Seamless

A Hero's Journey of Digital Disruption, Adaptation and Human Transformation

Anders Sorman-Nilsson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780730332855
• eBook ISBN: 9780730332862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Achieve brand success with smarter change management and seamless transformation

Seamless is a guide for transforming your brand and heroically taking your business into the future. Customers are sick and tired of the inconvenience, friction, arrogance and grating seams they experience on their customer journeys caused by brands undergoing awkward and haphazard change. This book shows you how to remove the external and internal seams for a smooth transition between marketing channels, to provide a transformative customer journey. Anders Sörman-Nilsson, futurist and author of Digilogue (Wiley 2013), reveals the key factors to designing a cohesive and agile brand that is fit for the future. This book looks at on-the-ground implementation of Digilogue ideas, giving you a first-hand account of how emerging technology has evolved and disrupted the business landscape since 2013. You'll learn the trials and tribulations of omnichannel marketing, change leadership, start up thinking versus a heritage (and family) business legacy and why there has never been a better time to implement seamless technologies in your business.

The future doesn't unfold neatly — in fact, it's often a disruptive slap in the face. Seamless is the key to a successful business future, and this book shows you how to make seamlessness work for your company, starting today.

• Design away the friction with transformative customer experiences
• Weave disparate channels and parts of a brand together into a seamless whole
• Take an integrative, rather than additive, approach to communications
• Achieve the highest level of customer intimacy, the key to customer loyalty
• Drive seamless change inside your organisation by designing journeys of constant adaptation

Communication channels continue to proliferate, and simply adding every new flash in the pan is a sure path to ruin. You need to bring together every part of your brand into a cohesive whole, one with deliberate, strategic structure and wholeheartedly gather all your stakeholders around it. Seamless shows you how to remove the scar tissue, reveal your brand's fresh edge and meet the future curious, agile and open-minded.

STEP 1
HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON

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Status quo

This is the place where the hero or heroine hangs out before his or her journey begins. She is happily oblivious of the adventure that is just around the corner, and where she lives is pretty cushy. We learn intricate details of this everyday life, along with the heroine's characteristics and outlook on life. This cements the heroine as a fellow (wo)man, helping us identify with them, and helping us empathise with their challenges through the upcoming journey.

Here's how the ordinary world looked at the start of Star Wars: Episode IV:

• Inner journey: The evil Empire oppresses the galaxy.
• Outer journey: Limited awareness of the problem; Luke dreams of joining the academy and he feels he is going nowhere on his uncle's desolate farm, but doesn't see any way out.

And here's how the ordinary world looked like for a more personal hero of mine (you might recognise some of the characteristics):

• Inner journey: Digital disruption sweeps the world of retail.
• Outer journey: Limited awareness of the problem; our heroine dreams of making her retail brand (Georg Sörman) strong and profitable again, but feels her hard work is taking her nowhere.

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1: Status quo

Change doesn't care whether you like it or not. It happens without your permission.

The love letter to my superhero

In December 2012 I sat down to write a love letter to my first pure love, my first hero. For years I had tried to influence the recipient. To help her realise her potential. To unleash the latent potential she was possessing. To help her let go of the legacy, the misplaced expectations, the unhelpful remnants passed down to her from her parents (particularly her father, the patriarch) so she could step into her own and release her own unique creativity. From a distance, I had watched the recipient, whom I love, suffer in silence. Now was the time to write all my thoughts and strategies down. The indicators strengthened my belief that the recipient would be finally ready to read, reflect, and act upon my letter.

The recipient, the first woman I ever truly loved, was my mother Birgitta. She is an energetic and elegant woman. She is full of life and exudes strength and determination. As one of my friends says, when she enters the room, her presence transforms the atmosphere to the point of near-intimidation. Mostly positively. Since 2003, she had been struggling, more or less overtly, but retained a proud veneer. She remained a woman who stoically believed in the Lutheran ethic of hard work, and that rewards follow that hard work, but she was starting to notice something odd. That logic no longer held true. The harder she worked, the more elusive the results became. And the harder she worked at following in the footsteps of her father, and his father before him, the more invested she became in her identity as a struggling, but hard-working woman.

My love letter to my mother first took the form of my Global Executive MBA thesis, and its main focus was whether the fortunes of a then cash-leaking bricks-and-mortar shop and mispositioned brand could be turned around and elevated — and, if so, how? But my work on this love letter began long before I sat down to write it. In May 2012, on a walk together with her springer spaniel Cicero, in a pine forest forty-five minutes outside of Stockholm, I asked my mother whether she wanted to become partners in the future. Whether she wanted my help to turn things around.

I wanted to help my mum leave a legacy and be able to retire with pride. Mum had taken on significant personal and financial risk when she bought out her two sisters between 2006 and 2007, after reporting to them as board members and shareholders between 2003 and 2006. In the family, we call Mum ‘Cinderella', because she is the youngest sibling, and is the only sibling to have worked professionally in the family business. And she has reaped no free lunches from it. Other than time spent in the US as an exchange student in the late 1960s, and when she met my dad in Stockholm in the late 1970s — her Prince Lars-Olof Charming — and three years spent in Australia, my mother's life has reflected typical family business stuff.

