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

The task of CAS leaders isn’t to issue orders, but to put in place conditions that will cause independent actors within it to choose behaviors that will lead to the right outcomes.11 The enterprise leadership team sets the vision that, in effect, defines what delivering business value will mean.¶

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.

The digital transformation requires that the enterprise embrace nimbleness as a daily dance move.

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.

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

An IT project is a journey from abstract to concrete—

The real question for those leading digital transformations is how to maximize the business value they get from IT, not how to make projects finish on time.

Companies whose investment processes demand quantification of market sizes and financial returns before they can enter a market get paralyzed or make serious mistakes when faced with disruptive technologies. They demand market data when none exists and make judgments based upon financial projections when neither revenues or costs can, in fact, be k

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