Digital Transformation Game Plan

Final Reflection: The Importance of Leadership

Having now read the book, it’s really important that you think through your role as a leader in this digital transformation.

There are many threats and opportunities facing businesses in the Digital Age: industry disruption from nimble startups, economic pressure from massive digital platforms, evolving security threats, and emerging technologies.

At the beginning of this book, we called out the three main challenges:

• Heightened customer expectations.

• Speed and ambiguity, which forces companies to come up with new competitive advantages more frequently.

• A plethora of emergent technology choices that could create competitive advantage.

It’s clear that dealing with these challenges will require a new type of leadership. There has never been a time when executives have been under as much pressure as today to let go of what they have thought to be true and explore new possibilities.

This revolution in what leadership means is particularly critical for organizations during digital transformation. Unpacking legacy systems, legacy thinking, and legacy behavior while truly focusing on the customer will likely require rewiring culture, talent, and technology. Organizations must break down barriers and remove blockers across the organization—like thawing the frozen middle-management layer—to establish new ways of working. This means being humble about what you don’t know and embracing the need to constantly learn and change. A willingness ...