[dropcap letter="E"]
Journalist Jordi Évole has sometimes expressed the paradoxical difficulty of interviewing someone one admires. I agree with him. Conversations lacking critical spirit are completely devoid of interest. Given that I share and eagerly await his serene and direct weekly articles in La Vanguardia, I arrive at the meeting with Xavier Marcet having tweeted many passages from his latest book Esquivar la mediocridad (Plataforma Editorial): it seems nothing will surprise me about him anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth. In less than an hour, I have been able to confirm that one can rethink even that which one agrees with. And it is that, as Henry Chesbrough, professor at UC Berkeley-Haas School of Business and ESADE Business School, highlights, Marcet is a lucid man who has "a curious and attentive mind that helps him shed light on deeper patterns, often hidden beneath the distractions and daily life of business."
Marcet's professional career, a defender of authenticity and liquid talent in organizations, is the result of that innate curiosity, which has led him to become, almost naturally, a startupero nearing sixty. An expert in innovation, Marcet proposed to Anxo Armada, a professional with previous experience launching startups, to develop a product that, through data, would serve as a bridge between the world of technology and management. They decided to create 8wires, a technological innovation space where digital products based on big data could be incubated and developed. This hub of technological talent has in a few months developed knowledge-intensive projects such as LiveCities, an open innovation platform through crowdsourcing, Worksbot, a virtual assistant that guides company workers to execute processes and answer questions, and Security All, an intelligent firewall to protect devices in homes and small businesses.
This capacity, as he himself points out, to "unlearn," in addition to his own experience, has allowed him to become one of the best ambassadors of digital transformation. Marcet has developed international consultancies in more than 20 countries in Europe and America, in companies such as HP, Sony, Arauco, Grupo Suez, Repsol, Banc de Sabadell, or Seat. He presides over Lead to Change, a network of companies dedicated to strategy and innovation consulting, is the founder of the Barcelona Drucker Society, and gives numerous conferences a year on innovation and entrepreneurship topics. His formula is, at first glance, simple: "when someone has or wants to lead the digital transformation of an organization, the first thing they have to do is transform themselves." To avoid falling into frustration, "the balance is to go from our client to technology and from our culture to technology. Imposing technology without thinking about the client and without transforming our business culture results in a useless waste of resources. Complexity is managed not by increasing it," he warns.
Despite his categorical statements, Marcet empathizes especially with organizations that have difficulties adapting to new times. In fact, he believes that "it is more difficult to transform a consolidated organization than to create a successful startup (which it also is)." To do this, he recommends stopping living off past successes and pausing to reflect, ask questions, and unlearn: "let's not base ourselves only on historical data, but reflect on what is changing. Living off past successes constitutes an orthodoxy difficult to transform. We must free ourselves from past successes to be able to unlearn."
Where is the key to this? In technology? No, the key is still in people. "Change has to come through our clients and the professionals we have within. Transforming people is the most difficult thing. We have to build a value proposition," concludes Marcet. Also in digital transformation, although it seems that technology is getting out of hand or beyond our understanding, people hold the key to success.