Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 302 | Strategy & Business Model | 1

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 302 | June 23-29, 2023.

Rewired to outcompete

Six signature moves led by the C-suite can build organizations that will outperform in the age of digital and AI.

By Eric Lamarre et al., | McKinsey & Company | June 20, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

How companies navigate the technology world to achieve sustainable competitive advantage is the defining business challenge of our time.  To be fair, this challenge isn’t new. But it’s an increasingly pressing one, with deep implications for how companies navigate a world where digital and AI are fundamentally reshaping how we work and live. Companies understand they need to meet the challenge, but most of them are struggling.

Clearly, for digital and AI to deliver on their business transformation potential, the top team needs to be ready and willing to undertake the organizational “surgery” required to become a digitally capable enterprise. There are no quick fixes. You can’t simply implement a system or a technology and be done. Instead, success means having hundreds of technology-driven solutions (proprietary and off the shelf) working together that you continually improve to create great customer and employee experiences, lower unit costs, and generate value. But creating, managing, and evolving these solutions at enterprise scale requires a fundamental rewiring of how a company operates. That means getting thousands of people across different units of the organization working together and working differently to digitally innovate, constantly.  

The lessons learned from the authors’ work with more than 200 large companies across multiple industries show that capturing this kind of value from digital and AI requires building six critical enterprise capabilities.  These are: business-led digital road map (align senior leadership team on the vision, value and road map for the transformation; reimagine business domains to deliver outstanding customer experience and to lower unit cost.); Talent (ensure that you have the right skills and capabilities to innovate and execute); operating model (increase the metabolic rate of the organization by bringing business operations, and technology together); technology (make technology easier for teams to use so they can innovate at pace); data (continually enrich data and make it easily accessible across the organization to help improve customer experience and business performance); and adopting and scaling (maximize value capture by ensuring the adoption and enterprise scaling of digital solutions and by tightly managing the transformation progress and risks).

The leaders need the following: align the C-suite around a business-led road map (inspire and align the top team, get the ‘bite’ size right: business domains, and commit to a contract with the C-suite); build your talent bench (Create a cleansheet for your talent, and build the team that will build your digital bench), Adopt a new operating model that can scale (Select an operating model that supports your strategy,and professionalize product management); Technology for speed and distributed innovation (Kit out a technology toolbox, Use APIs without exception, automate software delivery); Embed data everywhere (Turn to reusable building blocks: data products, Install the data architecture ‘plumbing’, and federate data governance); and Unlocking adoption and scaling (Focus equally on adoption and development, Scale with ‘assetizing’ and Track what matters).

3 key takeaways from the article

1. How companies navigate the technology world to achieve sustainable competitive advantage is the defining business challenge of our time.  To be fair, this challenge isn’t new. But it’s an increasingly pressing one, with deep implications for how companies navigate a world where digital and AI are fundamentally reshaping how we work and live. Companies understand they need to meet the challenge, but most of them are struggling.
2. Success means having hundreds of technology-driven solutions (proprietary and off the shelf) working together that you continually improve to create great customer and employee experiences, lower unit costs, and generate value. 
3. But creating, managing, and evolving these solutions at enterprise scale requires a fundamental rewiring of how a company operates. That means getting thousands of people across different units of the organization working together and working differently to digitally innovate, constantly. 

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Topics:  Technology, Digital Transformation, Strategy, Business Model, Decision Making