8 Digital Transformation Reads To Start The Year
by Sebastian Mueller, Chief Operating Officer at MING Labs
We hope you had a great start into 2019. What are your ambitions for this year? Have you started a new position? Do you want to make your organization more agile? Are you looking to launch a new venture? A new year is like a blank sheet of paper — anything is possible. It is exciting, it is daunting and it is full of opportunities.
For anyone tasked with Digital Transformation or Innovation, the stakes are high and the time frames are short.
So instead of only relying on your experiences and learning — why not use the insights others have already created?
That is why our team is continuously reading across various disciplines, to keep pushing their expertise. Here a few books we have been reading over the winter months, which include highly relevant insights, stories and mental models.
If you have any recommendations, please share them in the comments! We are always looking to expand our horizon.
# Business Model & Service Innovation
1. This Is Service Design Thinking — Marc Stickdorn
By now you surely have heard of Design Thinking — yet many people who use that word are not actually fully aware of all the included methodologies and principles it is based on. This book is for everyone who is interested in Design Thinking, looking to get more practical applications and methods, and is seeking to create new services and business models. A highly practical guide through the basics, theory and reference cases, that will guide you through the first steps.
2. Ten Types Of Innovation — Larry Keeley, Bansi Nagji, Helen Walters
There is more than one way to innovate — the authors have compiled ten unique innovation angles compiled from over 2,000 case studies. The finding? A successful innovation rarely uses just one angle, but is often a combination of multiple, leading to something truly differentiated. The authors take you through the ten different angles they have identified, and analyze case studies through this framework, which provides the reader with a new mental model to use in challenging their ideas and solutions.
3. Reinvent Your Business Model — Mark W. Johnson
Most commercially successful startups and innovations don’t just innovate around the product, but come up with entirely new business models. The most successful ones align what the customer sees as value, and hence what he is buying in is mind, with what the organization is selling and how it delivers.
This book is a great starting point for anyone looking to challenge their existing business model or invent a new one, covering many aspects that need due consideration.
4. Mapping Innovation — Greg Satell
Especially when you are at the start of your Digital Transformation journey, and it is a greenfield, it is hard to know where to start. We find that the best place to start is with strategy and governance — breaking down the larger company strategy and translating that into the innovation strategy, process, tools and pipeline. This book will help you get started with the basics you need, in order to setup the basecamp for the long journey ahead and introduce first structure.
# Organizational Transformation
5. The Innovator’s Solution — Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
Following the “Innovator’s Dilemma”, which laid out how well-run business follow sound business on their path to get completely disrupted by new entrants, the “Innovator’s Solution” is proposing how one might escape the dilemma. Across interesting analyses of organizational behaviours and processes that cause the dilemma, to insightful examples from various big corporations and different industries, to ultimately the compiled principles, the book is easy to follow and understand — yet the ideas are notoriously hard to implement.
6. Measure What Matters — John Doerr
As a long-term partner at venture capital firm KPCB and early investor in Google, John Doerr has seen many organizations scale fast and successfully conquer audaciously large challenges. One of the key instruments that helped align the teams to perform? Objective Key Results — OKRs for short. A very successful management tool, this book introduces the fundamental principles, the practical applications, as well as what to look out for and how to make it your own. Worth reading for any leader looking to align their teams around large goals and make sure everyone is focused on the right metrics and is giving it their all.
7. Sense And Respond — Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
It seems like everyone is gathering data, and many are proclaiming we are in a “data economy”. Yet in reality, most organizations are not able to generate any value or insights out of the data they gather for various reasons. In this book, the authors illustrate the new principles around opening a customer dialogue and gaining effective insights through gathering the right data. Further, they discuss the rethinking and reorganization required to make the best use of these new capabilities, for organizations to become truly customer-centric in their data practices.
# Useful Frameworks
8. Hooked — Nir Eyal
Why are some digital products highly addictive, while we delete others immediately? How do they keep us coming back for more? In this book, the author analyzes some of the most successful products today, ties the engagement stages back to be habit forming process, and extends it by a step that the best do really well. Very insightful, easy to follow and providing you with a clear framework on how to build the mechanisms into your product, as well as the moral appeal and warning of when and how to use these principles and what to avoid.
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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