War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

Employees will be nervous in the face of transformational change. You can help overcome that nervousness with a steady hand, a clear vision, and a commitment to the urgency of transformation.

Alternatively, lose the notion of projects entirely and build incremental capabilities in a steady flow.

Jim Highsmith is on target when he says, “Productivity measures in general make little sense in knowledge work.”13 Designing good software and infrastructure, solving business problems, and creating IT strategies are knowledge work.

think big and execute small.

innovation. An enterprise must not only create its future conditions of success but also must undo its previous ones.

The challenge, therefore, is not just to create an innovation; it’s to create a constant stream of innovations, to make innovation a normal part of doing business every day. And that can best be done if we overcome the duality of IT and the business.

A digital company is one in which every employee has the opportunity to be an entrepreneur, as Ries puts it.10 Instead of forming an innovation team with the privilege of breaking the rules, the enterprise should set the rules—processes, practices, bureaucracy, people, management culture, and everything else—to support all employees in being innova

Instead, digital transformation requires you to take a holistic view of your enterprise’s IT and organizational states. When you do, your transformational process becomes low risk: it’s incremental and consists only of improvements to assets you already own.

Proceeding quickly with reversible decisions reduces the risk of being late to market.