It was 1987 when the American rock band Guns N’ Roses released the Appetite for Destruction album’s second single, “Welcome to the Jungle”.
I can tell you that a digital journey in any organization in the Foodservice Equipment and Supplies Industry could be summarized as a dangerous safari in a jungle.
Actually, nothing explains workplace life better than the jungle analogy:
Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every dayYou learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we playIf you got hunger for what you see, you’ll take it eventuallyYou can have everything you want but you better not take it from me
“It’s none of my business”
Most organizations are functional: sales people with sales people, designers with designers, marketing with marketing, accounting with accounting, etc. (and most of the time everyone hates each other…)
It’s natural, easy to explain, easy to grow, and it’s also very efficient: people with the same skills understand each other immediately, help each other, improve together.
The problem arises when the work is no longer by function but by workflow.
Developing a software or implementing a digital project, for example, is a transversal process, perhaps the most transversal of transversal processes, and it is precisely at that moment that the functional organization shows its dark side.
Everyone just optimizes their own garden.
Translation: handoff. I’m done, now it’s your problem.
You can not even imagine how much I hate this attitude, it destroys companies.
Cross-Team Coordination: The Golden Fleece
In my experience, this is very common: people speak to each other a little and badly.
And when there’s no clear process, the situation gets worse: everyone interprets the situation how they want, everyone passes the buck, arrogance grows and no one sees the whole picture.
I remember being fascinated by Greek mythology during my secondary school years here in Italy, attending what we call “liceo classico” (5-year academic education specializing in humanistic subjects like literature, art history, ancient languages, history, philosophy and natural sciences).
The Argonauts were a band of heroes who, in the years before the Trojan War (around 1300 BC), accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece.
Cross-Team collaboration is almost like the Golden Fleece, and sometimes I feel like Jason with an epic quest to face in order to help organizations.
Bonus: turnover is killing me
Have you ever been in a workplace so long as the original coworkers have left, so now you’re in season 8 with all the new characters?
I don’t know how much time I spent nurturing this Industry on the same topics over and over:
-
- one reason is, of course, lack of understanding. We are living in a stainless steel world, digital is just an expensive accessory that you can’t touch in most people’s minds. And that reminds me of Colin Sharpe’s famous quote – a classic catchphrase among programmers: “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
- another relevant reason is that you have to speak different “languages”: marketing slang with marketers, sales slang with sales, IT slang with computer scientists, engineering slang with technicians.
- but the biggest reason for me repeating hundreds of times the same things (unfortunately, I’m not Paganini: “Paganini non ripete” – Paganini doesn’t repeat – is a famous Italian expression used to refuse to repeat a phrase, gesture, or action just performed. The expression originates from an anecdote from 1818, when violinist Niccolò Paganini refused to grant an encore to Prince Carlo Felice of Savoy at the Carignano Theater in Turin) is people leaving their jobs (or getting fired…) so frequently that you always have to start a discussion from scratch and projects last 12 months before even starting…
—–
Stay data-hungry. Stay data-foolish.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Consultant
