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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The role of EA leaders in technology innovation is to scan the horizon of emerging technologies to determine how they are being applied and identify opportunities for the organization to innovate for competitive advantage. Once EA leaders have identified and analyzed those opportunities, businesses can formulate strategies for adoption.
For organizations to survive and thrive in the modern world, we should be able to work “remote first”: working online as if we were in the office together. Our companies will only be stronger for it. The things that make remote working successful are the same things we want in place anyway: effortless and fast communication, a shared place for files and conversation, and alignment on a common vision.
Having clearly defined outcomes creates the opportunity for stakeholders to reimagine their business, which informs the shape of future capabilities.
We usually think of leaders in large terms: Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and so on. However, small acts of leadership happen every day, forming the glue that holds civil society together. These include helping a shorter person put a bag in the overhead compartment, organizing neighborhood cleanups, or starting petitions to change government. These are moments of “guest leadership.”
We spoke with several technology leaders of large, established enterprises who are successfully tackling the myriad challenges of digitization: transforming their operating model and technical architectures, streamlining core processes, simplifying legacy systems, improving data quality, and unwinding excessive governance and control mechanisms. They are navigating the balance of technical and social considerations and creating a culture of continuous collaboration, problem solving, experimentation, and learning, which collectively creates enterprise-wide agility. These are very big enterprises that are learning to operate like small, agile startups.
The values contained in the House of Lean for the 21st Century give us guidance as to the mindset required to succeed, but it takes concrete practices to bring these values to life. Given that leadership is the foundation of Lean, the effective Lean leader needs to form habits that align to the pillars that support the goal.
Apart from consumer adoption of digital technologies, startups are also disrupting the status quo of traditional organizations. To address the threats and capitalize on the opportunities, organizations are transforming themselves to enable digital capabilities to improve customer experience and offer analytics-driven personalized products, services, and collaborative innovations, leading to increased top lines and margins.
Our research and consulting reveal that CEOs and their CxO colleagues play a pivotal role in determining whether or not their organizations exploit the innovative opportunities provided by digital technologies. Creating and sustaining value from digital investments requires the CEO’s focused attention and oversight. CEOs set the tone, and their active participation determines whether their organizations optimize a return from any spending on IT. Most CEOs don’t seem to understand this or quite know what they should do.