Digital Tools for the rest of us.

Digital tools are there to make our work life more easy, more efficient, more enjoyable. But a lot of them are very complicated, and there are a loooot of them, so they become more of a distraction.

I’m a big fan of those new ways of working and like to experiment with them. Sadly, a lot of time, tools don’t work out in a real life company that is not a trendy tech-startup. So I gathered the most basic tools that help you in managing your work, collaborate with colleagues, share files, get things done,… that actually work in an environment where not everybody is a digital native.

Enjoy ‘Digital tools for the rest of us‘! Share if you like!

Digital Work Tools for the rest of us (2015) from Filip Modderie

2015 Work resolutions

Yes, that time of year, so let’s look forward!

Share more

Yes, that is primarily with you out there! Colleagues, blog readers, friends. Not because sharing is caring, but because sharing is a gift (of which the value is being defined by the receiver and not the one that gives it btw), so I’ll refrain myself from asking myself to much the question: is this relevant?! It’s up to you to decide on that one.

Doodle/sketchnote: practice practice

Inspired by my friend Nele from london linger & the great book from Mike Rodhe. Yes! Visual is the way to focus your brain on the main message & learnings.

As a little extra: don’t worry about making mistakes, drawing in non-erasable inkt,… : Practice makes perfect and you can always say Sorry afterwards, start over or just ignore your mistakes altogether.

Put your name on it!

Putting your name on it makes it personal. It’s not about taking credit (sometimes it should be!), but about putting your heart into it and taking responsibility for the results. Of your work, of your dreams, of your ideas,… Fully agree with Seth Godin.

Don’t RUN, move with a quick pace!

At work that is. If you are late: deal with it.

Keep up the willingness to LEARN.

I believe the willingness and ability to learn new skills quickly might be my most valuable competence. So let’s focus on the things I’m good in to make the difference (instead of putting to much time and effort in those ‘development points’).

Look people more in the eye.

Apparently, it helps to show confidence 😉

Here we go, up to a great 2015!

Extra: The Unofficial Goldman Sachs Guide To New Year’s Resolutions

Visual read – Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands

Just a quick fix on the learnings of Marty Neumeier’s “ZAG – The number one strategy of high-performing brands”.

7 habits of highly effective people: 7 learnings in 1 visual.

I am a firm believer of getting inspiration from books. They have a lot of advantages compared to other forms of learning:

They are cheap – For the price of one class-room or in-house training, you can buy books for the rest of your professional career.
You can easily pass them on (And share your thoughts on them).
You can skip parts (You know the feeling when you are in a classroom training and the first 3 hours are on topics you already know a lot about).
You can access them everywhere (hey, I’m living in a country with Blackout potential ;-)).
They typically go more in-dept than blog-posts.
But off course, you need to remember what is in there, so sometimes you need a quick recap of knowledge. That’s why doodling the main learnings of a book can come in handy.

My latest one is an old one: The 7 habits of highly effective people (by Stephen R. Covey). Down in one image!

Minimum Awesome Product

Creating a new product or service can take years. More and more companies however move away from the “don’t launch it until it’s completely finished, retested and out of date” approach. They go for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach where a working but ‘not ready for mass production’ product is launched towards a small group of customers in order to help further developing the product.

In that context, a new question arises:

“What about a kick-ass product”?

The risk with MVP’s is that what makes a product truly remarkable – more often than not – lies in the details, in how remarkable the elements of the products come together in a design, a use, a service experience,… With a MVP, you will only deliver the core of the new product or service, which is most of the time not enough for a real WOW experience. And by only offering this, you also tend to focus on getting the core better when working with the first customers. They evaluate what they get (the core capabilities) and by default they will give you feedback on how to make that core better by adapting it better to their needs. Only in rare cases, they will focus on the things that are not there or that they are not (yet) aware of (the details, the design, the packaging, the unclear element of a new kind of usage,…).

So how to tackle this issue without going again towards the old model of developing a product forever?

What about a parallel route? You push your MVP product in the process with customers to focus on shipping a real product as soon as possible. At the same time, use a small group (or even individual) to add some magic to the existing MVP product. Why not use a designer, an outside consultant, one of your top sales guys,…?

When you work on shipping your version 2 of the MVP product, just add the WOW elements (as they are not linked to the core of your product, this should be rather easy). Imagine how delighted your first customers will be if they see that both their requirements were met in your new release and a magical tough has been added.

Minimum Awesome Product (MAP): Delivered!

Challenges for enterprises on the Belgian Energy Market

The Belgian electricity market is in constant evolution. As both society and government move towards more renewables in the energy mix, new challenges are bound to arise. The physical nature of the majority of renewable energy sources (wind, solar, hydro,…) implies they are not as controllable as other sources of energy. When there is no wind, there is no power to be harnessed from wind. This uncontrollability is largely due to the simple fact that there are no realistic ways — yet — to store energy in large amounts. As long as we are unable to store energy in an economically viable way, the combined demand of all companies and households in Belgium at any given time during the day cannot exceed supply (the total sum of all electricity originating from windmills, gas-fired plants, nuclear installations, solar panels, imported energy, etc.).

As governments are constantly modifying the applicable rules and regulations, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to predict their energy-related costs. On the other hand, however, new technical evolutions (in terms of measurement, smart grids and load balancing for example) are creating new opportunities for companies to optimise their energy needs.

In the face of these challenges and opportunities, the Total Cost of Energy indicator (TCE) has been developed: a powerful tool designed to help you tackle your company’s energy challenges.

The TCE

Whether your organisation relies on energy simply for heating and lighting your offices or for more heavy-duty industrial processes, energy management is an essential part of your operational and even strategic management. It is therefore important to integrate every aspect with a potential impact on your total P&L within a comprehensive energy strategy.

