The Journey to Digital Transformation with David Rogers

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It’s the rule of business: you need to adapt and change to stay successful. Yet, so many businesses fail at digital transformation. In this episode of the What’s Next! Podcast, I sit down with David Rogers to take a deep look at what successful transformation truly looks like, where many organizations go wrong, and how the mindset around it needs to change.

Here are a few highlights from my conversation with David:

How would you define strategy?

I used to come at strategy with this idea that it was top-down: people at the top figure out these really big, important questions about the whole organization. But what I’ve learned is that strategy is much more pervasive than that. And also much more basic at the same time.

Strategy is asking two questions:

●????? What are we trying to achieve?

●????? How do we think we might achieve that?

You need to ask those two questions over and over and really engage in debating, discussing, coming to alignment, moving forward, learning, and then returning to the same questions.

For strategy to work, that conversation cannot just happen once a year on a strategy retreat. It cannot happen at the top level. This has to be done at every level of the organization on a continuous basis. And that's when things start to move because digital transformation can't just happen from the top down. It just does not work that way.

What are the barriers to digital transformation?

There are five barriers at the heart of all the struggles I see companies facing. Everybody thinks it's unique to their industry or company, but guess what? Everybody has the same problems:

1. No shared vision
2. No growth priorities
3. No habits of experimentation
4. No flexibility in governance
5. No change in capabilities

What are some obstacles that you see in the C-Suite around these types of projects?

There are three big misconceptions I see.

The first is that people think it's about technology when really it's about customers and the business.

The second is people think it is something that's going to happen top-down. That will never work if it's just top-down. It has to be engaging and driven by people at every level of the organization.

And the third is that people think it's a project with an end date, and it absolutely is not. It is an ongoing process that is not going to ever sort of finish and wrap up.

The best digital transformations are changing the way resources are being spent in every budget and every part of the organization. It's really the wrong conception of the whole endeavor to think of it as this project that you're going to spend extra on once, and then you're done. It's really changing the way the whole organization operates. That's absolutely critical to understand.

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Mahalo,

Tiffani

David Rogers Group is an expert on digital transformation and a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School. As the Director of Executive Education programs on digital business strategy and on leading digital transformation, he has taught over 25,000 executives through his programs in New York City, Silicon Valley, and online. He is also the author of five books and is releasing another in September 2023 called The Digital Transformation Roadmap, which follows his landmark bestseller, The Digital Transformation Playbook, which has been translated into over a dozen languages.