Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change

by Michael Wade, James Macaulay, Andy Noronha

Company leaders feel the urgency to transform their organizations in the face of digital disruption. New rivals are digitizing whatever can be digitized to attack incumbents’ value chains, gaining market share, eroding margins, and wreaking havoc to the competitive landscape in virtually every industry. For large and midsized companies, the imperative to transform is clear. How to transform is another matter. The hard truth is that despite leaders’ best efforts, and billions spent in pursuit of digital transformation, the vast majority of organizational change programs fizzle, falling well short of their expected impacts. Because failed transformation programs put incumbents behind the eight ball in dealing with disruptive competition, organizations can ill-afford for their transformation programs to flop. With this important new book, Orchestrating How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change , the team at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative, set out a new prescription for getting transformation right. The piecemeal strategies and pilot projects that are hallmarks of conventional transformation programs are hopelessly inadequate for the intricate, sprawling organizational environments found in most companies. Transformation practitioners need a different mindset and a new approach to executing change that can handle the complexity and scale of today’s market leaders. Orchestration—"mobilizing and enabling so as to achieve a desired effect”—paves the way for a new, more holistic view of organizational resources and how they work together to drive change synergistically . The follow-up to 2016’s award-winning Digital Vortex, Orchestrating Transformation is packed with quantitative and qualitative insights from years of applied research and engagement with executives around the world. A unique and indispensable guide for practitioners, the book moves past traditional change management doctrine to show how a connected approach to change can change everything.

Genres: Business

242 pages, Hardcover

First published February 21, 2019

Reviews

[Haifa Alhamzah · Rating 4 out of 5]

there's several elements that need to be considered to transform successfully, starting from acknowledging the complexity, meeting conceptual ideas w/ the implementation, and adapting more agile methodologies.

take home questions:
1) what are you offering? is it future oriented?
2) what's the channel you're using? could it be more dynamic and easily reached?
3) how you're interacting w/ customers, employees, partners? can digital improve your way?
4) where do you stand structurally? does it support your goals/plan?
5) how are you rewarding/motivating your people?
6) do you have the right culture to achieve your goals?

and remember; one instrument is boring, even if it's playing beautifully.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central conceptual offering of this book is a new organisational model for digital transformation. Drawing a parallel with orchestral groups and making the analogy to the company, it brings a model of operation for digital disruption and change in general. In this model, the leader takes the role of orchestrator while performance is delegated to the group where the information also lies.