Is digital transformation essential in a modern business? David Sovie, Senior Managing Director, and Vik Viniak, Managing Director and Senior Partner at Accenture, believe that with transformation comes growth. In this episode, Vik and David discuss why digital business models are critical for success and how companies can rethink their own products and services.Press play to hear David Sovie and Vik Viniak’s thoughts on…Improving Products by Making Them Platforms"The reality is that the Tesla car that you have today is actually a better car than three years ago. In the history of the world, that's never been true. It's only when you can have this kind of what I like to call 'evergreen' meaning, it's a continually upgradeable platform that you can actually improve features and functionality over time." —David SovieThe Importance of Persistence“Once you're on this journey, you're all in and you have to stay patient and you have to stay persistent on the journey. You can't just turn around in six months and say these things are not happening fast enough because to turn around a ship, it takes time.” —Vik Viniak Partnering for Success“I'm a firm believer that you've got to build your ecosystem. You’ve got to pick the right partners. And then you’ve got to go all in, whether it's to build a product, whether it's to scale or whether it's to drive growth in the market.” —Vik Viniak

What does it take to be a great manager? Host of the Supermanagers podcast, Aydin Mirzaee, is on a mission to find out. The CEO of Fellow.app speaks to managers from leading companies to discover what traits make good leaders great and how to drive success. In this episode, he shares his findings and explains what makes a “Supermanager.”Press play to hear Aydin’s thoughts on… How Practice Makes Perfect“You have to treat this just like a professional athlete would. Just like a professional athlete would do drills and practice and look back on their week and figure out what conversations they had and how they went and how much feedback did they give and how did the feedback get received. The world's best managers are also practicing, and they're very deliberate about all these things."The Risks of Imitation“Often, we try and look at a leader or a manager, and we'll try and emulate, right. And we'll try and be like them. And the big takeaway I had was that you really have to try and be like yourself. It's not about emulating anybody else. You just have to really understand yourself, just like you understand your team. You have to understand yourself, understand what your strengths are, and what the authentic you looks like, and then be that person, not trying to necessarily emulate others.”The Bottom Line“The thing that I hear most often is, it's all about the people. At the end of the day, you really have to treat everyone like real people, really understand them, and treat them like human beings.”

What is your personal power-up? Legendary growth marketer, Eric Siu, shares the most powerful habits anyone striving to “level up” should adopt in this episode. The author of Leveling Up: How To Master The Game of Life, and host of podcasts, Leveling Up and Marketing School, reveals how a game-like approach helped him navigate his career, including buying a company for just $2 and nurturing it into a multi-million dollar agency.Press play to hear Eric Siu’s thoughts on…Failure as Fuel"It doesn't feel good when people tell you that you're a failure, right? But I've learned to kind of enjoy that. So I know whatever I'm getting from people, that's fuel, because long-term, it's gonna make me stronger." Being Persistent"When I feel blocked, I'll try to brute force it. And I think it was Edison that said this, but it's not that someone is a genius, it's just that they stick with problems longer. Persistence is probably one of the biggest things. I think most people just end up giving up too easily… It's important to remember that all the great things that are built around you take time." The Importance of Culture "Everything starts from the top. I think people tend to emulate what the leader is doing. All the things I'd heard about culture in the past—which I used to think was a bunch of baloney - it all comes into play because culture, at the end of the day, is your operating system and it's how you do things. Your psychology ultimately cascades down to the entire team and they're going to behave like you." 

What does it take to instigate and implement digital transformation in a vertical that’s slow to change? Jack Newton founded Clio, a legal-tech SaaS company, with the idea of revolutionizing legal services through cloud-based technology. 13 years later, Jack is the CEO of the billion-dollar company, an author, and seen as a thought leader in the legal-tech space. In this episode, he shares the obstacles he faced along the way and what the legal industry’s future looks like.Press play to hear Jack Newton’s thoughts on…The One-Vendor Advantage“We could go really deep on a vertical like legal, even though on the surface it looks like a niche opportunity almost. If you provide true and deep value to that vertical, you're going to have an unreasonable right to win categorically, in that vertical... customers really want a vendor of record. As much as possible, they want to be able to buy all of their technology, all of their services, from one vendor.”Why DIY Integrations Are Not Ideal“Even though integrations between products are possible, at the end of the day there are very few customers that want to figure out how do I cobble together 15 different products into one through a number of integrations, and maybe a bunch of duct tape, when they can have one cohesive experience in one product?”Becoming Client-Centric“[T]here's a whole new way of thinking about legal services, in a way that is client-centered. If you embrace this client-centered thinking, you embrace this new way of thinking about the way you can design, price, and package your legal services. There's an enormous opportunity to drive massive competitive differentiation.”

Industries that resist embracing digital transformation face potential extinction. But change doesn’t come easy to everyone. In this episode, Dr. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg reveals how her venture capitalist fund connects existing economy leaders with emerging digital disruptors to future-proof their processes. She also explains why an entrepreneurial mindset is key to overcoming resistance to change.Press play to hear Jeannette’s thoughts on…The Conflict Between Old and New“If you put two groups together, one has everything to lose. Why? Because [established companies] are at the height of their success and every potential change or disruption could mean a risk to the company. And if you look at startups, it's a very different dynamic, right? They have everything to win and everything to gain.”Investing Early“That's what you do as a seed stage investor, you have to tune into the vision and always assume you're the stupidest person in the room. And then these people really have something very, very unique to what they're doing. And obviously you are mindful of asking all the right questions, but typically the best entrepreneurs have thought about them 10 times over before you even ask them.”The Emerging Global Workforce“What's so exciting about technology is that code is really a lingua franca. It's a way to tie talent together in a global way. Global talent is becoming a reality. It's great to see teams that interact from all over the world across different time zones, across different continents, different cultural backgrounds, but all unified by a common mission and a common vision.”

