This is a time of big change – but at least in our individual lives, the changes most likely to stick are those we each choose to make.  Of course life is a fascinating mix of choice and circumstance. As Sartre once wrote, “freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

What changes do we want to make coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic?  I want to really learn to lead in a more whole heartedly, full-throatedly, networked fashion.   I’m inspired by my online friend Simon Terry, who incidentally mentioned that Sartre quote to me the other day, to not only think but speak in those terms. Simon is the leader of a group called Change Agents World Wide.  It’s a network of people, subtitled “Changing work, one human at a time.”

There’s lots of discussion about how Covid-19 will change us.  I’m intrigued by some of the discussion about how it will accelerate best practices we’d been slower to adopt than we knew we should – like decarbonization and climate change efforts.  (Here’s one big link on that, from McKinsey.)

One specific example I find intriguing is the developer relations community started by boutique firm Redmonk called Flyless, described here. It’s an online community for software developers flying less, or not at all, because they still want to talk without going to conferences – and maybe flying less is going to be a good idea in the long term.  Starting that community is awesome.

I’d like to think about what we want to change, how we can help each other make those changes, how we can hold each other to high standards, “create a container” for changes, and point ourselves in the general direction we want to move in once we’re coming out of this thing.

It’s tempting to think that a centralized authority will be the determining factor, or that a “great man” will determine the direction of history, or that it’s so much bigger than us we have no control over it – but has there ever been a time when it was more clear that we’re all connected, for better and for worse?  What do we want to do about it?

Transformation is a phenomenon, and digital transformation is a big thing these days – but it’s hard to put your finger on just how to explain it.  It’s not just a matter of digitizing business processes – in best cases it’s about building a digital-first business model.  What does that mean? And what do people mean when they say it’s not just about technology – it’s also about cultural change? That’s often the biggest obstacle, in fact, to successful digital transformation: leadership stuck in old cultural ways.

Here’s what I think could be a good way to explain the change going on in the economy and world.

“In the dynamic between mind and machine, product and platform, core and crowd – the latter of each has grown so much stronger that the relationship between each of these pairs must be re-examined…The business world is always changing but in transitions as profound as this one, things are even more unsettled than usual.”

That’s from the book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson.  It’s a good book.

I think this also offers a good model for self-examination.  How much are you relying on your own mind – and how much are you leveraging the power of the machines you have access to?  I know I think of a lot of ideas, but observing the output of technologies offers a whole new level of insight into what I’m working on.   I get pretty excited about the product of my labor, but the true power is increasingly from the networks, the platforms, and if I’m not keeping my eye there, on the opportunities and the consequences, then I may be missing the lion’s share of what’s available.  For example, I work a lot with Twitter data on a product, but I’ve got to mind the value emerging out on the network of Twitter users and conversations.  The products I use help me gather that value.  And of course the core of any company these days is remiss if it doesn’t pay attention to, and tap into, the crowd it aims to do business in.

I’m going to try using this historic shift toward the power of machine, platform, and crowd as a way to talk about digital transformation.

‍Building a platform ecosystem can be a great way to build community and energy around what you’re doing. Three best practices I’ve learned from software developer platforms are as follows. These aren’t the only things to focus on of course, but I do like these three tactics.

(1) Provide some free level of access that people can immediately begin experimenting with at any hour day or night (Mashery taught me that before they were acquired by Intel).

(2) Make sure you tell people what types of functionality you want them to build on your platform and what types of things you intend to build yourself, even thematically (Several years ago Twitter published the quadrant diagram below and told its ecosystem which of those quadrants it wanted outside developers to focus on and which ones to avoid. The upper right was one to stay away from, they said.)

(3) If you can, it’s great to offer a high-touch preview of your roadmap. Salesforce regularly does a registration-required live video walk-through of what they’ve got coming over the next months.

Those are some of my favorite tactics. Anyone have anything else you’d like to add?

People have been saying for years that “data is the new oil” – but oil needs an engine. That analogy may break down, too, if data isn’t scarce but great engines are.

