8 Digital Transformation Reads for the Summer
by Sebastian Mueller, COO MING Labs
The summer months are connected to holidays and slower schedules in most parts of the world — and are a perfect opportunity for some reading. Engaging with a good book allows you to get inspired, reframe problems you are facing and benefit from the experience of others.
As we are continuing to build our capabilities around Business Design to help our clients with their Digital Transformation, our own reading focuses on related areas to create comprehensive and effective solutions for them and produce real outcomes.
Here are a few books the team is reading this summer — if you have any recommendations, please share them in the comments! We are always looking to expand our horizon.
#Business Transformation
1. Brick by Brick — David Robertson
The best way to learn is through making mistakes. The second best way is to learn from the mistakes of others. “Brick by Brick” tells the story of the Lego company at the turn of the century, looking to innovate and expand rapidly, but getting it wrong and nearly failing. They get to the brink of near collapse, only to make a successful turnaround and come back stronger than before.
2. Dual Transformation — Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert, Mark Johnson
In a business climate of permanent revolution, the ability to transform needs to be second nature for any successful business. Yet many struggle when faced with true disruption in their core business — they might even see it coming, yet are seemingly unable to act. In “Dual Transformation” the authors describe how leaders can successfully transform the core business, while building the future offering using unfair advantages derived from past success and scale.
#Organisational Transformation
3. Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation — Neil Perkin, Peter Abraham
While truly standardised Agile methodologies have found their killer application in software engineering and industrial production, their core principles, and ways of organising work and teams are applicable across businesses and problem sets. In this book the authors discuss the business case (and business need!) for new organisational principles, as well as how to map Agile methodologies onto your organisation at scale.
4. Lean Enterprise — Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O’Reilly
“Lean Enterprise” discusses the successful application of Lean Business and Agile principles in large organisations, and how they need to be restructured to support this shift. Through many concrete discussions around successful enterprise portfolio management, innovation culture, and applications around governance and compliance, this book goes into a level of details suitable for transformation leaders at larger organisations looking for answers.
5. Whiplash — Joichi Ito, Jeff Howe
As head of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito is definitely someone worth listening to. In “Whiplash” he writes about core shifts in the way organisations need to work to stay successful in the future, across nine core principles. These cover various areas, from ways of internally organising, to interacting with customers and corporate strategy.
#Mental Models
6. Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Antifragile”, as well as the other volumes of Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, is an intriguing concoction of practical exploration of randomness and statistics, mixed with a large portion of philosophy and mental models through which our world can be viewed. His excursions on antifragility can be especially interesting and applicable to innovation portfolio management, as well as corporate venture capital and related areas.
7. Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David Duncan
Clayton Christensen, famous for his work on disruption captured in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “The Innovator’s Solution”, is simply an authority on innovation. In his latest book, he introduces and discusses the Jobs theory as a mental model to think about businesses. It discusses how the job a customer is evaluating a product for needs to be the guiding principle for understanding the business one is in, and organising the company around solving that job to avoid lateral disruption.
8. Scale — Geoffrey West
Are there fundamental laws by which organisms and systems scale? Can we find a common theory to describe how companies scale? Is it efficient to scale up a company? Is there a maximum size? Do organisational principles affect how it scales? In this fascinating book, Geoffrey West — theoretical physicist by trait — discusses how organisms and ecosystems scale in nature, and its implications for our human systems and institutions.
Do you have any book recommendations? Please let us know in the comments — we are always looking for inspiration!
Sebastian Mueller is Chief Operating Officer at MING Labs.
MING Labs is a leading digital business builder located in Berlin, Munich, New York City, Shanghai and Singapore. We guide clients in designing their businesses for the future, ensuring they are leaders in the field of innovation.
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