Digital Was Never the Problem
Why aging organizations fail at technology, and why it is almost never the technology Fifth in a weekly series on how institutions fail and how they come back. Twenty-five years ago I helped install a working system inside a factory that died anyway. Nine years ago I ran a training with no strategic purpose whatsoever, and it turned out to be the thing that carried an organization through a digitization it never asked for. The difference between those two stories has nothing to do with software. The question There were diapers on the desk. Four or five brands, cut open, laid out across the table so the layers could be compared. Somebody in that room had been doing real product analysis, the unglamorous kind, with a blade and a ruler. I was there because the invoicing had just been automated. A software firm I had brought in a few weeks earlier had installed a stock and sales system, and for the first time in the history of that company the sales invoices came out of a mach...