Source: Podcast with Adams Jacob from Chef
Right now, the most common line of thinking – when it comes to digital transformation – is we will take some large enterprise, like Procter and Gamble, and we’re going to rewrite Procter and Gamble so that it works the way Google works.
So, if Google had built Procter and Gamble, what would Google have done? And that’s our strategy.
The big plot is to take the entirety of your business, burn it to the ground, and then rebuild it as if they were another organisation they have never seen before, in a pattern they’ve never seen?
These things don’t work…
Yet, today that’s the predominant strategic theory,
If I take the tools, and the culture, and the pieces of the palaces in Menlo Park and I somehow figure out how to go from being Procter and Gamble to being Google, then it’s going to work.”
And it probably wont.
What’s going to happen is someone at Procter and Gamble, it won’t be me and it won’t be Charity, it’s going to be someone at Procter and Gamble who picks up Honeycomb, who picks up Chef, who picks up Kubernetes, who picks up whatever. And they’re going to make it Procter and Gamble.
What pops out the other side, it won’t be us who tells Procter and Gamble how to transform.
Procter and Gamble is going to transform, and then they’re going to tell everybody else, after a decade or more of us being like, “Hey, you should try it this way. What about doing it like this? Hey, Google does it this way. How about this? Facebook works like that.”
They’re going to be like, “Hold my beer. This is how Procter and Gamble does it. We’re deploying 100 thousand times a day, we’re doing the world’s greatest science you’ve ever seen and we’re adapting technology every inch as fast. We can get resources whenever we need them. We spun up a cancer research project in ten minutes on internal hardware. We developed custom motherboards to do the blah-blahs.”
And everybody is going to be like, “You did what?!” And Procter and Gamble’s stock price will go through the roof, and next thing you know the enterprise will actually start transforming. But they’ll be transforming to themselves, not to us.