MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Digital Transformation Opens New Questions - and New Problems to Solve

When leaders view technology as merely a source of answers and solutions, they miss opportunities to innovate in bigger, bolder ways.

In a recent conversation, John Donahoe, the former CEO of eBay who currently runs ServiceNow, told me about the most important phase in a company’s digital transformation: the part where you start asking better questions. Instead of seeing new technologies as a means to develop more efficient answers to known problems, managers should view them as opportunities — even requirements — to revisit the problems themselves. They should go back to first principles, Donahoe says, and ask, “Have we identified and framed the core issue in the right way? Instead of solving for X, should we be solving for Y?”