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.
Subscribe to Arthur D. Little's Culture & Leadership Newsletter
Insight
I finished my introduction to this issue with reference to Larry Keely's triad for technology product success: desirability, feasibility, and viability. Drawing on the rich material provided from Federico, Gabriele, Manjunath, and, of course, our survey respondents, I'd like to wrap up with a brief look at these concepts in more detail.
This survey examined the business uses of real-time data and organizations' readiness to exploit real-time digital data streams. More than half (67%) of the 117 responding organizations are headquartered or based in Europe, with 19% in North America, 6% in the Middle East, 5% in Asia/Australia/Pacific, and the remainder elsewhere in the world.
By focusing merely on Big Data, you may be missing the real revolution — digital data streams (DDS). The reason DDS is easy to miss is that it's like Big Data, but it's the dynamic dimension of Big Data — and in motion.
Recently, with the availability of real-time digital data streams (DDS) and the so-called Big Data that can potentially provide valuable data for an organization, we are witnessing a major transformation in the dynamics of the data-based, decision-making phenomenon. Real-time DDS consists of data that is continuously delivered immediately after creation or collection, which organizations can utilize in real time. Often, with this type of data — described as unstructured or semistructured, high volume, and high velocity — there is a minimal or zero time delay in its streaming. Through insights from the latest CBR survey results, this article examines the challenges related to value creation using real-time DDS as well as the readiness levels of responding organizations.
As noted in Part I of this Advisor, the idea of riskfare itself isn't new (although I think I may be the first to use the term); the concept has been radically transformed over the last 60 years in light of the development of modern portfolio theory and behavioral economics.
Embrace Politics
One of the most influential talks of my career was an internal talk Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco gave about 20 years ago at the company I worked for at that time. "On Beyond Zebra" was its title and it was about politics in organizations.