My mum spent three years absent from the business between 1997 and 2000 while we lived in Canberra, Australia, and my father completed his post as Swedish defence attaché to Canberra. During this time, my cousin Lucie covered for Mum in the business. From 2000, Mum slowly took over the reins of the business as the health of her father, Per, deteriorated until his passing away in 2003. From 2003 to 2006, my mum and her two sisters owned an equal number of shares in the company, with my grandmother, Ingrid, the majority shareholder after her inheritance from her husband, Per. During this time my mother was the managing director, and reported on the increasingly poor figures to her sisters and her mother. When my grandma Ingrid, bless her soul, passed away in 2006, the tone between the three sisters gradually deteriorated, and Mum bought out her two sisters in a process that was begun in around 2006 and completed by 2008 (see figure 1.1 for more more detail). The buy-out included Georg Sörman (Georg Sörman Pty Ltd), which covered the retail business of two shops — one on the island of Kungsholmen and one in Gamla Stan (Old Town), Stockholm.

Figure 1.1: Georg Sörman family lineage and Cinderella's challenge

Since the buyout of her two sisters, an historical déjà vu of my grandfather Per's emotionally disastrous buyout of his two siblings in the late 1960s, Mum's relationship with her two sisters is virtually non-existent, and tense at best. So I also wanted to prevent a similar situation repeating itself for a third time, because I am very close to my brother, Gustaf, and want(ed) to keep it that way. And I wanted to reconnect with my parents and create something enduring together, while they still had the energy and health to do it.

So basically, I wanted to help Mum show up her sisters, who she felt cheated by, by reinventing the family business brand and rebuilding it successfully. To help her reinstate her sense of self-worth. And to stop the vicious cycle of Mum managing the business on artificial ventilation, without changing the fundamentals that were causing the bleeding.

And, on our walk in the woods outside Stockholm, this wonderful superwoman, the first woman I ever truly loved — my mum — said that she would be honoured if I put my mind to the reinvention of her third-generation family business, Georg Sörman — Stockholm's oldest menswear shop. My futurephile mind went to work. And it hasn't stopped since.

Text and textiles; ideas and fabrics

Mum's ordinary world is one of textiles, fabrics and provenance. Hard work is something physical, not philosophical, theoretical or text-based. Yet, curiously, text and textiles have a closely interweaved history — literally and metaphorically. Both originate from the same Latin root, texere, which means to weave together — not so incidentally it turns out. While text, like a book, can weave together narrative, story, concept, thoughts, musings, romance or even a strategic direction, so textiles and the fashioning of textiles weave together different strands of thought. As you are reading this you can probably already see the intermeshing that is going on in this text. That text and textiles, in mystical ways, belong together. And that metaphors of textiles are found like a thread spun through the fabrics of life. (As in the last sentence, and as in the jumper shown in figure 1.2.)

Figure 1.2: Inis Meáin jumper from Georg Sörman, Stockholm

This is perhaps why a research project at the University of Glasgow is focused on creating a big data visualisation of thirteen centuries of startling cognitive connections between metaphors and different strands of thinking. Metaphor, it turns out, governs how we think about our lives — the past, the present and the future. The first online Metaphor Map from the University of Glasgow showcases more than 14 000 metaphorical connections, based on four million lexical data points, going back to AD 700, based on a mapping of the Historical Thesaurus of English, which spans thirteen centuries. According to Dr Wendy Anderson, the findings of the project include that ‘metaphor is pervasive in language and is also a major mechanism of meaning-change'. The ensuing map also revealed the strong connection between textiles and text, such as the description of social networks in textile terms like ‘weaving and spinning'; another example is something being defined as ‘tweedy' if it is rustic, or ‘chintzy' if petit-bourgeois. In a modern context, it is perhaps not surprising then that textiles are ever-present, and that textiles are a foundation for our conceptual ability to craft complicated structures and systems — like binary digital technology, for example, which sprung out of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title page
• Copyright
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• STEP 1: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 1: Status quo
• STEP 2: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 2: Call to adventure
• STEP 3: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 3: Refusal of the call
• STEP 4: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 4: Meeting with the mentor
• STEP 5: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 5: Crossing the threshold
• STEP 6: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 6: Tests, allies and enemies
• STEP 7: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 7: Approaching the inmost cave
• STEP 8: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 8: Ordeal
• STEP 9: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 9: Reward (seizing the sword)
• STEP 10: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 10: Road back
• STEP 11: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 11: Resurrection
• STEP 12: HERO'S JOURNEY WHEEL FOR MAMMA SÖRMAN-NILSSON
• 12: Return with the elixir
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: A letter from Birgitta
• Appendix 2: A letter from Lars-Olof
• Index
• Advert
• EULA