MIT Sloan Management Review Article on You're Going Digital - Now What?

Enough with the top-down strategizing. Understand how change really happens on the ground — and plan for it accordingly.

At the 30,000-foot level of the corporate suite, plotting digital change is heady, exciting stuff. Business leaders can almost smell the gains in efficiency and speed and the data-driven increase in customer satisfaction when they think about all the new tools at their disposal and how they might restructure their organizations. As one senior executive at a large telecommunications company recently told me, “Mapping out a new approach to compete in the digital era has been so cool!”

But here’s the decidedly less cool, more mundane truth that I’ve learned after 16 years of working on such transformations with more than two dozen companies across eight industries: Success depends less on strategic inspiration than on the way people on the front lines implement new digital tools, and most leaders aren’t laying a foundation for those employees to succeed.

About the Author

Paul Leonardi (@pleonardi1) is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He advises companies on how to use the data enabled by new technologies to lead digital transformation.

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