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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In a recent webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Borys Stokalski and Aleksander Solecki explored the processes and practices that support business agility from the perspectives of value innovation and product portfolio management. In this Advisor, we share the Q&A session that followed.
Digital transformation is the hottest trend and spend in technology circles these days. But how can employees possibly transform a business that they don’t fully understand?
This article is the first in a series of Advisors that will outline some of my lessons from leading Agile transformations. Getting started with Agile involves some organizational preparation; hence, the countdown to enterprise agility is the subject of this Advisor.
We have set out to “demystify digital transformation” through interviews with a cross-section of senior leaders at seven firms in a variety of industries. As we conduct our research, a comprehensive view of how mindsets must evolve to enable this transformation within firms is emerging. One of our most prominent initial observations centers on the digital mindsets of leaders; this mindset determines whether an organization’s digital transformation gains traction or flounders.
This Executive Report is an update to a 2015 edition that introduced a process for deriving enterprise architecture (EA) value metrics that align with the value drivers particular to an organization — those important to both the core business capabilities of the organization as well as its key stakeholders. It contains refinements to the process as well as additional information and perspectives from the field regarding the strategic use of value metrics that will, over time, allow the EA organization to be viewed as a strategic resource/partner and eventually earn a seat at the strategic planning table.
This Executive Summary accompanies an update to a 2015 Executive Report that introduced a process for deriving enterprise architecture (EA) value metrics that align with the value drivers particular to an organization — those important to both the core business capabilities of the organization as well as its key stakeholders. It contains refinements to the process as well as additional information and perspectives from the field regarding the strategic use of value metrics that will, over time, allow the EA organization to be viewed as a strategic resource/partner and eventually earn a seat at the strategic planning table.
When you watch live video recordings of jazz legend Miles Davis, he walks among the assembled musicians on stage during performances, guiding the focus or center of gravity of the music that they collectively create; he performs leadership. As one’s belonging gets more distributed in networks, relations become key to achieving collective creativity. Leaders are challenged to develop within their teams the capability to act and respond as one entity greater than the sum of their parts — to sound with one voice.
The challenge of being open to innovation is in breaking out of familiar patterns. A lot of what we do is guided by patterns. These patterns help us in a stable context but get in the way in a dynamic or complex context and hinder innovation. The first step in dealing with suboptimal patterns is to be aware that they are hard to see.