Rewired

Chapter 7The ultimate corporate team sport

No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.

—Halford Luccock

Leadership is crucial in any transformation but the intense, cross-functional nature of a digital and AI transformation requires a much greater level of collaboration across the C-suite. Everyone has an important part to play and without it, the transformation success will be at risk.

The CEO

Because digital and AI transformations require heavy cross-functional collaboration and the building of shared enterprise capabilities, the CEO (or division leader, in the case of conglomerates) plays an essential role. They are responsible for creating top-of-the-house alignment and architecting the new enterprise capabilities to avoid organizational misunderstandings.

The CEO is particularly important in convening and rallying leadership around the need for transformation, and regularly communicating the vision, alignment, and commitment to reinforce it. There are also far-reaching knock-on effects of a digital and AI transformation on end-to-end processes such as having to reduce servicing capacity in bank branches when customers increasingly use their banking app to complete certain tasks. Since these knock-on effects can touch so many different parts of the organization, it's up to the CEO to continually recalibrate and realign across the entire business system to capture the full gains.

The CEO also has an important role in holding people accountable ...