The Digital Leader

7What Can Go Wrong and How to Make It Right

Rising to the Leadership Challenge

Even bite‐size projects can be stalled, and there are lessons to be learned from companies that have hit some snags. The most important of these is for the CEO (or digital surrogate) to stay deeply engaged throughout. You will find no substitutes for learning and paying attention to how well the execution is progressing.

This is by no means a passive role. The point of that engagement is to do a quick diagnosis at the first hint of a problem and to be decisive in executing a remedy. Unless top leaders use their full toolkit—including actions like reallocating resources, changing people, and coaching on behavior—they themselves can become the roadblock. You can learn as much from other leaders' missteps as you can from their success.

Reckoning with a Bad Hire

A common problem that can be ruinous for even a bite‐size approach is recruiting the wrong chief digital officer. It is an easy mistake to make given that the executives who do the hiring usually know little about digitization and use of AI and so on. Our observation and experience across the globe is that while the batting average for new hires is not perfect, for CDOs it is much worse. CEOs have to own up to having made a wrong decision and move quickly to fix it, because the longer they wait, the larger the resulting competitive disadvantage for their companies.

A mistake in this critical hire is what slowed the digitalization of a large ...