Book: The Digital Mindset

With everything becoming digital at work and the future is practically here, I read anything that might point the way for me to upgrade my skills. The latest is the book The Digital Mindset by Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley. This book has some neat things to consider, so I write a brief blog on what I (and we) need to do to be successful in the future amidst all of the machines.

The authors encapsulate their guidance into the 3 C’s: collaboration, computation and change.

With each of the 3 C’s, there is a page on “getting to 30 percent”. The authors’ contention to attaining a digital mindset is that you don’t need to be a computer scientist, get a computer degree or even know coding to develop a digital mindset. You just need to understand 30% of the concepts to be successful in the digital world.

So those pages with the “getting to 30 percent” give you the tips on what to do in order to be able to collaborate, compute and change.

Collaboration

The collaboration they talk about is 1) collaborating with artificial intelligence and 2) working remotely and collaborating with your peers/boss digitally (or maintaining your digital presence).

The collaboration with the machine can be boiled down to don’t think the machine or software or chatbot is a human. It is not. At the present time, it can only do limited things as prescribed by the software code.

The part about working remotely and maintaining digital presence with your work peers was REALLY useful. The stuff presented in the chapter could really boost your career or help you prevent derailing your career. You probably utilize some of the tips for your LinkedIn profile too. The collaboration in this section also includes the internal social media in companies and how to productively use them to maintain your presence.

I will probably re-read the chapter on remote working and maintaining your presence in social media again to make sure I remember to use their tips.

Computation

Here the authors are talking about data analytics and understanding how to use data, statistics and probability. They also talk about how to story tell with data in ways that your audience can get interested and understand what you are getting at. There is also a primer on statistics, going over descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, predictive statistics, regression models, correlation and causation.

Okay, there’s a lot of learn. There is a 30% page but you probably would need to take a statistic course or read a book on statistics to get at those concepts.

Change

The authors discuss three parts to this section and the section is geared more towards corporations rather than to individuals.

The first one is cybersecurity: companies can never protect themselves 100% from hacking so they need to instead plan for when they get hacked. The other thing is companies need to be constantly upgrading their hardware and software because their “partners” (it could be Microsoft or Apple or Amazon or Google or whoever…) are constantly upgrading their software. Those upgrades can mean other software or hardware will need to be upgraded in order to function properly or take in the latest new security features. They call this upgrading the technological debt of the infrastructure.

Everywhere there is constant upgrading.

There is also a need to seriously consider privacy: privacy needs to come first and be embedded in everything we do.

The other thing is we need to get familiar with blockchain; mainly the author believes blockchain will be the route to increased security.

As individuals, we need to also be constantly upgrading our infrastructure to capture the latest security features and it behooves us to understand blockchain so we can figure out how to use it to our advantage.

The other thing about change is that since change is constant and accelerating, we won’t know what to do unless we experiment. Change is happening so fast that researching and planning is not fast enough – we need to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. Now, in corporations, there is a pushback on these experimentations. As individuals, we can do our own experimentations and do it quietly to see what works.

Lastly, the last chapter is about leading the organization through continuous change or transition. The only thing as individuals that we can take out of that chapter is the continuous learning.

Closing

This blog is a very brief, very high-level presentation of what was in the book. As I was writing this blog, I was thinking I need to do some kind of poster of some of the 30% tips that I need to instill into my memory. That would help me start doing the stuff I need to do, especially on the collaboration and computation part of the digital mindset.

And then to close this post, I think these are the books I want to keep in mind and maybe re-read as I prepare for the future:

• The Digital Mindset – Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley
• The Adaption Advantage – Heather McGowan
• Metaskills – Marty Neumeier
• Whiplash – Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
• Flux – April Rinne (reading now)
• The Neo-Generalist – Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin
• Range – David Epstein (want to read)