Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Dave Martin, Tony Ponton, and Kim Ballestrin explain that humans crave certainty, and we desperately want to be right the first time. They argue that trying to be “right” can lead us astray in highly complex environments. Thus, we must become comfortable with ambiguity, especially with the notion of arriving at a partially correct decision. Next, we need to select the appropriate measures to track our progress. Are we on the right track or not? Once we have additional information, we can adapt our decision and refine our course of action. This iterative process serves us well in complex situations for which our predictive powers are simply far too limited.

Cutter Fellow Noah Barsky outlines 10 unconventional rules for helping us identify critical risks. He argues that we should not relegate risk management to our compliance or legal departments. On the contrary, we need to transform the mindset that says risk management and mitigation are the responsibility of specialists within specific functional areas. Instead, it must become everyone’s responsibility. Many risks remain stubbornly hidden in organizations. Barsky closes his article by suggesting, quite astutely, that we need to “listen to the kids” in our enterprises.

The best leaders recognize that they don’t have all the answers. They acknowledge the limits of their expertise and understand the need to marshal the collective intellect of their teams. As Peter Drucker once said, “The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.” So what can leaders do to gather input from a diverse array of sources? How can they generate and critically evaluate options? What does it take to uncover and assess hidden risks? In this issue of Amplify, we explore these questions in depth.

Lori Silverman says we need to rethink our focus on data analytics. She points out that many enterprises are not achieving the ROI that they would like from their data science and analytics efforts. Silverman argues that we need to think more broadly about optimizing the decision-making processes throughout our organizations, rather than continuing to pour resources into hardware, software, and human resources in hopes of better data-driven insights. She explains how to design an end-to-end process that helps people throughout the enterprise define key questions, mine data for crucial insights, and develop recommendations based on those insights. Finally, she describes how we can communicate our conclusions to others much more effectively through narrative storytelling.

One of the most important knowledge graph (KG) functions is creating linkages across multiple data sets. By providing a visual representation of the underlying connections between data nodes, KGs help leaders advance their understanding of their environment so they can make intelligent business choices.

This Advisor reviews the book Future Ready, which should be in every leader's library because it lays forth the issues and risks of each path forward for successful digital transformation.

Innovative Leadership originates from the idea that we must regularly innovate how we lead as our organizations change in a continually more complex and faster-paced world. As with contin­uous improvement, leaders who follow Innovative Leadership regularly elevate their leadership to meet current and anticipated conditions, challenges, and opportunities. 

This Advisor offers two “mini-starters” to explore the DEI issue in more depth: (1) a critique of leadership programs for Black executives with suggestions for improvement and (2) the threat that “me over we” poses to both DEI programs and the business sector at large.