My barber shop is a special place. Black and white checker tiled floors. The walls an eye-popping canary yellow. Pictures and newspaper clippings of hockey stars, winning teams and winning goals randomly scotch-taped to the walls. Black and white headshots of young guys with perfect skin and fantastically quaffed hair. Plastic Christmas decorations. A small flat screen TV duct-taped up near the ceiling so everyone can see. And hanging in the middle of it all - a dusty ceramic pink pig with tiny angelic silk wings turning ever so slightly each time the door opened.

Willy Wonka would be impressed. A suave young techie in a crew neck sweater and thick glasses tours a group of senior business people through a virtual factory - spurting out digital jargon as he walks. Around them, a buzz of activity. Big screens lit up with dynamic graphs and data. Busy workers walk quickly from station to station...

Digital strategies have significantly different capital requirements, risk profiles, expertise and resource needs. They have very different business structures and management cycles for making change. To jump and run with any of them is perhaps more dangerous than doing nothing at all. After all, executive representations are at stake...

Get ready to be sheared. Mohawk haircuts for everyone. Dunked in bath tubs of purple dye. Stained that way for weeks. Wading through a pool of mud and god knows what. Climb to the top of the grease pole. That's what engineers at my alma mater went through in their first week of school. Sadly, Sales in a lot of companies doesn't seem much easier...