Talent and Leadership

Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI

| Charlie Ranalli

Authored by experts at McKinsey, this guide is a comprehensive and insightful exploration into the transformative power of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. They meticulously outline the frameworks and methodologies that successful companies have employed to not only adapt but thrive in the rapidly evolving digital era. It presents a blend of theoretical insights and practical applications, making it a valuable resource for business leaders aiming to navigate the complexities of digital transformation.

One of the standout features of “Rewired” is its pragmatic approach to integrating digital and AI technologies into existing business models. The authors emphasize the importance of aligning digital initiatives with core business strategies, ensuring that technological advancements contribute to business goals. The book is full of case studies and real-world examples, illustrating how various organizations have successfully implemented digital transformations. These examples provide readers with tangible, actionable insights that can be adapted to their unique business contexts. Additionally, the guide addresses common challenges and pitfalls associated with digital transformation, offering solutions and best practices to mitigate risks and maximize returns.

“Rewired” highlights the human aspect of digital transformation, focusing on the crucial role of leadership, culture, and talent management. Aligned with the core tenants of this blog, the authors argue that while technology is a powerful enabler, the true drivers of transformation are the people within the organization. They provide strategies for nurturing a culture of innovation, continuous learning, and agility, which are essential for sustaining competitive advantage in the age of digital and AI. Overall, “Rewired” is an indispensable resource for any business leader seeking to harness the full potential of digital and AI technologies, offering a roadmap to outcompete and excel in the modern business environment.

Rewired: the McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI
by Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, Rodney Zemme

Fast Times: How Digital Winners Set Direction, Learn, and Adapt

| Charlie Ranalli

In Fast Times, a team of McKinsey consultants share the recipe they apply to help their customers be first movers and win the digital race.

“[Fast Times] is for senior executives who are frustrated by the slow pace and limited return on investment (ROI) of their digital transformations, and are unsure what’s holding them back” in the word of the authors.

While not a detailed blueprint to design a Digital Transformation initiative, they cover critical imperatives to develop a Strategy, Capabilities, Adopt and Scale, and they cleverly do it answering provocative questions like “Are you clear about the which transformation model is best for your company?” or “Have you hired digital stars?”

They provide insightful tips on Speed, Scale, Talent and Culture. A must read for leaders already embarked in a digital journey or in need of a reset.

Fast Times: How Digital Winners Set Direction, Learn, and Adapt
by Arun Arora, Peter Dahlstrom, Klemens Hjartar, and Florian Wunderlich

The Agile C-Suite

| Charlie Ranalli

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

Building Digital-Ready Culture in Traditional Organizations

| Charlie Ranalli

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

Do you need a Chief Digital Officer?

| Charlie Ranalli

One of the hottest topics CEOs face when tuning their leadership teams to embark in a Digital Transformation is deciding if they need a Chief Digital Officer. They do.

These are the four reasons why.

One: responsibilities

The Digital leader is concerned with strategy and models, change management, digital business outcome and supporting the rest of the business leaders develop their digital skills and agendas. She or he is the “sherpa” facilitating the development of the roadmap and nudging the transformation, understands technology profoundly but does not have to be a technical expert.

The IT lead executive on the other side delivers on technical stuff, itself a gargantuan effort – more on this later. The two must form a strong and fluid partnership since their success is mutually dependent, their agendas are complementary but different.

Two: priorities and bandwidth

Seasoned executives know that mixing workloads that have aggressive real-time demands with forward-looking pioneering work on the same individual(s) usually leads to the present mortgaging the future. In Sales it is one of the guiding principles in organization design and priority management: once a leader, team or individual executive has enough “existing” customers, growth will suffer, it is crucial to either reshuffle responsibilities or add people.

The same happens here. The CIO will usually be tasked with managing delivery and operational workloads, inevitably sacrificing time needed to research and strategize if also asked to lead innovation. The CDO has a lighter operational burden and demand-driven disruptions, and can focus on imagining, planning and building the future.

