Digital technologies now increasingly pervade both business and everyday life. Employees and customers alike, whether business or consumers, draw their expectations from digital experiences. And techniques like big data and AI are obviously impossible without digitization.
When launching a new software product, the tendency can be to go for a ‘quick and dirty’ approach. And often, too much attention is paid to development and product design, too little to marketing. You get products that work really well, but don’t address key needs and requirements among the target market. Or you get products, sometimes high-quality ones, that launch in perfect silence and disappear the same way.
Over the past several years, I’ve tried to put my finger on why leading transformation feels a bit different than other leadership roles. In the area of transformation, leaders are often the primary change agent and don’t have others inside their organizations to turn to for advice.
When most people think of “computer software,” they think of applications that are used to interact with a PC, laptop, or mobile device. These programs display icons or information on a screen and take input from a keyboard, pointing device, touch screen, or game controller. But interactive software represents only a fraction of the software that’s out there.
In the early days of radio broadcasting, a radio receiver was known as a “wireless.” This term distinguished radio communications from the telephone and telegraph, which relied on wires.
Refrigeration fun fact: Electrically powered air conditioning, which relies on the principle of the refrigeration cycle, was invented not to make homes and other buildings comfortable in hot weather, but to control the temperature and humidity in a printing shop. The lithography process that was common in the early 1900s could be adversely affected by variations in temperature and humidity, so William Carrier invented a device to keep those factors stable.
