Author: Charlie Ranalli

Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption

| Charlie Ranalli

There is a pattern to digital disruption in an industry, whether the disruptor is Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club, Pillpack or one of countless other startups that have stolen large portions of market share from industry leaders, often in a matter of a few years.

By decoupling the customer value chain, these startups, instead of taking on the Unilevers and Nikes, BMW’s and Sephoras of the world head on, peel away a piece of the consumer purchasing process. Birchbox offered women a new way to sample beauty products from a variety of companies from the convenience of their homes, without having to visit a store. Turo doesn’t compete with GM. Instead, it offers people the benefit of driving without having to own a car themselves.

Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption
by Thales S. Teixeira and Greg Piechota

What’s Really Disrupting Business? It’s Not Technology

| Charlie Ranalli

Technology isn’t the main force hobbling many companies today—it’s changing customer needs and expectations.

Supporting and illustrating one of the two principles originating this blog that digital transformation is not about technology, marketing professor Thales Teixeira argues that successful disruptors are quicker to detect and cater to emerging customer needs than larger competitors, often with access to similar technologies and similar amounts of technology.

Mr. Teixeira discusses several cases of newcomers entering mature markets, and how incumbents reacted or adapted.

What’s Really Disrupting Business? It’s Not Technology
by Danielle Kost
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, February 2019

See also: Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption

Unlocking Success in Digital Transformations

| Charlie Ranalli

Digital transformations are even more difficult than traditional change efforts to pull off. But the results from the most effective transformations point to five factors for success.

In a new McKinsey Global Survey on digital transformations, more than eight in ten respondents say their organizations have undertaken such efforts in the past five years.

The results from respondents who report success point to 21 best practices, all of which make a digital transformation more likely to succeed. These characteristics fall into five categories: leadership, capability building, empowering workers, upgrading tools, and communication.

Unlocking success in digital transformations
McKinsey & Company
October 29, 2018

Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business

| Charlie Ranalli

For over a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn’t. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture.

Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business
by Sunil Gupta

Leading With Next-Generation Key Performance Indicators

| Charlie Ranalli

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and David Kiron, the executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, partnered with Google to run a survey of more than 3,200 senior executives and interviews with 18 executives and thought leaders, them to explain how they and their organizations are using KPIs in the digital era.

Then they went a step further and published a self-assessment tool to help leaders and their teams evaluate how they measure-up against those best practices.

Article
M. Schrage and D. Kiron, “Leading With Next-Generation Key Performance Indicators”
MIT Sloan Management Review, June 2018

Self-Assessment Tool
Measure Your KPI Alignment
MIT Sloan Management Review, June 2018

The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation

| Charlie Ranalli

Based on the research behind their pioneering paper The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry, George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business, identify the nine characteristics that differentiate digital leaders.

“The best companies — those we call Digirati — combine digital activity with strong leadership to turn technology into transformation. This is what we call Digital Maturity. Companies vary in their digital maturity, and those that are more mature outperform those that are not.”

Consistent with other research, leaders are digitally transforming three key areas of their business: customer experience, operational processes and business models, and each of the three pillars has three elements that are changing.

The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation
By George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee
MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2014

The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry

| Charlie Ranalli

The researchers developed a digital maturity model to show how different companies are reacting to technological opportunity, and cleverly analyzed how business invest in Technology, but more importantly, how the true leaders create the leadership and change management capabilities necessary to drive change, which they called transformation management intensity.

They proved that transformation is as – or more – important than the technology itself in the quest to be a digital leader.

The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry
By
George Westerman
Research Scientist, MIT Center for Digital Business
Andrew McAfee
Associate Director, MIT Center for Digital Business
Brief
Paper