Note that the CDO must be responsible for outcomes and show results but is a lot less concerned with the day to day operational demands of the IT infraestructure.

Three: profile and dynamics

The CDO is a networker, both internally and externally. Innovation and change require a huge investment of time during the envisioning, planning or implementation phases of new initiatives. It can be selling ideas, coordinating or troubleshooting, and while structure and focus are essential to get results over time, a lot of the actual hands-on time is unscripted and unstructured.

The CIO on the other side lives in a significantly more systematized and process-driven environment required by project delivery, operations, support and security.

This requires each executive to have a specific profile – or at least wearing the right “hat” for the demands of the job since smart, experienced individuals could conceivable adjust their style as needed – but will be challenged to do both simultaneously.

Four: an additional voice

Another advantage is bringing other technically competent individual to the leadership team. Although the role is not as technical as the CIO, the CDO will have enough technical know-how to present alternative ideas and views, challenge assumptions and enrich the debate along the way.

This of course requires good planning and decision-making habits, idea curation, and a bit of conflict management. But openness to consider a wide spectrum of possibilities, have heated debates and experiment with different approaches is a desirable attribute in a digital leadership team.

Size Matters

The size of the business has a counterintuitive impact in the need to create the CDO role. Instinctively, the larger the business the more important it should be. Not so fast.

Here is other side of this story: larger businesses have larger IT organizations, giving the CIO more flexibility to delegate day-to-day operational duties, redeploy a % of the staff to innovation initiatives, and therefore reinventing the position as a hybrid CIO/CDO role. This is particularly true if the company is advanced migrating systems to the cloud – freeing resources and budget from legacy on-premises jobs.

Smaller IT organization however will have a smaller or more junior team reporting to the CIO, making it more challenging to redefine and expand the position, or redeploy resources further down the IT organization.

One solution does not fit all

In the end, this is a case-by-case discussion that must consider several factors – but most of the time separating the roles will be the preferred approach, with far more upsides than downsides.

The Digital Innovation Hub

| Charlie Ranalli

The Digital Innovation team is the source of vision, knowledge and experience in how technologies will transform the way a company does business. It is the hearth of the Transformation program and will cement the ability of the organization to innovate identifying and adopting future technologies beyond the initial change initiative.

Name and purpose

While the name may change depending on company size and convention (e.g. Digital Innovation Center in larger corporations, Digital Innovation Team in smaller ones, Digital Excellence Center after becoming a Digital leader) the purpose is similar: a compact but assertive group of specialists to lead the design and implementation of the initiatives that bring to life the Digital Transformation.

Responsibilities and influence

Members of the Digital Innovation Team collaborate with business teams to identify, assess and eventually develop innovation opportunities enabled by technology, and then guide the IT teams to implement and manage the relevant systems. Some organizations call them Product Owners, although this may be more or less applicable depending on industry and scenario.

They are also influencers and a support function, the go-to experts when line of business leaders or teams come across ideas, opportunities o problems that could be addressed with technology. They partner with and empower the less technically-savvy to help them be Digital innovators.


Digital Innovation Hub

  • Contribute to the Digital Strategy
  • Monitor industry and competition
  • Research trends and innovations
  • Imagine novel applications of technology
  • Assess feasibility and potential impact
  • Develop and lead initiatives
  • Drive business outcome
  • Ensure alignment between business and technology

Organization

The team is usually structured to match the mayor “themes” or initiatives that form the basis of the Digital Strategy: Data Analytics, Customer Engagement, Digital Marketing, Process Automation, and so on. They are part of the same team (formally or virtually) to ensure that the plans they manage are aligned and connected.

In smaller organizations, this may be one of only two functions that report to the Chief Digital Officer, and in most cases will rely on a sister function, the Transformation Office, to orchestrate the Digital Strategy, the rollout of projects and drive change.

The Digital Innovation team is one -if not the- most impactful and cost-effective investment of the Digital Transformation program. Independent from line of business organizations and IT, they will focus on innovation regardless of short-term pressures or complacency.