While the technology enabling remote work has seen leaps and bounds in the last year, the foundations have been in place for far longer. In a time where the virtual workspace is more necessary than ever before, how much do we really understand it? In this episode, Mark Templeton shares his experience as a visionary in the virtualization space, insights on apps and the cloud’s development, and why remote work will continue to evolve.Press play to hear Mark Templeton’s thoughts on…Figuring Out the Future of Work “Whether it was collaboration, software, or security or management or networking, video, different types of technologies, like voice to text, text to voice—we just imagined all the pieces that would need to be possible to enable work from anywhere.”The Impact of Remote Work on People“We talk a lot about technology, but technology is only as good as the people that adopt it. So as the pioneer behind the virtual workspace, how important do you think in-person collaboration is or human to human contact? Because taking human interaction away from even a work environment leaves a lot of questions about how you build a culture, how you share common values."Returning to the Office“What we found is that people overwhelmingly want to have the flexibility to work in a hybrid environment where they can choose what they want when they want. However, we've seen that productivity data and culture show that it's more effective if people are either altogether or all remote.”

How can companies use technology to solve problems? Brad Garlinghouse believes it’s about embracing innovation. In this episode of Decoding Digital, he talks about his impressive career and shares insights into where growing companies commonly make mistakes. He also discusses cryptocurrency and how it will have a lasting impact on customers and businesses.Press play to hear Brad’s thoughts on…The Problem with Traditional Payments“It's amazing to me that you can stream video from the space station, but if you want to send money to me in London, that's going to take days to get there and it's going to cost you a fair number. And it's like, wait, how did we end up here? Where I can do all these things on an almost instantaneous basis, but I can't move my own money from point A to point B.” Disrupting the Middleman“Today, if you and I were going to transact, there has to be a middleman involved. Pick your middleman, but there's a middleman everywhere. With a blockchain we’re saying ‘Hey, take out the middleman. You can still transact. You can have certainty, but you don't have to have trust.’”The Power of Blockchain “I think if you want to impact the most people and really put a dent in the universe, how do we reach 99%? Not, how do we get the 1% using Bitcoin for payments to 2%, 3%. No, I'm going to go work with the major institutions, the major governments. And I'm going to introduce these technologies in such a way that they can have a broad impact on a broad cut of the population—the unbanked, the underbanked—in ways that I think are pretty profound.”

Digital transformation doesn’t happen by itself. The reality is people are the driving force behind change. But how can you inspire your workforce to embrace digital leadership? In this episode, Dr. Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane discusses some of the key findings from his book, The Technology Fallacy: How People are The Real Key to Digital Transformation, and shares what it takes to be a digital hero.Press play to hear Jerry's thoughts on...Digital Maturity and Digital Leadership “Over 50 percent of the most mature companies said, ‘we need more and better leaders to be successful in a digital marketplace.’ These digital maturing companies were actually doing something about it. They were far more likely to say they are developing the type of leaders that we need to work in a digital world. So it's not that these maturing companies had better leaders, but it's what they were doing to get and grow these better leaders inside.”Training Digital Heroes “You're going to have 30 percent of the people that will never be digital heroes that are always going to play it safe. They want to check the boxes and follow the rules. There's 40 percent in the middle that can go either way and are going to respond to the culture and respond to the signals from senior leadership. If you can convert that 40 percent to digital heroism, you're well on your way to digital maturity.”Embracing the Soft Skills“I've often said it's a lot easier for me to teach the average manager the technology they need, than it is for me to teach the technology leader, the management and the strategy and the business knowledge they need.”  

Not many start-ups can survive a direct attack from Amazon. So, when digital payment services company, Square, came up against the retail giant and won, it set Jim McKelvey on a mission to find out why. In this episode, Jim reveals the part innovation has to play in survival, the two classes of innovation and why they’re important, and how crises accelerate transformative change.Press play to hear Jim McKelvey's thoughts on...The “Hero” Myth“The people that I studied are not heroes. They are people who for one reason or another ended up in these weird situations where they had to become adventurers. They had to learn how to survive in the jungle. And learning that survival skill set is something that we're all capable of.”Survival and Innovation“Occasionally somebody gets dropped in the jungle. For some reason or another, they get put in a very hostile environment and then just don't die. And the process of not dying is what I study in the book. And it turns out to have this repeatable path. And that's what I call an innovation stack.”The Role of Disruption in Innovation“Throughout history, there were these companies who not only survived existential threat, but they then grew up later to become the biggest in their business. The biggest bank in the world, the biggest furniture company in the world, the biggest airline in the United States, the biggest frozen foods company in the world, the biggest automaker.”

Is data the new oil? Ross Mason pioneered improving integration to unlock more valuable data, but he believes this is only the start of driving change. In this episode, the Founder of the world’s leading API platform discusses how APIs enhance big data potential. He also explains how the gap between IT and business is closing as the lines between CIO and CEO begin to blur.Ross Mason shares his thoughts on…Defining APIs“You hear people say an API is a product. The product realization of an API isn’t building the API. It’s putting all the infrastructure around it to help people get successful using it.”API-Led Connectivity“We’ve barely scratched the surface of what connectivity really means. APIs need contexts that know how to connect better and more easily, and group things together in a way that we can understand better as humans.”The New Role of the CIO“The role of the CIO is really to figure out the strategies within the organization to make [data] broadly available and actually get those assets to the front of the business where they can be used most effectively.