How to Manage Disruptive Change

The overwhelming questions of our time:

• Can today’s organizations embrace change and become an adaptive enterprise?
• Do they have the necessary leadership skills?
• Can they overcome their personal and organizational bias for the status quo?
• Can they win the talent war?
• Can they successfully meet the demands of today's empowered workforce and customers?
• Can they manage the challenges of digital transformation and cybersecurity?

The future, by its nature, is unknowable. Strategic planning is no longer workable. Organizations need to adapt to constantly changing circumstances and situations.

The book is about people exploring, learning, creating, innovating and problem-solving in an environment of accelerating change. The book offers a set of management guidelines, concepts, and principles for managing disruptive change.

Although the status quo is not sustainable, studies show that even in the face of uncertainty and risk, decision-making is biased toward the familiar, the earlier decisions and organizational inertia.

Today planning involves progressive realization – the concept that knowledge, understanding, and perceptions are transient over time. Progressive realization uses a network of cross-functional teams to design and create alternatives. They test, measure, learn, rethink and retest.

The CEO and the management team have the responsibility for the analysis of problematic situations that could challenge the organization’s long-term survival. Managing disruptive change will require rethinking the organizational emphasis on the short-term. Focusing instead, on creating a strategic vision to guide the adaptive symmetry of leadership, vision, technology, talent, and a culture. Prepared for whatever the future brings

Disruptive change is forcing organizations to rethink long-standing business concepts. The traditional hierarchically structures that were designed to ensure predictability, conformity and budget control are being replaced by a horizontal network of business units, functional workgroups, and cross-functional project teams, collaborating through culture.

Cross-functional teams with diverse perspectives, personality traits, talents, backgrounds, and interests are better at innovation, creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making than capable individuals alone or teams with cognitive bias.

When freed from top-down, command and control decision-making, empowered employee teams can offer new forms of innovative thinking, problem-solving, products, services, and customer engagement strategies.

This hybrid flat and team-based structure can offer many significant advantages. Both a horizontal and a vertical organizational structure. Both functional and project-based. Fewer traditional managers. More project managers. Fluid boundaries and collaborative. Cross-functional planning teams, working together to experiment, prototype and discover new innovative customer solutions.

In the constant battle to manage disruptive change, high-potential organizations are increasing their investment in intangible or conceptual assets. Intangible assets are strategic expenditures designed to create value over many years. Organizations that are not investing in conceptual intangibles will increasingly become competitively disadvantaged.

Organizations have long emphasized the customer value proposition – getting and keeping customers by exceeding their expectations profitably.

Many of the customer branding and marketing concepts apply as well to winning the talent war.

Like customers, talent is in demand.

Like customers, talent has choices.

Like customers, you do not pick talent; they pick you.

Like customers, talent shops online for jobs.

Customers check ratings, Talent checks reputations.

Customers check prices, Talent checks salaries.

How should an organization approach digital disruption? You cannot look to the past for what has worked. You cannot trust your instincts because everything is changing. However, digital transformation is a categorical imperative for long-term success and survival.

With the constant stream of new technologies blurring industry boundaries and redefining markets, digital transformation demands the leadership's attention, understanding, and action.  It Cannot be Delegated. It Must Be Led. It may be an uncomfortable subject for many executives but an unavoidable obligation. With an investment of time and some coaching, the terminology, concepts, and principles are understandable.

5G, the fifth generation wireless network will not only address the challenges of cybersecurity and the exponential growth of mobile devices; it will be transformative, potentially disruptive, creating new businesses, new industries, profoundly changing how many organizations work, and how we live our lives.

5G is not an evolution of the current 4G wireless networks, but instead, a revolution in wireless communications technology that will ensure end to end trust, security, and confidence.

With Fast Identity Online Alliance (FIDO) cybersecurity solutions are in the pipeline. Cybersecurity threats were not a consideration when the Internet was conceived. Globally, cybersecurity threats pass through the Internet backbone communications unchallenged. As a result, today’s internet favors the cybercriminals. Threatening individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide.

Over time, we’ve learned that adding incremental cybersecurity solutions from different vendors, not designed to interoperate, have led to gaps and vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Security must be designed in, not added on.

It is the authors view that the only long-term answer is to stop the invaders at the front gate. Once they get in, we can slow them down but not eliminate the threats.

Identity and Access Management is about defining and managing individual network users roles and access management privileges. Ensuring that only registered users with trusted devices and software are granted access to online services, applications, and data assets, and in the right context.

The Fast Identity Online Alliance (FIDO) is a nonprofit organization with over 250 members, including the leading technology providers and global brands, formed to address the issues of interoperability among available authentication technologies.

In each deployment of FIDO authentication standards, the end-user does not need to understand how the process works; only that it is secure. With FIDO, the login experience is simple, and security is behind-the-scenes.

Creating a Secure 5G communications network and services environment for the Future Internet. Over time and with much effort, an infinitely rich and secure 5G network will ensure that only the right individuals, using the right devices, with the right software, get the proper access, to the right websites, applications, data, and for the right reasons.

Although the book’s primary focus is the business enterprise, its Board of Directors, Management, Staff, Family Members, Business Partners, and Suppliers, the concepts and principles apply to Healthcare, Education, and Government Entities as well.