A Practical Guide to Digital Transformation

I read a lot of articles about Digital Transformation and, while a lot of them are well written and well researched, I often feel they fail to add any practical value. On one level how can they? Digital Transformation should be something that you do, not something that you write about.

I also reflect back on my experiences in working within organisations that have transformed, with leaders who have led transformation in practical steps. I count myself lucky to have worked for some wonderful leaders in my career. And I try to think how best to capture what these people did in leading transformation.

I also believe that we are all seekers of knowledge, of advice. I believe we are all seeking to improve ourselves. This is part of what makes us human. Typically we read something, get an idea of how to do things and then set off and do it. Often we ignore the original advice , believing that we can translate what we have read about, heard about or thought about into some ground-breaking action. Sometimes we succeed and talk about it as our success, sometimes we fail and perhaps talk about it a little less.

So, it is with some trepidation, that I would like to suggest that Laszlo Bock’s book about working at Google, “Work Rules”, is a very practical guide to all of us on how to execute a digital transformation.

First off a few words about the book. If you have read the book then maybe you should skip these paragraphs. Laszlo Bock was the Head of People Operations at Google for many years. People Operations being the term that Google use to describe HR but, as Laszlo reveals, what he did in People Operations was a little different to what most of us might expect from an HR leader.

I did find the book a little condescending. I have worked for large companies that have put in place much of what Laszlo describes in the book so many of the concepts were familiar to me. To someone that is new to large organisations, has little knowledge of HR or very little knowledge of behavioural science then I hope the tone is less condescending and more informative.

What is quite unique and I doubt that many other organisations could replicate is the sheer speed of growth and scaling that Google has done between 2004 and today. Is there any other company that has grown so quickly to reach 50,000 people? I suspect not.

That speed of growth makes the HR job quite challenging and you can imagine the sheer pace at which Laszlo and his team had to work in order to continue to build and perfect the people operations practices in Google. So, Laszlo does achieve an enormous amount as documented within this book — hiring practices, performance management, learning organisation, pay and benefits, global culture — you name it.

The book contains 14 work rules that are summarised at the end of each chapter. These include topics like give your work meaning, trust your people, pay unfairly and nudge. At the end there is a chapter entitled, “Afterword for HR Geeks Only: Building the World’s First People Operations Team”, with sub headings like “strive for nirvana”, “use data to predict and shape the future”, “improve relentlessly” and “field an unconventional team”. To me this summed up the ethos of this book far more than repetition of the 14 work rules could ever do.

OK, so this is a book about Google’s HR. How is that a practical guide to digital transformation?

The first way to look at this book is as a way to reinvent work and the workplace. What Laszlo put in place for people operations at Google could be put into any workplace, large or small. Putting in place the 14 rules that he quotes several times during the book is a set of practical steps to transforming your workplace.

What I feel is more significant is the way that he describes Google and Laszlo’s part in working at Google. Of course he refers to some internet entrepreneurs and there are passing references to many of the technologies that you could describe as being part of digital transformation. However it is the approach that Google brings to running a company, the way that it tries to make employees feel like owners, the over-arching need to treat people “fairly” (even though one chapter is entitled Pay Unfairly), the respect for people’s opinions and the need to gather data to support all people decisions (described in pages 127 to 135) that marks this book as truly documenting a transformation.

If you are in the market for a transformation, one that embraces the digital age, one that leverages the psyche of Gen X/Gen Y/millenials, then you would do well to read this book.