How To Turn Adversity Into Purpose Through Mindset written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with Siri Lindley In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Siri Lindley. She is a two-time world champion triathlete and winner of twelve ITU World Cup races. She’s the top female triathlon coach in the world, she’s guided Olympic medalists and Ironman champions to not only become better athletes […] Rewiring Organizations For A Successful Digital Transformation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with Rodney Zemmel In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Rodney Zemmel. He is co-leader of the McKinsey Digital Practice,  a senior partner based in New York, and a member of McKinsey’s Shareholders Council, the firm’s board of directors. He serves clients across a range of industries on growth strategy, performance improvement, and value creation by harnessing the power of data and analytics, digital culture and capabilities, and modernized core technology. He is the co-author of Rewired: the McKinsey’s Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI. This book shares the lessons McKinsey has learned helping companies deliver successful digital and AI transformations into a detailed “how to” manual.  Key Takeaway: Digital transformation requires organizations to rewire their processes and operations, leveraging new technologies to achieve value. It’s important that organizations take ownership of their digital transformation as an ongoing journey and actively learn to implement changes in order to keep improving. Rodney highlights the significance of selecting the right areas for transformation that can deliver a differentiating value, plus the importance of upskilling and reskilling existing talent within digital changes. Questions I ask Rodney Zemmel: [01:48] How much collaboration or maybe fighting goes on to structure a book like the McKinsey guide, that’s effectively going to represent the brand itself? [03:20] Do you see this book as something you can take to a client and say we’re going to walk each of the sections here? [04:28] Why is the title of the book “Rewired”? [08:56] How does somebody start addressing what is essentially a line-by-line audit of everything they’re doing? [12:22] Would you look at the value derived by digital technologies differently than by producing customer value or revenue? [14:23] Are you advising companies that they might need to get different people or new people on these digital changes? [16:32] Are there organizations that are significantly behind in this rewiring? [17:50] Is there a correlation between leadership inside of an industry by how digital it is? [19:02] Are you seeing people wasting a lot of time and money on AI because it’s the trendy thing of the moment? [20:07] How crippling is any of this without access to data inside an organization? More About Rodney Zemmel: More about Rewired: the McKinsey’s Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI Get in contact with Rodney More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training: Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here Take The Marketing Assessment: Marketingassessment.co Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please! Duct Tape Transcript Email Download New Tab John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, did you know that HubSpot’s annual inbound conference is coming up? That’s right. It’ll be in Boston from September 5th through the 8th. Every year inbound brings together leaders across business, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and more. You’ll be able to discover all the latest must know trends and tactics that you can actually put into place to scale your business in a sustainable way. You can learn from industry experts and be inspired by incredible spotlight talent. This year. The likes of Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, Guy Raz are all going to make appearances. Visit inbound.com and get your ticket today. You won’t be sorry. This programming is guaranteed to inspire and recharge. That’s right. Go to inbound.com to get your ticket today. (01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rodney Zemmel. He’s a co-leader of the McKinsey Digital Practice, a senior partner based in New York, and a member of McKinsey’s Shareholders Council. The firm’s board of directors serves clients across a range of industries on growth strategy, performance improvement, and value creation by harnessing the power of data and analytics, digital culture and capabilities, and modernizing core technology. We’re gonna talk about a book that he co-authored called Rewired: The McKinsey’s Guide to Out Competing in the Age of Digital and AI. So Rodney, welcome to the show. Rodney Zemmel (01:46): Thanks for having me on, John, it’s a pleasure to be here. John Jantsch (01:48): So I have to ask as an author also, but as an author who basically has only an editor to answer to, I’m wondering how, how writing a McKinsey guide like so a, a tool that’s effectively going to represent the brand and be put out there as the tool that everybody uses. How much collaboration or maybe fighting goes on to structure a book like that? Rodney Zemmel (02:11): Your podcast is only 20 minutes, right? ? So it’s actually, I think this is the first book that we’ve ever put the words McKinsey Guide on. Okay. So this was a very conscious step on our part. Yeah. And the model we had in mind, there’s