Analyst firm IDC released a series of reports on four parts of digital transformation yesterday and it could be looked at that way. I haven’t read it in full but I love the way it’s laid out and really appreciate that we’ve come to a place in history where this kind of model is valued as an asset.

Central to this model is not data, but an “intelligent core” that processes internal and external data.

The model here, in narrative terms, is this: digital transformation is a cyclical process that runs internal engagements like data from instrumentation and insights from people, processes, assets and APIs, as well as external engagements like shared data and actions taken, through a central intelligent core. What’s in the core? Developer services so internal and external data can be worked with, and an orchestration layer to make sure everything keeps operating smoothly.

As data churns through that intelligent core, being processed by developers and being kept in sync with orchestrated processes, then it goes back out of the core into internal and external engagement, as new insights gleaned and new actions taken.

As I’m writing this, I’m in transit to visit a customer for which Sprinklr could totally be understood as providing the intelligent core for a substantial amount of this kind of digital transformation.

In this model, the data is important but the intelligent core is where the leverage comes in. IDC’s announcement quotes Meredith Whalen, senior vice president, thusly: “What is important to take away is that the data does not distinguish the company. It is what the company does with the data that distinguishes itself. How you build your intelligent core will determine your potential as an organization.”

That brings to mind something Jack Clark of OpenAI said on Twitter recently. He criticized the outdated belief that “Data is the most strategic thing” and argued instead that “compute is the most strategic thing. In the future we’re going to be using procedural environments/complex game simulations, so you get the data from your simulator and the strategic point comes from using compute to run it faster (aka generating more data). Another way to think about this is the rise of GAN [Generative Adversarial Network] techniques for data augmentation – you sample a distribution of initial data then you use compute to massively expand the available data via GANs, or whatever. Ultimately, compute trumps data.”

That’s probably taking it to a whole new level – arguing that the core could use AI techniques like Generative Adversarial Network AI to take a little bit of data and extrapolate out to build far more data to capture insights from. That’s cool to imagine.

Exciting times!

“We want to reinvent, but we sure … don’t want to reinvent the wheel.” – Warby Parker co-founder Neil Blumenthal.

That line really struck me from this Fast Company article “The Future of Retail in the Age of Amazon.”

It reminded me of my friend Hideshi Hamaguchi‘s analysis of innovative products in terms of new and known behavior and value.

Hideshi explained that creating a product that allowed users to capture new value from known behaviors is a great way to make something attractive and comprehensible for the market. Making something that enables users to capture known forms of value using new (hopefully simpler) forms of behavior is good too. But when you’re innovating in terms of both behavior required and the form of value that comes from it – that’s going to be a tough sell.

I made a crude visual representation of that here. Hideshi’s would be much more attractive, I’m sure. In this case Green certainly doesn’t mean “go.” It just means, this is the easiest path to go to market. The yellow quadrants are probably the smartest way to successfully innovate.

This was a big struggle in building Little Bird, before it was acquired by Sprinklr last year. We were in that top right red quadrant. We were asking users to set up workflow systems to regularly check in on and engage with content highlights from high-impact people, on any topic, not filtered by keyword, in order to find key opportunities in a cloud of conversation to co-create value as a part of. That’s pretty awesome, but for most people it’s new behavior to capture new value.

Thankfully, now that we’re part of Sprinklr, the data we surface is much more easily actionable through more familiar behavior and delivers more familiar value.

One of the mistakes I made was building in that top right corner. The company could have been much more commercially compelling on its own if we’d succeeded in moving toward the more-popularly known axis in one direction or another. We knew this, I was just stubborn. )And it’s much easier said than done – we certainly tried.) I’m stubborn in large part because I am motivated more than anything else by awe, and the abundance of opportunities I personally have always been able to create with the behavior and value exactly as we delivered it was (and is) something I’m in awe of. In the future I’ll team up, with greater self-awareness all around, with settlers I can pass the ball to. That would probably be necessary but not sufficient.

Word to the wise!