The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation | HBR

July 14, 2017
  • Digital thinker. The director has had little direct interaction with digital as an operator but conceptually understands the digital environment. They have been a board director or adviser in a digital business but are not a digital native.
  • Digital disruptor. The director has been deeply embedded in digital, often with experience from a pure-play company. This type of leader typically has less general management breadth.
  • Digital leader. The director has had substantial experience running a traditional business that leverages digital in a significant way (retail or media, for example). It’s likely that this person has less hands-on digital experience but has managed disruption as a general manager.
  • Digital transformer. The director has led or participated in a transformation of a traditional business. Typically the person does not have the seniority of a digital leader but is more digitally astute.

Digital transformation needs to be wholesale. Digital innovation needs to permeate and recast every aspect of the business and the board. Companies that do so will thrive in the new world, and those that do not, sooner or later, will fail.

Source: The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation | HBR

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2017 Global Digital IQ® Survey: 10th anniversary edition

March 14, 2017

… in some ways company leaders are no better equipped to handle the changes coming their way than they were in 2007. In fact, Digital IQ—the measurement of an organization’s abilities to harness and profit from technology—has actually declined since we began asking executives to self-assess their own organizations. Enterprises aren’t so much falling behind as struggling to keep up with accelerating standards. And looking ahead, it is clear most are not ready for what comes next—and after that—as technologies continue to combine and advance, and new ways of doing business go from inception to disruption seemingly overnight.

Source: 2017 Digital IQ: PwC

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The case for digital reinvention | McKinsey & Company

February 12, 2017

This finding confirms what many executives may already suspect: by reducing economic friction, digitization enables competition that pressures revenue and profit growth. Current levels of digitization have already taken out, on average, up to six points of annual revenue and 4.5 points of growth in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). And there’s more pressure ahead, our research suggests, as digital penetration deepens.

Source: The case for digital reinvention | McKinsey & Company

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25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do | Harvard Business Review

February 6, 2017

Like President Johnson in the 1960s, we see that automation could make a major contribution to productivity and prosperity… For companies around the world, automation will offer the potential to capture substantial value — and not just from labor substitution. These technologies enable higher throughput, enhanced quality, better outcomes, greater safety, and the opportunity to scale up or adopt new business models.

Source: 25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do

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The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande

December 22, 2009

Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world–and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking.

Source: The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande

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