Page 234 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

keeping up with the phoneses � 213

risk takers, and sometimes they are credited for bringing new and
improved solutions to the world of enterprise.
Every new product must be seasoned by the heat of trial and er-
ror. Without this, new ideas would never become the standards that
Bluetooth, mobile e-mail, SMS texting, voice recognition, sales force
management software, and many others have become. Not every
company is willing to take risks, and timid companies generally fol-
low second or third in line to those who know the benefits of keeping
up with technology. Keeping up means making some degree of effort
to continue to learn and grow. This can be true and gutsy leadership.
If you want to keep up with the Phoneses, you’ll have to become
a learning organization. What does that mean? How about taking
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risks? You can’t learn without trying. You’ll never know if a mobile
strategy will work without at least trying pilot projects. To keep up
with the Phoneses, president and CEO of Wifi.com Steve Lamont
recommends that the mobile workforce conduct pilot tests to integrate
people with technology. Tests give the enterprise a good impression
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of what is involved when trying out a new technology. It’s a manage-
able and reasonable approach to being innovative. Steve says, “The
most important thing to get right is the pilot tests. The ones I’ve seen
go the best are the ones that have isolated a group of people who are
going to be part of the experiment. By limiting the focus, there are
ways to limit the total cost invested and ways to involve people on the
front lines in a lot of the design and decisions. Pilots are a way to fail
forward, because you fail quickly and learn lessons from it that help you
improve it. The best programs are the ones that, through piloting, . . .
get to the point that people in the pilot say that they love it, and the
rest of the organization says, ‘We want it—when can we get it?’”
So constant learning, trying new things, learning from those new
things, capturing that learning and sharing it across the board, reas-
sessing, and moving forward is a metaskill. Trying new software, test-
ing a new application, deciding to hold pat in one area but to extend
in another, all lead to learning. You can’t keep up if you’re not getting
better.