In the digital arena, it’s impossible to avoid Dion Hinchcliffe. Perhaps you’ve seen one of his numerous keynotes or joined one of his workshops. Maybe you’ve read one of his books, Web 2.0 Architectures (with coauthors James Governor and Duane Nickull) or Social Business By Design (Peter Kim, coauthor). Or possibly you’ve spotted one of his stream of articles over the years, for ZDNet, ebizQ, and many others.
Recently, Hinchcliffe has been leading strategy teams at a series of boutique consulting firms – but unlike most practitioners of strategy consulting, his background doesn’t include the McKinseys or Deloittes of the world. Why didn’t he learn digital strategy from one of these usual suspects? “Management consulting firms have often ended up hiring me to teach them these things,” Hinchcliffe quips.
In fact, his LinkedIn profile only goes back to 1997, which for a man in his late 40s, represents only the latter half of his career – and by then, he was already a technology visionary and company founder. How, then, did Hinchcliffe build his career to that point?
As with many digital influencers, he started off coding – in his case, working with machine languages to convert videogames from one platform to another in the 1980s. At the same time he began his lifelong practice of writing articles. “I wrote about computing constantly back in the 1980s,” Hinchcliffe says. “Byte Magazine didn’t know I was sixteen.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/04/18/digital-influencer-dion-hinchcliffe-power-of-the-network/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Katherine E. Allen.
