As Global Chief Product and CX Officer at Nortal I delivered a keynote to 150+ digital executives from across North America and Europe.

Successful customer centric strategies are designed from the perspective of customers (outside-in), but the change required to make them real has to be delivered by employees (inside-out).

With a talk that connects early management science such as Taylorism and Lean Manufacturing with today's outperformance of product-led companies in the 'Magnificent 7', I explain that traditional management styles in many corporate and government organizations have focused on process, structure and risk minimization, rather than enabling employees to deliver value efficiently.

However, the most successful organizations today focus on building adaptable organizations, in which employees can seamlessly make change happen and deliver value for customers. With a simple framework, case studies and practical advice on how to move forward, I present an exciting new point of view on Digital Innovation. View the talk on Nortal's website here.

An opinion piece published in at the well respected CFO.com online and print publications.

In addition to crippling breakdowns, tech debt can open the door to hackers, regulatory non-compliance, or attacks by rogue employees. It can degrade the customer experience and website accessibility, lower search engine rankings, and allow licenses to expire unexpectedly. Beleaguered employees waste countless hours on manual workarounds, eventually leading some to resign in frustration. Companies that seek outside investment may watch potential funders walk away because a code review identifies excessive tech debt.

In this article I consider how code reviews, non-functional testing, regular security audits, pair programming, AI, clear metrics, and better stakeholder communication can eleviate the worst of the commercial impact of technical debt. Read the full article here on CFO.com.

Co-author on this academic paper in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that evaluates the impact of healthcare pathway changes implemented as part of an award-winning programme I led, on behalf of AstraZeneca.

Key highlights from the analysis of recent (2015-2020) routes to diagnosis for patients with heart failure in a geography of 2.5million:

Route-to-diagnosis is dominated by emergency hospital admissions – the case for a staggering 70% of patients.

Diagnosis through community pathways positively impacts survival (a previously untested assumption).

£2,500 – the saving to the NHS every time a patient is diagnosed with heart failure through community pathways.

Link to the full paper here.

An opinion piece published in at the marketing and advertising industry stalwart AdAge.

With the number of AI tools expanding rapidly, and new capabilities emerging every week, it is easy for marketers to feel left behind, or to throw caution to the wind and start using AI in the wrong ways.

This article explores the need to for a pragmatic and deliberate strategy for employing AI in the marketing industry. In particular vertical (industry specific) AI tools should be considered along with the mass-market AI models from OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic etc.

These need to be combined with clear responsibilities for rolling out AI best practices, in particular employing cross-functional innovation teams. Get it right and marketers can prototype, experiment and learn much more quickly and cheaply than before. Read the full article here.

Opinion piece in CEO magazine, online and print editions. Used to successfully position Nortal as a thought leader in employee experience technology.

The key to boosting employee motivation and spurring innovation at a critical time is hidden in plain sight — tucked into wallets, hanging around necks or attached to a belt lanyard.

It’s time for the humble employee badge to have its time in the spotlight.

Even as technology and the pandemic transformed the workplace and work habits, this slim piece of plastic has barely changed. While it grants office access, shows the boss we’ve arrived, and signals to security that we belong in the building, it could—and should—be doing much more. CEOs dedicated to bringing employees back to the office, building camaraderie and promoting innovation would do well to support reinventing the little ID card.

Link to the full article here.

An unique opinion piece discussing different 'system levels' of experimentation and what we can learn from each of them to build better products and services.

The writings of Charles Darwin, Joseph Schumpeter and Clayton Christensen span almost 200 years and they are rarely compared, however, there is a common theme that runs through all of their work that holds the key to developing better products and services.

These thinkers all produced famous analyses of different systems. Darwin of course focused on biological systems, Schumpeter focused on economic systems and Christensen focused on market / organizational systems.

There is a common theme across all of their analyses – that there is an underlying process of experimentation which selects the winners from the losers.

I like winning and rather dislike loosing. When I develop products and services for clients, I want them to win, to be successful. And I believe that the process these great thinkers all analyzed, experimentation, can also be used to select winning strategies, products, services, features and even user experience details.