Every Friday, we select a few articles from the week that we think are worth your time as a construction financial manager (CFM). We look for compelling articles not only about financial topics, but about business, technology, and life, that challenges you to think about your role as a CFM in different ways. We’d love to hear from you about how we’re doing, and to have you join our community by subscribing to receive this weekly post by email. Follow #CFMReview.
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To Make Money with Digital, Be an Innovator – Not a Strategist (from hbr.org)
Authors Jeff Dyer and Nathan Furr have researched innovators for over a decade now. This week they write about the mistakes made when moving a business into the digital realm for the first time.
Here are my two main takeaways from the article:
1. Businesses succeed more when they treat expansions into digital as innovations, rather than just trying to replicate old business models with new technology
2. Businesses (and innovators) can test digital models with “a series of small, low-risk, low-cost experiments”
This article is about product development. But let’s apply the same logic to internal development. New digital tools pop up every day that help us increase productivity. Email massively sped up snail mail.
But some technologies take us to whole new heights. Think of the touch screen. The touch screen didn’t just make typing and scrolling faster. It has enabled a wave of products and features that couldn’t exist without that technology: games that require direct interaction, drawing apps, the ability to sign your signature on a phone, mobile photo editing, the list goes on.
I’m going to break my rule just once here and plug zlien. What we’re doing is both new and old. zlien takes a 200+ year-old practice—sending notices and filing liens—and makes it fast, easy, and digital. But we’re also innovating, by introducing automation and analytics, synthesizing important data in our customers’ dashboards to aid smarter decisions, involving recipients of notices and collecting feedback to make our process even smoother, and help our customers further.
Okay, enough about us. Bottom line: digital isn’t just a chance to get faster, it’s an opportunity to do more and do different.
> Read the article here to learn about the newspaper industry’s transition to digital, and more.
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Sigh In, Sigh Out, and Change Your Brain’s Grey Matter
Today I’m comin’ at ya with a double dose of the Harvard Business Review! What can I say, I love their stuff.
Did you now that practicing mindfulness—meditation would be the most prominent example of this—can actually change your brain? Meditation has been proven to increase grey matter, and scientists last year identified 8 regions in the brain that are affected by this practice.
One such region is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), important to focus, flexibility, self-regulation, and the ability to learn from past experiences. Benefits from other affected parts of the brain include increased capacity for complex thinking, and greater perception skills. There are, of course, many personal takeaways as well: better sense of self, emotional regulation, introspection, etc.
I’ll let the writers at HBR wrap up this weeks CFM review: “Mindfulness should no longer be considered a ‘nice-to-have’ for executives. It’s a ‘must-have’: a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress.”
> Click here to see the article and learn the details
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