Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology

Chapter 8

Creating a Religion around Convergence

Until now, we’ve been laying out the ideas central to convergence. We’ve explained what this coming together of media, technology, and creativity is and what it means to your organization and the business world at large. We’ve showed you some companies that are dealing with this dramatic shift well and some who aren’t.

Now, in the book’s final chapters we’re going to draw you a road map. This map will take you from where you are now, most likely an organization built for a predigital age, to one that’s better engineered for the rapid innovation and disruption cycles of the twenty-first century. The road map will address both broad strategic issues and down-and-dirty tactics. We’ll teach you how to recast your organizational ethos, and we’ll tell you how to get executives involved in the change even if they don’t want to be part of it.

We’ll start off by talking about how you can develop a vision of change, telling you how to think about this, who needs to be involved, and how the vision needs to be articulated. We’ll follow by looking at how your organization and its processes need to be made over. It’s not enough to just tell you to blow up your silos. We’ll tell you exactly how to do it. Finally, we’ll end with a discussion of Agile methodology, which we believe is key to establishing a customer-centric organization built for our time.

The Convergence Mantra

It all begins with a story.

To effect real change, you need a narrative ...