Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans—you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.
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If electric cars and trucks are the vehicles of the future, then that already suggests a massive change in the industrial infrastructure — new modes of manufacturing, new modes of refueling and repair, and, perhaps, new roads. Given the key role of autos in society, such a transition will be a major story. However, it is really only a small part of the changes facing the automobile industry. As we explore in this Executive Update, other technological changes in the auto industry include: self-driving cars, intelligent auto production processes, and cars as entertainment centers.
As a second-order effect of the Internet, digital transformation can be broken down across the three major areas that it will transform: customer experience, operational processes, and business models. Although transforming the customer experience is the most visible manifestation of digital transformation, as I discuss in this Advisor, transforming internal processes through digitization, worker enablement, and performance management can also show great benefits.
Both the explosive growth of Agile adoption and the return to collaborative and experiential learning are part of a larger global transformation whereby people are seeking to cast off authority in exchange for autonomy and peer collaboration.
In many market sectors, the journey to become more Agile is a strategic imperative. This Advisor looks at some of the reasons some organizations find this transition difficult. These challenges point to the practices, processes, and cultures of the past as potential hurdles.
Researching and writing about the digital backbone has strengthened my initial thesis of the concept due to an overwhelming response to the research and from opportunities to engage with audiences worldwide on the topic. In this Executive Update, I’d like to share some of my own discoveries and insights from conversations with CEOs, chief architects, CIOs, market and sales leaders, as well as innovation leaders across many industries and geographies — what I refer to as my “digital backbone learning lab.”
When successfully deployed and business value-focused, a business architecture practice is a critical enabler for digital transformation.
This Executive Update proposes a five-layer customer engagement stack — running from customer dissatisfaction through customer satisfaction, customer delight, customer success, and finally partnership. The maturity level of an engagement between a service provider and a customer is a function of the attitude of the people working with the service provider and the perception formed by the customer.
Entrepreneurial organizations typically have severely limited resources and many last only briefly; consequently, their ability and opportunity to implement knowledge management (KM) practices before suffering the consequences of “knowledge mismanagement” are limited. In fact, one might say that the flat managerial structure and agile business processes characteristic of entrepreneurship are in direct opposition to the somewhat time-consuming and structured processes traditionally associated with KM.