That is precisely the problem. Google and other hyped companies like Facebook, Airbnb and Netflix will be elevated to the holy examples of what every business should do.
But there is a big difference between these successes and current (Danish) company. Google & Co. is born into a digital age, without cumbersome luggage existing markets, systems and cultures.
It is a fact, I have wondered for some time, and recently massively confirmed when I interviewed the country's foremost talents in business to Berlingske Business Magazine Talent100, published in April.
In almost all cases, which included a number of Denmark's largest companies, was digital development an inevitable and rich piece of the strategy work. In the example, some food, transport and construction.
But the challenge is not to decipher Google's success strategy. It is easy enough, and it is as I said written books about. The challenge is to move an established business, often a big one, in a more digital direction.
Such a process touches nearly automatically by well-established, culture-bearing principles of the company, which organization and professionalism that in a digital world must be redefined. It also includes the company's systems, as it built up on the old, often silo-like principles, and now have to be redesigned.
A good example is marketing. One of today's mantras is called customer journey, where the recipient, the customer is in the center, and not the sender company. Using digital tools follow the customer through the entire process from beginning to interest after the sale. It is ideal, with more satisfied customers as a result.
Some of the consequences of the organization is
- More power to marketing, which is also a major purchaser of IT,
- Requirements for departments that had never had to deal with customers, thinking in marketing,
- Better ways to measure the effectiveness of each department and employee,
- Recruitment of new types of employees with more knowledge on IT and marketing,
- Amendment of existing IT systems to a more customer-focused approach.
It is heavy items that require time and it can easily go too slow.
Take Nokia, a company that definitely was accustomed to change, yet not managed to turn things around in time. In the mid-00s, when we were still at the iPhone one, I interviewed a Nokia boss, and he explained convincingly how mobile manufacturer was about to become an Internet company that would live content and services. Nevertheless failed Nokia. Not because the objective was wrong, but because they did not manage to turn things around in time.
It is simply very difficult to implement fundamental changes in an established and historically successful business. People and systems resist, from the ancient management recognition that change involves resistance.
Therefore, it is limited in what we can learn from Google. That's the easy part, to formulate a strategy and implement it in life without baggage.
The much more difficult, and therefore more admirable, exercise is the change in which there is resistance. It is the story, most companies can learn from. And not by Google.
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