President Guo’s speech | Digital leadership

This article is a PPT lecture note I gave on "Digital Leadership" at several forums and trainings recently, and I would like to share it with readers of the public account.

(one)

"Bionic enterprise" is BCG's vision for enterprise digital transformation, which includes:

A strategy and original intention
Three major corporate performance: smart operations, personalized customer experience, products and services
Two contributing factors: one is technical factors, including Artificial intelligence, big data, and modular technology; the second is human factors, including Digital talents, platform organizations

A bionic company blends new technologies with human capabilities to power innovation, advantage, growth, efficiency, and resilience.

Bionic companies combine new technologies with human capabilities to drive innovation, advantage, growth, efficiency and resilience.

“Digital Transformation Leadership" is the starting point for improving the human factors of bionic enterprises - the behavioral traits displayed by business leaders to develop digital talents, enable them to realize their potential, and promote the construction of platform organizations.

The starting point of digital transformation leadership is the characteristics of organizations and talents in the digital transformation environment, which are discussed separately below.

(two)

First of all, the application of information technology has promoted the organizational form from the functional organization characterized by specialized division of labor in the pre-industrial era, to the business unit system characterized by the distribution of rights and responsibilities in the heyday of industrialization, to the matrix organization in the post-globalization era of the 1980s (see "Organizational Change | Is the Matrix Organization Ended?"), to the team system in the post-industrial era, and the network platform organization in the digital era. People's organization, collaboration, employment and interest distribution relationships are constantly changing.

See "Organizational Design in the Digital Era"

Mintzberg's organizational configuration theory also explains the evolution of such organizational models. In the digital era, more and more "innovative organizations" have emerged, represented by Internet companies (see "I Kan Feishu | Digitization of Advanced Organizations")

In terms of organizational digital applications, different organizational forms have different information technology application characteristics:

The process by which organizations apply information technology is itself transformative. The digitalization of business process management in "mechanical organizations" has different transformation paths. The implementation of ERP suite software with connotation of "best business practices" has become the mainstream of information technology promoting organizational change at the beginning of the 21st century:

See "ERP Hot Review | Looking at the industry opportunities of Chinese enterprise management SaaS from the era of the rise of packaged software"

From the information age to the digital age, our assumptions about organizational operation have changed. We focus on how organizations can continue to innovate to sustain vitality in the environment of uncertainty, the so-called "VUCA era". The focus of organizational management has shifted from "efficiency" and "control" to "innovation" and "continuous change." It is under this premise that agile organizations were proposed.

Agile is originally a software engineering methodology that uses a lean and iterative approach to quickly and continuously meet user needs:

The digital transformation of enterprises means that the enterprise itself has become a digital product. The digital product creation process of "digital enterprise" must be managed by modern software engineering. Therefore, "agile" has changed from a software engineering term to a management term. Although controversial, the Spotify model (or "tribe system") is considered a best practice for enterprise-level agile operations:

See "If you are not ready for scaled agility, don't expect digital transformation to be successful."

Digital native enterprises are highly agile organizations. However, most traditional enterprises in the state of digital transformation have both process-based organizations and agile organizations:

The evolution of organizational form is accompanied by the evolution of organizational culture. The book "Reshaping the Organization" proposes a description of the organizational culture form of "organizational color": (See "How to do the "Culture and Climate" module of the Business Leadership Model BLM")

(three)

After talking about organization, let’s talk about talents.

The working method of digital organizations is cross-functional collaboration, with product or project teams as work organizational units. The relationship between people and organizations has been transformed from "positions" in the past to "roles."

Taking Digital Ventures, the digital business entrepreneurship department of Boston Consulting Group, as an example (see the old article "The Difference between "Digital Innovation" and "Digital Transformation"), each digital product team consists of six types ofroleComposition:

Business Architect: Responsible for business model design that generates revenue and profits and establishes an operating system.
Product Manager: Responsible for organizing the team to continuously deliver products to meet user needs
Strategic Designer: Responsible for studying user behavior and exploring user needs
Experience designer: Responsible for studying user interaction methods and optimizing user experience
Engineer: Proficient in full-stack technology and using modern engineering methods to deliver technology
Growth Hacker: Responsible for using various low-cost methods to spread the product and grow users

In modern technical organizations, only technical personnel can manage technical personnel, which also highlights the importance of "technical experts" in digital organizations. In addition to improving the organization's recruitment capabilities, the most lacking thing in the 21st century is talent. To promote digital transformation, companies must also establish a self-generation mechanism for digital talents. The following figure is the digital talent training system designed by BCG Platinion for enterprises:

(Four)

The grand, precise, and rigorous composition of the symphony, and the natural, casual, and unrestrained improvisation of jazz, appropriately reflect the characteristics of industrialized steady-state organizations and digitally sensitive organizations. As early as the late 1980s, John Clarkeson, the then CEO of Boston Consulting Group, proposed "Jazz Leadership", using the comparison between symphony and jazz to inspire organizations to lead strategic execution in the 21st century. See the original text:

https://www.bcg.com/publications/1990/strategy-jazz-vs-symphony

This article takes the famous jazz musician Duke Ellington as an example. The behavior of a jazz musician is that the soul of the band leads the general direction, fully unleashes the creativity of the band members, improvises individually, and follows the prompts of others to cooperate tacitly to complete exquisite works.