Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Many CIOs today feel like they are building bridges as they are walking on them. Organizations are being pressed to innovate to catch up to or to stay ahead of competitors. IT shops feel this as pressure to move at the speed of business often with changing and incomplete business requirements. Leaders inside the organization are quickly building the future imperfectly.

Despite the attention now given to innovation and innovation processes, and the importance in which they are viewed for the progress and survival of companies, the means by which good ideas are created continue to elude us. While there are numerous methods for gathering and processing ideas -- from crowdsourcing to innovation labs -- the means by which good ideas can be generated by groups remains poorly understood.

Deciding the priority and funding for major IT initiatives, such as developing a new system or supporting a new technology, are among the most important functions of the IT governance process. Anyone who has been part of an IT governance committee recognizes that business needs and goals are the key basis for these decisions -- IT strategy must be synchronized with business goals.

According to Rand McNally, Africa, Asia, and South America make up 62% of the world's landmass. These markets have 82% of the world's population, which is 5.3 billion out of 6.5 billion people. China and India alone have more than 2.4 billion people.1 The consumer opportunity is huge. Presuming your company operates outside of the Western world, you must win big in these markets to thrive in this global economy.

This Executive Update provides an abridged section from my upcoming book, Supply Chain Management: The Real WOW Factor, covering insights about ways to thrive in emerging markets. It delves into the harsh realities of working in these markets and offers key solutions in business operations, such as low-cost, high-quality business models and action-planning focus areas across the product supply chain, from the customer and consumer back through raw and packing material suppliers.

In a series of workshops conducted in 12 US and three European cities as well as one in Asia, I asked more than 1,500 CIOs to answer the following question: When you, your CEO, and your CFO hear the word "innovation," what is the first thing that leaps to mind?

Don't be surprised if your agile adoption is going south after your next company reorganization. Many agile implementations I've observed will not survive company or division reorganizations. Unfortunately, many of these agile adoptions enabled teams to exhibit truly breakout performances.

Winston Churchill once said, "We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives." We make technology and our technologies shape us.

— Sherry Turkle, Simulation and its Discontents (The MIT Press, 2009)