments across people, process and data, one can unlock much greater returns from technology.
Amer helps organisations to reimagine their future in a rapidly changing digital economy. In his earlier role, Amer helped to scale Deloitte Digital from the ground up to the leading digital creative consultancy in the region, helping numerous clients on their digital transformation journey. Previously he was General Manager and Head of Strategy at Deepend, one of Australia’s leading independent digital agencies. Over the past 20 years he has also built several successful startups.
Amer holds a degree in Computer Science as well as an MBA majoring in Marketing. He was a finalist for 2011 Young Executive of the Year and has been featured in numerous publications including Australian Financial Review, AdNews, B&T, WARC and Contagious. He is regularly engaged as an industry thought leader, speaker, and facilitator.
Here are the excerpts from the interview.
In the past 20 years, you have built several successful start-ups from the ground up and helped major corporates in their digital transformation journey. You have closely observed how companies adapt to the new working models and fit into the rapidly growing digital culture for two decades. In your opinion, what have been the most prominent innovation challenges at workplaces in the past 18 months?
In times of turbulence, the single biggest challenge that organisations face is the knee-jerk response to retract back to the core. In the past 18 months, we have seen too many companies, hit by the pandemic, re-allocate and retrench resources from innovation functions back to the supposed safety of the core business. This logic is something like burning all the lifeboats and swimming back to the Titanic.
Backing away from innovation during a crisis is bad for business. Companies who leaned into innovation delivered 17% better shareholder returns during COVID-19. Even better, when normality returns, these are the companies who will have a head start on their competitors who will then have to rebuild from scratch.
The food service industry has been a great example of innovation during a crisis. As customer needs shifted from dining-in to home delivery, the industry rapidly pivoted. Enter white-label cloud kitchens purpose built for food delivery services. Not only do operators like Taiwan’s JustKitchen solve the post-pandemic needs of restaurants, but they have also paved the way for virtual brands that exist only in food delivery services with no physical retail locations.
Speaking of the high-performing technologies that companies should be investing in for a successful turnaround, we understand that it isn’t just about the digital acceleration, but the kind of technologies that fit seamlessly into an organisation. According to you, what are the key factors that should be taken into consideration in these unprecedented times to build an innovative digital framework?
So, your IT department has acquired the Ferrari of tech stacks. But there’s a problem: no one has been trained on how to drive it, there are no processes to operate it, and no data to fuel it. So, the gleaming, shiny Ferrari stays parked in the driveway going nowhere.
In far too many organisations, the solution to any problem is ‘more technology’. Global IT expenditure is forecast to hit $4.1b in 2021, an 8% increase from 2020. But here’s the dirty secret – technology alone is just an equaliser. When everyone is buying the same tech, you’ll need to augment it in order to unlock any kind of differentiator.
The goal here for corporates should be to think, act and behave more like a start-up. Don’t just rely on big, monolithic technology architectures – let your teams experiment with lean, just-in-time cloud services that focus on getting work done. Invest in upskilling to build people skills and processes like agile, self-managing teams that allow them to be more efficient. By balancing investments across people, process, and data, you’ll unlock much greater returns from technology.
The change indeed comes from within. And this has encouraged our talent leaders to unlock the true potential of their employees. What could be some of the common goals and strategies that leaders should focus on when building a thriving workforce?
Companies who choose to build future capabilities from within need to be really clear on strategy. We’ve seen too many examples where hundreds of employees go through agile training, only to return to their desk and still have to face the same status reports and layers of management to get any decisions made. Unless there is an ambition and willingness to truly reinvent the organisation, companies are better off implementing a divested innovation strategy via incubators and start-up ecosystems.
For those who choose to take the plunge and invest in their people for the future, the goalposts need to be clear: Are we attempting to reinventing how work gets done? Or are we rethinking what work we do? Or both? Are we upskilling for the sake of incremental improvement? Or is the intent to rapidly evolve to survive disruption? The answers will differ for every organisation, but these choices should be bold and not shy away from ‘breaking today’s business’. Change takes time, so any strategy you develop should understand that by the time you get there, things will have changed again.
Amidst all the core changes, the primary objective of any organisation is to cater to the unique needs of all its stakeholders. HR Leaders are trying to foster a culture where employees and customers are placed at the heart of businesses. Any golden tips for leaders who are striving to strike the perfect balance?
There’s nothing quite so futile as a super-efficient workforce that delivers zero customer value. The rise of Design Thinking over the last decade hasn’t been an accident, the data shows that methods that put the customer at the heart of the organisation deliver drastically better returns.
As with most things, however, the devil is often in the details. We’ve seen hundreds of corporates boldly proclaiming that they have pivoted towards customer-centricity. In reality, many of these efforts are short-lived and produce disposable outputs like ill-fated focus groups and customer journey maps that are used as nothing more than pretty wallpaper. Truly delivering on customer-centricity means customer needs are incorporated into every part of the organisation’s proposition: the product, the business model and the experience layer. When this is done well, employees are organised around serving these customer needs, and we’ve seen many organisation design models embrace this such as network based teams. When it works well, employees are able to deliver higher levels of value while operating under greater autonomy, which is a win-win situation for all involved.
Do you think unconscious biases often come in the way of effective leadership at workplaces? How do you think leaders can overcome them?
I once blogged about the 24 primary cognitive biases and how they play into a business context. One of the biggest ones we see is the sunk-cost fallacy which causes people to irrationally cling onto things that have already cost them something. This can be poison to any change efforts in an organisation. However, when we peel back the layers what we see is often not a resistance to the future state at all, but instead a resistance to the process of change itself. If an executive has been successful in the current state of things, anything that represents change threatens their foundations for success. Even when change is for the better, human nature means that people are naturally resistant. This is particularly troublesome in a digital economy where change is a constant.
So, what can leaders do to overcome these biases? I’d suggest starting to delve deeper than surface level resistance and understanding the latent motives at play. Sure, our in-market sales leaders are resistant to the proposed regional change program, but why? In these cases, it’s useful to have mechanisms to listen and capture concerns. Middle management workshops with external, unbiased facilitators can help to capture high level concerns. Bottom-up surveys can be useful to gather large amounts of sentiment data. Even better if they are run frequently in bite-sized formats as this can also give benchmarks and trends to measure the incremental impact of any interventions you implement. All of this can serve to peel back the layers and give your changemakers a useful frame of reference around which they can build a more effective transformation program.
Any pearls of wisdom for our HR leaders embarking on this journey of digital transformation?
Times of change provide leaders with the opportunity to be brave and lead by example. Transformations can often be scary – if there is no fear then you’re probably not being ambitious enough in the change agenda. That’s why it’s called ‘transformation’ and not ‘alteration’. However, keep in mind that bravery is not the absence of fear; brave leaders face down their fears and tackle them head on. When leaders lead from the front, your people will follow - in the words of someone much wiser than me: ‘Be the change you want to see!’
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