a book called Valuation, which our, our firm has had an updated every year for the past 20 years or more. And that really is like the guide for corporate finance executives on how to value a company. And it’s sort of become like a standard business school textbook. Yeah. There’s no equivalent in the world of digital. And there’s a bit of a sense that digital was a bit sort of the wild west in terms of, oh, it’s all about agile and people improvise the method and you can’t measure things as well. And you know, you’ve gotta try it and see, and we don’t believe that, right? We believe there is a systematic method that has proven to get results. That’s what we tried to create. And the three of us who did this together, myself, Kate, and Eric, we actually worked together and different clients around the world all the time. So we had a lot of fun on it. So, you know, there was maybe, you know, debates around the best way to say something or whose data and whose examples to use, but there wasn’t much, uh, sort of real, you know, real, real tension and putting it together. John Jantsch (03:19): So, so is this the, you know, junior consultant at McKinsey’s, you know, book to take into a client and say, this is, you know, we’re gonna walk work through, you know, each of the sections here. Obviously everybody’s different, but I mean, is that how you see it? Rodney Zemmel (03:32): I actually think this is the client’s book to read, right? And for them to like understand how to do things themselves in their own organizations, and of course by all means, call us if there’s a need to help. But, you know, we actually do think there’s a better way to do this. And you know, we know the fact that only 30% of digital transformations are hitting the value that they’re intended to hit. And we wanna see the world do better. And frankly, we we’re, we’re far enough down the learning curve here that I know we’re putting sort of a lot of intellectual property out in the world through publishing this book and, you know, anybody that can have it and therefore, you know, do you, do you need to call us or not? We’re confident that this is about sort of a learning journey for clients and people who are further down the learning curve are always gonna want to get better and better. So I feel like we’ve sort of published the, you know, the 2.0 version here and there’s always gonna be a 3.0 and a 4.0 that people will need help on. John Jantsch (04:25): So why rewired? I mean, I think a lot of people would say, well, you know, for the last 20 years I guess since we came on the internet, we’ve been wired, right? I, again, I’m tossing that up for you to smack it outta the park, but, but I think that, you know, a lot of people would think, why are we having to rewire what’s different? Rodney Zemmel (04:44): Great John Jantsch (04:44): Question. Is it just an evolution? Rodney Zemmel (04:46): No. So I look, I I’ll give you an example, uh, the answer to that using like generative AI, which is like the hottest conversation topic in the world right now, right? Generative AI is the coolest thing and it’s deceptively easy to go pilot and go trying your business, you know, in the marketing function, in customer engagement and go do a cool pilot and get things up and running. However, it’s really hard to get it working at enterprise scale and get real measurable value from it, right? So if you wanna write somebody a birthday poem or if you want to on a one-off basis send some cool customized things to a customer, it’s easy to do. If you want to build a system where you can send tens of thousands of customized things to customers every day in a way that is safe, in a way that really reflects the personalization preferences of that customer in a way that doesn’t let bias creep in a way that has measurable economic impact, then it’s not enough just to go launch a piece of technology. You actually need to rewire your commercial function around that technology. So there’s this idea that it’s not about like, you know, sticking a coat of paint on it that you actually do need to go and fundamentally rewire the house to take advantage of these technologies. John Jantsch (05:58): A and do you get the sense that all over, you know, companies in, in all over the world that there are little pockets of people just doing this on their own and that’s that there’s a real danger in what you of not sort of institutionalizing, you know, whatever methods you take. Rodney Zemmel (06:12): Absolutely. So, you know, when we did our interviews with companies, so what we tried to do is say, look who’s creating value from digital transformation? And you know, there’s about a quarter of companies who we think are really hitting their economic targets between 25 and 30%, depending on the kind of transformation. And we did interviews with them and then we did interviews with the ones who were missing and then with some who were somewhere in between. And one of the most common things we heard, like one of the most common failure modes was I’ve got more pilots than an aircraft carrier , right? So, you know, a CEO or a chief marketing officer says, you know, we’re going big on personalization, we’re going big on digital customer engagement and next thing you know, it’s everywhere. But there isn’t actually a top down roadmap of how to do it with real milestones and metrics and uh, around it. (07:01): And a real fundamental change in the operating model. If you’ll let me