HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leading Digital Transformation (with bonus article "How Apple Is Organized for Innovation" by Joel M. Podolny and Morten T. Hansen)

Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation

by Rita McGrath and Ryan McManus

WHAT’S YOUR DIGITAL STRATEGY? That simple question often throws the CEOs of traditional companies into a panic. They believe that digital technologies and business models pose an existential threat to their way of doing business—and of course they’re right. But the pressure they feel often leads them to make big bet-the-farm moves—and that’s usually wrong.

Veon, a large multinational provider of telecommunications services, is a case in point. Its new digital platform, introduced in 2017, was a huge project, involving 100 staff members in Amsterdam and another hundred or so in its London office. The idea was to create a mobile app that would offer users rich localized ...