What is “Digital Transformation” and do I need one?

As an entrepreneur in our modern digital economy your business needs to leverage technology for success, and “digital transformation” has been the buzzword de jour for years to describe what companies need to do to become competitive in the 21st Century. Even so, business owners rightly respond, “But what is it and do I really need to it?”

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Learning from Failing

Concert Audience and Stage

I have been listening to the Cautionary Tales podcast all year long as I drive with my 10 year old son to and from his Saturday Art of Problem Solving program. The delivery and style of the stories create both and emotional and intellectual response of joy and satisfaction; frequently mingled with discomfort, sadness, longing, and pathos. This Saturday we listened to another episode and it was no different. Except it was.

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Your Business: The Innovation Engine Society Needs

If you run a small- or medium-sized business, you likely have a very intimate knowledge about your customers’ needs and goals that many of your larger competitors do not. This is why we, at Simbiotrek (sim-bÄ“-ˈä-ˈtrek), believe there is huge opportunity for smaller firms with established offerings to grow and have oversized impact by focusing on customer value.

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Overcoming the “Achilles Heel” of Agile

I recently noticed a former colleague gain a Disciplined Agile certification. In my congratulatory message I also indicated my interest in learning more. In addition to that conversation, he also pointed me towards a series of meetups and LinkedIn articles led by Ivar Jacobson around “Essence for Agility”. I won’t go into all the aspects of that, but I do want to share some of the thinking that it inspired me to do about how I’ve been been working and why that has been a solution to the Achilles’ Heel of Agile Adoption.

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3 Necessities for Becoming a Repeatedly Innovative Organization

The article below was originally published in June 2018 and was based on a previous article from November 2017. Over the course of 2020 I had the opportunity to return to these ideas, refine them, apply them in new situations, and learn a bunch more from my experiences and also the study of others’. I intend to revisit and provide updates and expansions to some of the ideas in this post over the course of 2021 – and beyond: learning is a lifelong activity and learning is at the heart of innovation.

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