Orchestrating Transformation - Preview

The Context for Transformation

price of oil, which influences its customers’ investments and, there- fore, its own revenues and profits. Despite this, the company was being told in no uncertain terms by its customers that it must think more deeply about digitization. Other- wise, it would lose business to competitors. So, the need to change was clear. How to change was not. Like many business leaders facing the task of company transforma- tion, Ann-Christin was feeling lost. As a successful executive, this was not a familiar emotion. In her previous roles, she had dealt with a lot of complexity, but it was manageable complexity. In her new position, she wasn’t comfortable at all. For starters, she didn’t understand much about digital technologies. As an oil and gas engineer, she was more versed in compact manifolds and flexible jumpers than in cloud computing or augmented reality. Worse, she was unsure of her remit or how her performance would be assessed. And she wasn’t clear on the extent of senior manage- ment’s engagement and support for this initiative. They were inter- ested enough in digital to create her position, but were they really committed to a wholesale transformation? And would they give her the means to transform the organization? Ann-Christin’s biggest fear was that she would become what she herself called the “Queen of PowerPoint.” In other words, she would do a lot of talking, and create a lot of slides featuring words like “strat- egy” and “enablement,” but people in the business would largely ig- nore her. Coming from the business herself, she fully recognized the danger of becoming a corporate irrelevance.

THE BIG QUESTION: HOW? We wrote this book for all the Ann-Christins out there.

These are the people who’ve been tapped on the shoulder and told something like, “We want you to drive our digital transformation,” or “We would like you to build up our digital capability,” or “Could you help us to find new ways to make money through digital?”

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