October 2020 – Digital Transformation: A Framework

A new approach to leadership for the team at the top.

If a company wants to be very fast, thoroughly transform customer experiences, and systematically outperform competitors, it needs more than many agile teams. A truly agile company requires that the company’s top officials, most, if not all, of the top executives, also adopt agile principles.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, a team of Bain & Company consultants describe how such an agile leadership team works, how it differs from the conventional corporate-style executive committee and other agile teams, and what agile means for the day-to-day work lives of senior executives.

While the job of a conventional agile team is to create innovative solutions to a problem, an agile leadership team aims to strike the right balance between standardizing operations and pursuing innovation.

The Agile C-Suite
by Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez
Harvard Business Review, May–June 2020

Interviewing executives and employees at more than two dozen digital and in-transition companies and then surveying employees in over 500 digital and traditional companies, the researchers identified the values and practices from digital culture that make sense to transplant to traditional companies as they embark in their digital transformation journey.

They identify impact, speed, openness and autonomy as the four key values of digital culture, and then extrapolate them with eight digital and traditional practices to promote innovation without sacrificing the integrity and stability that enable a healthy workplace.

They support the empiric research with real-life examples.

Building Digital-Ready Culture in Traditional Organizations
By George Westerman, Deborah L. Soule, and Anand Eswaran
MIT Sloan Management Review, May 2019