It might sound counterintuitive but digital transformation is not about technology. So, what does it mean for companies to keep up in an ever-evolving digital age? Well, according to today’s guest, it’s about having a “strategic imagination.”

David Rogers, an instructor at Columbia Business School, is an OG thinker on digital transformation. His books, The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age and The Digital Transformation Roadmap: Rebuild Your Organization for Continuous Change, laid the foundation for an entire strategic approach to taking companies into the digital age.

David and Greg delve deep into the misconceptions about digital transformation, emphasizing that it's not merely about technology but about strategic imagination and continuous organizational change. They discuss the evolution of digital transformation over the past decade, the importance of a well-defined strategic vision, and the roles of agile methodologies, hypothesis-driven experimentation, and cohesive leadership.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Digital transformation is about contexts

56:33: The question of digital transformation. It is not about bolting technology onto an existing company. It is about—really, it is about—how do we adapt an organization so that it can thrive in a digital context, right? The digital is actually about the context, not about what you are doing, even necessarily per se, inside the business. And to me, the most defining characteristic of the digital era is this accelerating change and accelerating and growing uncertainty that organizations have to cope with.

What makes an effective leader?

25:16: Effective leaders do not orient their job around making decisions primarily. What they are primarily trying to do is to define what truly matters, to then communicate that to others, achieve that kind of alignment and clarity that we are pulling in the same direction, and then to empower others—to enable the rest of the organization to do it.

Digital transformation is not about technology

10:28: Digital is not about the technology inside your company. It is not about the behaviors of the market and the customers. But it is more the context we are in, which is one of—not a change that happened in 1994 to 1996, or some other change. Oh, the shift to mobile. Oh, the shift to this. Let’s shift to the cloud. It is just one after another, and each wave of technology change is catalyzing the next. It is not just, “Oh, why are they each coming?” Well, each one is building on the one right before it. And so we are dealing with this pace of change and level of uncertainty; therefore, in your context, for any organization, that is unprecedented and certainly not what big organizations were built for and organized for in the 20th century.

Strategy as thinking discipline

34:39: Strategy is something you need to embed in every level of organization as a thinking discipline, which is about defining: what are we trying to achieve? What do we believe is a way—or the best way—to achieve that at this point in time.

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Faculty Profile at Columbia Business School
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