Miles to Go: Transformation for the ‘Bionic Era’

The notion of business transformation is not new by any means, but the goals and objectives have been shifting.

We used to view transformation as a means for responding to—or escaping—disruption. Sometimes you could even disrupt your rivals. This was only a year or two ago. Today, the goal of transformation is to thrive in a “bionic” environment—creating value in ways that weren’t possible before using three new types of capital: behavior (developed by tracking ongoing activity), cognitive (the value inherent in algorithms), and network (the connection points, with people and machines, that a company can deploy). These new forms of capital are fast becoming vital to businesses of all types.

We’ve been researching and writing about the nature of bionic companies over the past year, getting to the heart of what makes them tick. This week, strategy+business magazine published an article exploring how you can lead your company toward a bionic transformation by thinking about shifting your business in three key ways.

• From a business model based on managing the supply of your product or service to one based on providing whatever customers demand, using any means possible;
• From an operational approach based on stocks of information that you hold and capture, to one based on flows of knowledge that you collaborate on and share; and
• From a competitive position based on a stable landscape of rivals to one based on platforms where a single winner dominates the system.

In the article, Kelly Barnes, John Sviokla and I detail the quiet revolution underlying these shifts in mindset. We’re seeing an upending of the sources of wealth that businesses deploy and create, the first such major shift since the Industrial Revolution. Bionic transformation turns every company’s business strategy on its head. It leads a company to reinvent what it does and who it benefits, enabling that company to compete in unprecedented ways by combining digital prowess, human ingenuity, and strategic purpose.

As we mention in the article, perhaps the most critical factor in bionic transformation is the imagination of you and your colleagues; many powerful bionic practices, making full use of behavior, cognitive, and network capital, have yet to be developed. In addition to this week’s article, I’d encourage you to explore our additional transformation-related insights here.