What was the best thing about November?
To me, it was the World Forum events we run across Europe at ServiceNow.
We welcomed over 5,000 customers and partners in four locations: London, Frankfurt, Paris and Rotterdam.
The exchange was incredible! There was so much learning on stage and off stage while networking.
Reflecting on the discussions, the main conversations were around 5 key themes which we covered in the main keynotes of each event. I'd like to share these with you today.
Last week, I attended the European Women in Tech conference in Amsterdam. It's been a while since I went to an event like this and it was great to be back learning and networking.
I attended dozens of sessions and wanted to spend some time reflecting on them.
The best way for me to reflect is by writing. Writing is my way of thinking and learning and I'm getting back to it more and more as well.
So, here are my top learnings from the European Women in Tech conference.
Throughout my career, I've worked in three big tech companies and consulted hundreds of SMBs.
No matter the size, most organisations tend to fail in two areas which undermine or slow their performance and growth.
The first one is what we'll talk about today and that is execution.
Making things happen efficiently and effectively is the number one challenge for the majority of companies but unfortunately, most of them don't even admit they have an execution problem or don't place particular importance on it.
And it's not just about how people do work. It's really about how decisions are being made, how individuals are being let to execute on these decisions and then how change is being adopted to manifest the outcome of these decisions.
Few companies have proper project, program and change management practices used consistently in every team and every department. Most organisations tend to leave teams and departments to figure out how they execute. There's nothing wrong with giving autonomy but the result in 99% of the cases are siloed teams with disparate priorities who don't talk to each other and end up doing similar pieces of work and in the end not knowing whether they were truly responsible for it.
I was recently made aware of a book called "Zone to Win" and having just watched a video summarising the key points, I found it fascinating.
It's not just about why established companies struggle to embrace disruptive innovation but about how they can do it.
Even though I have not yet read the book, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the key points with you as they can be an eye-opener.
The author, Geoffrey Moore, argues that companies struggle with disruption because of internal issues. Having worked in different types of industries and different organizational sizes, I can definitely agree. Internal processes and challenges stall innovation. Companies get too bogged down into fixing things rather than innovating and changing.
To resolve such issues, the book says organisations need to segment the enterprise into distinct management zones, each with its own methods and metrics.
These zones are also aligned with the strategic horizons of the company - a model defined by McKinsey around annual planning of investments and resources and when you get a return on them.
This is a guest post by my friend and former colleague Sam Hirbod.
This year, INBOUND 2020 - HubSpot's yearly inbound conference - moved to an all-digital immersive format featuring exceptional speakers ranging from Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon Web Services to Chrissy Teigen, Bestselling Author.
The move to digital events is not something HubSpot is alone in doing, it’s been an ongoing trend for the past years but 2020 definitely accelerated the process of having industries digitising their efforts.
When applicable, digitalisation removes the physical barriers of COVID-19, making it easy for people to still meet, albeit online. As a result, people were able to attend INBOUND 2020 from all over the world from the comfort of their own homes or offices.
What’s the downside of digitalisation? From my perspective, although biased as I work within the tech industry, there aren’t too many as it’s all about putting customers first and making sure everything still works the way they want it to.