actually, sorry, this maybe a longer answer than you’re looking for, but there’s a beautiful example in the banking industry. Um, so if you use any banking app, right, the customer banking apps, the private banking apps, whatever, every bank’s app is basically the same, right? Some are designed a little bit better than others, but they all have the same functionality. So we were at a round table with consumer banking CEOs and a few of them said, you know, digital is table stakes. It’s something we have to invest in, but it’s not, uh, competitively differentiating. We said, we don’t think that’s true, let’s actually go look at the data. And what we did was we got the data on actually how they were doing digital. We looked outside in and did some interviews at the work practices across the different banks, and then we looked at their economics and we saw that actually again, it was about the same ratio. (07:47): About 25% of them were actually making money. Were showing positive return on equity, were showing positive growth per, in value per customer through their digital initiatives. You could not tell that if you just looked at the customer apps, right? They were the same mm-hmm. , you could tell that if you started asking questions like, how does business and technology work together in your organization, right? Do you really have a proper agile operating model? Right? Do you have a single set of digital priorities across the company? Do you have a, a clear technology architecture with the specific set of features to it? Do you have, so when you went through and it sort of wasn’t just, you know, the front of house, but that actually rewired all the way from front to back, those were the ones who were making money from it. John Jantsch (08:32): Yeah. It’s kinda like the apps were just an interface and really nothing more . Rodney Zemmel (08:36): Yeah, yeah. And the necessary, right, but not sufficient. John Jantsch (08:39): Yeah, they were, they, they replaced tellers though is how they looked at it. So, so the book is broken up into sections. The first one really is the transformation roadmap. So I mean, how are you advising people? Because just what you explained was a transformation of how somebody would look at their entire business. So what, you know, how does somebody start addressing, you know, what is essentially, you know, a line by line audit of everything they’re doing? Rodney Zemmel (09:04): Yeah. So I don’t think it shouldn’t feel like an audit, right? So I will, I’ll use generative AI as an example again, right? So I was with a company a couple of weeks ago who said they’ve got 75 different pilots going across their organization on Gen AI. And their question for us was how should they organize and govern those and prioritize them and resource them and so on. And you know, answer to that a little bit qui is don’t do that, right? It’s just right. If you’re doing 75 things in this new and fast moving area, you’re not gonna be able to do them well. What you actually need to do is to step back and say, where is the value really going to be in changing your business? And yes, there are easy things to do with gen ai, maybe in HR around recruitment or maybe in finance with, you know, being able to pull from different feeds across your finance systems and so on. (09:53): But is that really gonna drive differentiating value for your business? Is that something you should spend time on? Or is that something that all the various software companies you work with, they’re gonna go innovate within their own product? Instead, pick the area that’s unique to you and that can really drive value. Don’t pick tons of areas, pick one area. It has to be an area that’s big enough to matter. And our rule of thumb is 20% of ebitda, it’s not gonna drive a 20% EBITDA improvement in a particular area. It’s not gonna be big enough to sustain people’s attention. So pick an area unlike that and then develop the real plan around that. And it’s never gonna be one use case, right? A while ago, five years ago, there was this idea of like the silver bullet use case, right? If only we could do amazing, you know, supply chain forecasting, right? We wouldn’t get caught out in the chip shortages or whatever it is, but it’s multiple use cases that need to sort of feed together Our, our data actually says it’s 11 companies who had 11 use cases within a particular domain or adjacent domains were the ones who were more likely to sort of cut through into being in that quadrant that’s creating value. John Jantsch (10:58): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor, Marketing Made Simple. It’s a podcast hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work. And in a recent episode, JJ and April chat with StoryBrand certified guides and agency owners about how to use ChatGPT for marketing purposes. We all know how important that is today. Listen to marketing made simple. Wherever you get your podcasts. (11:34): Hey marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the key to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three-step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at DTM world slash certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. (12:22): So, so let’s talk about value then for a minute. Because some of the AI, for example, or some of the tech technology, digital technology, maybe it doesn’t deliver customer value, it actually delivers convenience or efficiency inside the organization. So