Taking my Own Medicine: What I’ve Done to Manage My Own “Digital Transformation”

I’ve been writing about digital transformation for some time, and have shared thoughts from our work helping clients reinvent the core of their businesses. Over the past few years, McKinsey has also been on this journey, reinventing how we work (you can read more about Digital McKinsey here.) This was by no means an easy process, and on a personal level, I have had to change how I work on many different fronts. Three in particular stand out:

• Moving away from the ‘perfect’ answer to testing and learning – As business models change and evolve, companies are changing how they work. That’s helping us to rethink how we work with clients and exploring different models of support. For me, that’s been about working much more with flexible, agile teams of experts who come in and out of projects as needed. I am working in intense, fast-paced war rooms with clients and partners, through rapid cycles of building, testing, and scaling initiatives. I’ve had to learn how to focus on not having the “perfect” answer, but finding a good answer and testing it in the field then adapting. It’s a radically different approach to problem-solving that took some getting used to. But I’ve also found it much more effective.

• Refocusing on building my network – New ways of working requires new skills, capabilities, and talent. While McKinsey has always prided itself on cultivating great talent, we’re looking to bring in people with a wide array of specialized disciplines (we’ve hired 850 developers, designers, architects, and data engineers into an entirely new group, McKinsey Digital Labs). As we evolve our HR processes, I’ve found that I’m spending way more time building up my personal networks to find great talent. Of course, networking has always been important but there are just so many more tools and avenues for doing so these days. I keep a much stronger eye on my connections through social media, speaking and publishing, not just for building my network, but also explicitly for recruiting. I have had to invest as much as 20% of my time on interviewing and helping new colleagues get connected within the firm.

• Working with a broader ecosystem of partners – Many of the new challenges in our clients’ businesses can’t be addressed just by us, even with the broader talent base we’ve built. So I’ve also had to build connections with, and manage, service and technology partners – including not only the big enterprise tech players, but also smaller service providers who complement us. It has changed the basic ways I develop new client opportunities, and mobilize to help clients build new capabilities. I have had to learn how to strike different kinds of agreements, manage partner stakeholders with their own agendas, and orchestrate delivery to clients of work across multiple parties. It requires a new level of collaboration both within our teams but also with clients, vendors, and external partners. And over time, I see how much better the problem solving has become and how much better the solutions are.

I joined McKinsey eight years ago and it is remarkable how much we have changed in that timeframe. The firm has thrived through nine decades of leadership in the consulting business, but these latest forays into new capabilities, partnerships and technologies have been as nerve racking and invigorating as wing-walking.

The one really core thing I’ve learned is that you can’t stop learning. There is no “end state” to the digital transformation journey. It’s a constant process of learning and trying new things.  How has your company’s digital transformation changed your own personal priorities?

Learn more this and other topics on our Digital McKinsey site. Follow us on Twitter @McKinseyDigital. And please follow me @davidedelman.