About a year ago I heard Sir Dave Brailsford, speak.  He is an inspirational speaker.  If you don't know who he is, he helped us Brits win some gold medals and managed Team Sky to win the Tour de France.

He has a doctrine called marginal gains is all about small incremental improvements in any process adding up to a significant improvement when they are all added together.  In cycling, if they could get 10th of a second in the wind tunnel and a 10th of a second in the mountain climb.  The that's a win by 20 seconds, which in the Tour de France is enough to win.

The challenge today isn't about incremental gains. 

Tom Goodwin in his new book "Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption" Tom talks about that digital so far has been digitising analogue things.

If you look at the history of electricity, all we did with the invention was take the gas light and make it electric, steam turbines and make them electric.  In fact the electricity revolution didn't change anything until there was other technologies, communications, television etc.

He goes on to talk about the only way for us to reap the benefit of digital is to create new things.  If you look at the iPhone it created new technologies such as facebook, snapchat, shazam, things that didn't exist before.

The TV remote control hasn't changed in 20 years.

Management consultants talk about "the new" but only do this within the frame of reference that they understand.  They bring a inside out view, rather than an outside in.  Check all the management consultants out on social media, let me know if you can find them.

In the article (below) while there there is a lot scene setting it talks about having resources in a company to explore new beginnings and leapfrog the competition.  Digitalisation is all about leapfrogging.  Taking social media, for example and rolling it out across the organisation for example.  Rather than having random acts of social in sales or marketing or customer service or HR.