Intro
Hello my dear readers,
I hope you are doing well, safe and finally enjoying the warmer weather. Here in The Netherlands we are getting ready to celebrate King's Day on Tuesday in orange style although without the typical fun in the buzzy streets and canals. Oh, I never realized how special is socializing with other humans in big groups. I hope soon this will return all back to back.
As usual I prepared my newsletter with my latest writings, videos and other useful resources. Let's go straight into it!
My Monthly Fail Story
Problem solving...
In 2021 I decided to commit sharing more failure stories on social media and less of “Look, my dear network how well I am doing!”
So here is my fourth story:
My whole career I did business problem solving. To be honest, mostly successfully thanks to learnt LEAN thinking methodologies. After a while I got really confident in this area.
So when a colleague asked me if I am willing to solve a cost reduction problem, with no doubt I said 'Yes!' He did try to scare me a bit that others already had unsuccessful attempts, but this didn't bother me. I still felt confident to 'crack this nut.'
Well, things didn't go as expected. I did extensive data analysis for months but I could not find the factors to reduce the cost without incurring them in other business parts.
Two lessons learnt here:
- Be humble about yourself and your capabilities.
- Sometimes bringing transparency in business is a great achievement too.
I would love to hear your failure stories too! Please share it by replying to this email.
Find Your Purpose
Have you ever heard of a term - Public Benefit Corporation?
I learnt about it only recently when I read an article that Veeva became the first public company to convert to a public benefit corporation.
This sparked my curiosity and I immediately started to do research on this new concept. What does it mean to be a public benefit corporation?
I summarized my key takeaways in a short 2 minute video.
Personal Growth
A hungry person runs faster
A hungry person runs faster! These were the words I often heard while growing up. Although I didn't like this life philosophy when I was younger, now I think of it differently.
I believe happy people are always struggling a bit, otherwise they would get bored, which is not healthy. People who stay too long in their comfort zone and are not stretched don't reach their full potential.
So, we shouldn't be afraid to be a bit 'hungry' and not fear failures which make us stronger.
Why should I build my personal brand online?
I have been talking about digital transformation a lot! But mainly from operational excellence point of view - how companies can optimize their processes by using emerging digital technologies.
However, digital transformation is also about how we utilize social technologies such as social media in creating and strengthening personal or company brands.
It's interesting that apparently people trust and value communication coming more from a person rather than a company! So it seems like that not only enterprise marketing teams should be engaged with building a company brand, but also employees.
If you'd like to learn more on that topic, I would encourage to read a guest blog post from Viktorija Lukoseviciute, who is a partner and strategist from my favourite personal brand consultancy school Persona Cognita.
Viktorija took an interesting angle to describe benefits of building a personal brand online from an expat perspective. If you too would like to hop on this journey, I would highly recommend to join Persona Cognita Personal Brand Excellerator which is starting soon!
Business
3 lessons Maersk learned from adopting Hoshin Kanri
I am beyond excited to get my first article published on Lean Enterprise Institute blog. This nonprofit organization has always been my number 1 inspiration and knowledge source in advancing my LEAN thinking. So it's a big pleasure to contribute an article with three key learnings on deploying Hoshin Kanri at Maersk to this world-leading LEAN thinkers community.
Hoshin Kanri is a strategy deployment tool which helps organizations to drive business breakthroughs. I would highly recommend looking more into this tool for enterprises which would like to improve their strategy execution process.
Meet Lab271 at Schuberg Philis office
- So, Agne where do you work?
- Schuberg Philis.
- Hmmm. Never heard of it...
And then my story starts explaining our company history, no manager culture and self-steering customer teams obsessed with 100% customer satisfaction. Today I am very happy to show a short glimpse into one of the coolest spaces we have at Schuberg Philis - Lab271.
This is a place where you can meet our robotdog, experiment in our 'toy factory' and get inspired on how to optimize manufacturing processes or get to learn on how tactile computing can simulate your operations environment. Sounds interesting? Are you currently puzzled how digital technology can solve your business challenges?
Feel free to reach out to me! We love talking with business leaders and brainstorming on how digital technologies can solve the biggest business problems. Although we are a technology company, we never start there. Business problem first, technology second!
Books
Exponential organizations by Salim Ismail
Transformation is the new normal! For many this urge to transform comes from a fear of being disrupted by what Salim Ismail calls 'exponential organizations.' Think of Uber, Airbnb, Waze, Netflix, Tesla, Alibaba...
In other words, those are the organizations whose impact is disproportionally large compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies.
These are my few takeaways which could inspire legacy companies:
Make sure you have a MTP (massive transformative purpose) which is not a traditional mission statement, but rather a higher aspirational purpose of your organization.
While data is indeed the new gold, make sure your organization focus is on extracting insights which solve your business problems.
Build an organizational culture where people have autonomy to propose new ideas and experiment without fear of failure.
Make An Impact
NEW! Resources page
All serious bloggers have a resource page on their websites. And of course I was dreaming about it for a long time already. Finally, this came true and me too can proudly guide you to check out a new section on my website. This is a page which will always be work in progress because I will update and put new books to read, templates to use or apps to download. So, I encourage you to check it out from time to time. Please, let me know if you have some advice to share which fits this section too. You can do it by replying to this email. Have a nice weekend!