TRUSTING TECHNOLOGY

Trusting Technology is about adapting to new ways of life and work. Technology merely provides the platform.When we talk about the challenges of technology, we’re really talking about the challenges of improvement—the ways we change and the lessons we learn on our path to making things better.

The challenge—and the opportunity—is that technology offers us so many options. It’s bemusing! What areas of our business do we focus on? How can we make them better? Trusting Technology is a handbook to help business leaders become centred in their focus, approach, and resilience when adopting and adapting technology. Among other things, you will learn how to:

• Generate, curate, and make ideas happen.

• Better understand how to improve your customer’s journey.

• Build a machine that connects your community of customers and colleagues.

• Nurture confidence in the face of change.

• Convert information to insights for your colleagues and customers.

• Describe your security strategy in five minutes.

• Capture your business’s special sauce to create new assets.

This vital conversation is not about the technology itself, but rather, the connections it enables and the change it imposes on our comfortably imperfect routine and environment. The means are not software code and hardware bits, but rather systems thinking, empathetic change, rapid learning, and adaptive planning.

10-MINUTE REFLECTIONS: VOLUME ONE

Reflections provides a tool to help you step out of a busy routine to consider your business, where you are succeeding, and how you could do better.

Volume 1 covers a series of 30 topics, each with a 5 minute read followed by a 5 minute exercise, designed to prompt your thinking and help you to generate ideas for action. Some of the topics you'll address:

• Knowing when your team needs help

• Revealing value, one step at a time

• Production lines and the bottleneck effect

• Letting information flow

• Outside-in design for your business

• When better beats best

Address all these and more—in just 10 minutes each.

10-MINUTE REFLECTIONS: VOLUME TWO

Reflections provides a tool to help you step out of a busy routine to consider your business, where you are succeeding, and how you could do better.

Volume 2 offers another 30 wide-ranging topics for reflection. Combine with volume 1 and you have 60 potential game changers designed to prompt your thinking and help you to generate ideas for action. Volume 2 topics include:

• How your business restricts innovation

• Your best approach to get lean

• Are you really solving, or simply moving, the problem 

• Risk, confidence and your dream job

• Creating experts

• Using minimalist deadlines

Remember—each topic provides a 5 minute read followed by a 5 minute exercise, designed to prompt your thinking and help you to generate ideas for action.

THE TECHNOLOGY LEADER’S HANDBOOK

The pace at which new tools are being made available to business leaders can seem bewildering. New fields of work are being enabled by oceans of data and massive, affordable processing power on tap.

The typical CEO—or product, sales and finance executive—does not have the time or inclination to keep up, let alone to sort the useful from the marketing hype.

There’s a need for Business Technologists like you to step forward, understand where the business value can lie, and translate this into terms that will excite the busy non-technical business leader.

This is the opportunity ahead of you. Are you up for it?

If so, you’ll need to double down on new skills. Sure, you’ll need to wrap your head around the technical aspects, but it’s the people skills that will allow you to stand out. The learning, planning and other topics that I cover in this handbook.

You’ll find a thousand articles on this stuff scattered across the blogosphere, but to my knowledge, this is the first book that covers them all in a single concise, handy volume.

I’ve coached hundreds of technologists over the last few decades. It’s been a passion, and I’m excited to provide this synopsis of lessons I have learned in the process. A word of warning—I advocate brevity and prefer business books that get to the point. Most help in the shortest time. This book has 17,000 words—I hope every one is useful to you.

And I hope you enjoy the read. Most of all, I hope you will bound ahead as a result.