Driving Digital Strategy

Digital transformation is no longer news--it's a necessity. Despite the widespread threat of disruption, many large companies in traditional industries have succeeded at digitizing their businesses in truly transformative ways. The New York Times, formerly a bastion of traditional media, has created a thriving digital product behind a carefully designed paywall. Best Buy has transformed its business in the face of Amazon's threat. John Deere has formed a data-analysis arm to complement its farm-equipment business. And Goldman Sachs and many others are using digital technologies to reimagine their businesses. In Driving Digital Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta provides an actionable framework for following their lead. For over a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn't. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture. Gupta covers each aspect in vivid detail while providing navigation tips and best practices along the way. Filled with rich and illuminating case studies of companies at the forefront of digital transformation, Driving Digital Strategy is the comprehensive guide you need to take full advantage of the limitless opportunities the digital age provides.

Introduction: Framework for reinventing your business -- Part One. Re-imagine your business: Business scope -- Business model -- Platforms and ecosystems -- Part Two. Re-evaluate your value chain: Rethinking R&D and innovation -- Operational excellence -- Omnichannel strategy -- Part Three. Re-connect with customers: Acquiring customers -- Engaging consumers -- Measuring and optimizing marketing spend -- Part Four. Re-build your organization: Managing digital transition -- Designing an organization for innovation -- Skills, capability, and talent management

Every organization makes plans for updating products, technologies, and business processes. But that’s not enough anymore for the twenty-first-century company. The race is now on for everyone to become a digital enterprise. For those individuals who have been charged with leading their company’s technology-driven change, the pressure is intense while the correct path forward unclear. Help has arrived! In Driving Digital, author Isaac Sacolick shares the lessons he’s learned over the years as he has successfully spearheaded multiple transformations and helped shape digital-business best practices. Readers no longer have to blindly trek through the mine field of their company’s digital transformation. In this thoroughly researched one-stop manual, learn how to: • Formulate a digital strategy • Transform business and IT practices • Align development and operations • Drive culture change • Bolster digital talent • Capture and track ROI • Develop innovative digital practices • Pilot emerging technologies • And more! Your company cannot avoid the digital disruption heading its way. The choice is yours: Will this mean the beginning of the end for your business, or will your digital practices be what catapults you into next-level success?

For a business to thrive competitively in today's marketplace, it needs to have an effective e-commerce channel. Getting it right opens up new markets and opportunities; getting it wrong leads to declining revenues and profitability. To ensure effectiveness, business leaders and decision-makers must understand how e-commerce channels work to make the best strategic choices for their business. Drawing on experience in consulting to large complex organisations and ground-breaking primary research with senior executives from leading corporations, Leading Digital Strategy creates a convincing case for action and offers practical strategies, methodologies and models to improve the effectiveness of a company's online offering. It explores how to align organisational structure with wider goals and implement a customer-centric culture. With coverage of the key digital trends, tools and technologies affecting business today, it provides a practical framework for multi-channel success. This book challenges leaders to become as fluent and creative in digital as they are in finance, sales and marketing, and equips them to choose the right strategy and the right people to make it happen. With strategies for improved operational performance and enhanced engagement from senior management, Leading Digital Strategy gives readers the power to drive forward effective digital initiatives and realise rewarding opportunities for change.

Two world-renowned strategists detail the seven leadership imperatives for transforming companies in the new digital era. Digital transformation is critical. But winning in today's world requires more than digitization. It requires understanding that the nature of competitive advantage has shifted—and that being digital is not enough. In Beyond Digital, Paul Leinwand and Matt Mani from Strategy&, PwC's global strategy consulting business, take readers inside twelve companies and how they have navigated through this monumental shift: from Philips's reinvention from a broad conglomerate to a focused health technology player, to Cleveland Clinic's engagement with its broader ecosystem to improve and expand its leading patient care to more locations around the world, to Microsoft's overhaul of its global commercial business to drive customer outcomes. Other case studies include Adobe, Citigroup, Eli Lilly, Hitachi, Honeywell, Inditex, Komatsu, STC Pay, and Titan. Building on a major new body of research, the authors identify the seven imperatives that leaders must follow as the digital age continues to evolve: Reimagine your company's place in the world Embrace and create value via ecosystems Build a system of privileged insights with your customers Make your organization outcome-oriented Invert the focus of your leadership team Reinvent the social contract with your people Disrupt your own leadership approach Together, these seven imperatives comprise a playbook for how leaders can define a bolder purpose and transform their organizations.

Become a Digital Master—No Matter What Business You’re In If you think the phrase “going digital” is only relevant for industries like tech, media, and entertainment—think again. In fact, mobile, analytics, social media, sensors, and cloud computing have already fundamentally changed the entire business landscape as we know it—including your industry. The problem is that most accounts of digital in business focus on Silicon Valley stars and tech start-ups. But what about the other 90-plus percent of the economy? In Leading Digital, authors George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee highlight how large companies in traditional industries—from finance to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals—are using digital to gain strategic advantage. They illuminate the principles and practices that lead to successful digital transformation. Based on a study of more than four hundred global firms, including Asian Paints, Burberry, Caesars Entertainment, Codelco, Lloyds Banking Group, Nike, and Pernod Ricard, the book shows what it takes to become a Digital Master. It explains successful transformation in a clear, two-part framework: where to invest in digital capabilities, and how to lead the transformation. Within these parts, you’ll learn: • How to engage better with your customers • How to digitally enhance operations • How to create a digital vision • How to govern your digital activities The book also includes an extensive step-by-step transformation playbook for leaders to follow. Leading Digital is the must-have guide to help your organization survive and thrive in the new, digitally powered, global economy.

Digital transformation is not about technology--it's about change. In the rapidly changing digital economy, you can't succeed by merely tweaking management practices that led to past success. And yet, while many leaders and managers recognize the threat from digital--and the potential opportunity--they lack a common language and compelling framework to help them assess it and guide them in responding. They don't know how to think about their digital business model. In this concise, practical book, MIT digital research leaders Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner provide a powerful yet straightforward framework that has been field-tested globally with dozens of senior management teams. Based on years of study at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), the authors find that digitization is moving companies' business models on two dimensions: from value chains to digital ecosystems, and from a fuzzy understanding of the needs of end customers to a sharper one. Looking at these dimensions in combination results in four distinct business models, each with different capabilities. The book then sets out six driving questions, in separate chapters, that help managers and executives clarify where they are currently in an increasingly digital business landscape and highlight what's needed to move toward a higher-value digital business model. Filled with straightforward self-assessments, motivating examples, and sharp financial analyses of where profits are made, this smart book will help you tackle the threats, leverage the opportunities, and create winning digital strategies.

This book on business psychology—particularly organizational leadership—crosses industries, continents, and business environments: it includes 45 précis on emerging theories of leadership; ethical and cultural considerations; group and team leadership; leadership self-development; management philosophy and practice; organizational diagnosis and cultural dynamics; personality and lifespan in the workplace; professional development; qualitative research methods; psychological, socio-cultural, and political dimensions of organizations; the role of technology in organizations; strategic change management; and systems theory. The material ranges widely but is pithy: each précis offers in easy bites the latest "take" on the subject, drawing from popular textbooks, recommended readings, case studies, group exercises, personal experience, and self-reflection; each was written as a key to understanding and change with an eye to re-imagining leadership in the 21st century. Both rigorously researched and entertaining, this book addresses the fast-changing realities of organizational leadership in domestic and international settings across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors: it will serve as a valuable quick-access resource for practitioners and students.