And that is where the Total Cost of Energy (TCE) model comes in. To help you map all these elements into an effective strategy to minimise costs and maximise your competitive edge.

The TCE is basically a construction of all the elements that a company can/should consider when making decisions regarding its energy needs. It lists elements from the pure raw energy source, the time of buying, security of supply, energy and cost saving measures and a lot more.

You can download the whitepaper with the TCE here for free (no strings attached).

I firmly believe that when companies look towards energy as an integrated and strategic asset, they are able to save a lot of money, whilst still creating a more sustainable energy landscape.

Disclaimer: The author is Marketing Innovation & Transformation manager for a EDF Luminus, the major challenger on the Belgian Energy market.

Habits of successful artists – Spark 10: Lead a tribe

Leading means taking risk, standing out from the crowd, do something for the first time, ship it and convince others to follow you. It takes a great deal of courage, a great idea and a risky execution.

Courage: doing something new is by definition an uncertain business: No benchmarks, no best practices telling you what to do. Just you, your brains & intuition.

A great idea: It all starts with this. Being able to have something that creates a new kind of value to at least one person or organisation.

Risky execution: As the idea itself never represents any real value. It’s only by putting it to use that you will create an impact. Going out into the real world and leaving your whiteboard is always risky: in the real world, you can actually brake things 🙂

Go out, be brave & lead!

Habits of successful people – Spark 8 : Write Daily

Ah, the art of writing! This should be an easy one to talk about, no? Well not for me, because writing is one thing, but doing it daily is another one. Actually, I am already glad when I get to Write Weekly (Note to self: one added value of writing: it visualizes things: Let’s call it the WW from now on ;-)).

Well, enough about the hard things of writing, let’s start with the benefits!

First of all, it helps you to learn. Not from books or classes, but from your experiences in real life (with others!): By looking back at your day and writing about it, you re-live the day and the learnings you had. As we all know that learning comes from repetition, it helps you in actually storing as many learnings of your day as possible.

Second reason is that — by forcing yourself to write something down — you create your own opinion, your own vision on things: Writing something down requires a structure of words, of paragraphs, of build up… This helps you in clarifying the ideas you have in your head. Also, by seeing your own writing, you will sometimes discover the stupid things that sounded very interesting while they were still in your head. For me, this is clearly the most important reason to write.

Writing also helps you think more in terms of the receiver of the information. It forces you to translate your idea in something another person can understand (without direct access to what’s in your head) and respond to. When it’s out into the world, people can react to it, in order to build a conversation. This helps in making your idea spread and actually have an impact.

And finally, it just can help you to calm down. Let it all go. Don’t you believe me? When you lie awake at night because the wheels in your head are turning on a splendid idea, just write it down in the book that always is next to your bed and have a good night sleep!

Habbits of succesful people – Spark 7: Teach others.

The first thing I learned from my very first manager ever (thanks Mark for that!) was to make sure you are never the only person that can do the job. It felt so contradictory to everything I expected (especially if that first job is in a high tier technology consultancy firm). I thought that being the only that could do a certain job meant power and a secure future. Thanks to Mark, it did not take me long to realise that keeping ‘knowledge’ from others is the most stupid thing anyone can do in today’s world.

Let’s explain by kicking in with the most interesting one:

You can enjoy holidays if others can do your job. If you are the only one who knows something, prepare yourself for a boss that will be reluctant to give you a holiday and lots of incoming text messages while you are sipping your cocktail at the beach.

When you want to be a leader, you are more ‘evaluated’ on your ability to teach others than to actually perform tasks yourself. Delegating means making sure your people can do what you do.

From organisational perspective, people having the monopoly to a certain tasks, process, knowledge,… are a single point of failure. You don’t want to be called that…

Sharing knowledge is fun: it gives you a good feeling: you should try it out!

Giving new ideas to others might spark their feedback… and eventually might even deepen your own knowledge.

And probably the most important: In today’s world, you need to be able toadapt yourself… which means learning new things. How you think you’re peers will share there knowledge with you if you are being a protective lone wolf?

Habits of successful artists – Spark 6: Make predictions.

It’s the time of the year for it: New Year’s resolutions. But making predictions is not about what you are about to do (or not to do, for what that matters).

Great leaders have the guts to stand out and describe how not only their future, but also that of their company, their industry, and even the future of the world… will look like tomorrow.

Why?

Most people don’t know where to go to.

If you can help them in picturing a vivid image of what the world might look like tomorrow, it will help them, their team, their organisation to start working on it, to guide their work (and, if necessary, to start the change).

It brings the sparks to others.

Yes! Others dream as well! By confronting them with how you see the change, they might be more willing to share their view. Confronting the dreams can only help in making them more realistic, more real,… and you already have at least 2 people who believe in a dream becoming reality.

Being able to picture the future is the first step in creating it.

If you are able to see, draw, explain, code,… what will be different tomorrow, it means you have something that already past the first test: it is not so high up in the clouds that we cannot grasp it with our current level of understanding of the world. Thus picturing the world is already half of the work!

How?

Dream big

When in doubt: dream a little bigger. There will be plenty of people, moments, committees, bosses, gatekeepers,… to make your ideas more ‘realistic’ afterwards, so you can better overcompensate that upfront.

Share it with others

Share your dream with others. First of all, this will force you to frame your ideas, make them just tangible enough,… Secondly, what is the use of your ideas if they will never become reality (aka the new normal). Lastly, it will show your commitment: it’s your idea and reputation on the line.

Be part of the dream

Take commitment in the steps towards the creation of the new reality you paint. Be the change that is necessary!

You should give it a try!