Introduction

In 1971 the NASDAQ was born, and that November, Intel launched the first commercial microprocessor chip, the 4004.

The 4004 is history’s first monolithic central processing unit, fully integrated in one small chip. Such a feat of integration was made possible by the use of the then-new silicon gate technology that allowed twice the number of random-logic transistors and an increase in speed by a factor of 5 compared to the incumbent technology.

Since then, chips have improved in line with the prediction of Gordon Moore, Intel’s cofounder. According to his rule of thumb, known as Moore’s law, processing power doubles roughly every 2 years as smaller transistors are packed ever more tightly onto silicon wafers, boosting performance and reducing costs. Moore’s law is thought to be coming to its end due to the physical limits of effects of quantum mechanics, however the rate of change driven by technology is not abating.

A modern Intel processor contains around 3.5 billion transistors, half a million of them would fit on a single transistor from the 4004—and collectively they deliver about 400,000 times as much computing output.

This exponential progress is difficult to relate to the physical world. If cars and skyscrapers had improved at such rates since 1971, the fastest car would now be capable of a tenth of the speed of light causing time distortions for the driver like those seen the movie Interstellar; the tallest building would reach half way to the moon.

While we are nearing the end of super reduction in size of silicon transistors, we are still seeing significant increases in the speed of computing. Today there are 3 billion people carrying smartphones, each one more being powerful than a 1980s’ super computer that once filled a space similar in size to a family living room.

The exponential rate of technological advancement means that each morning when we rise, not only are we heading out into a world where more powerful and varied technology exists than existed yesterday—we are moving into a day where more technological advancement will occur than on any other day in history. For business leaders, managing in this ever-changing landscape is challenging enough in itself. Factor in the knowledge that cloud computing and software platforms are increasingly low cost and very powerful, newcomers are emerging all the time, and your competitors have easy access to the same technologies that will engage their customers as well as yours and the challenge is daunting.

Business start-ups require less capital than ever before, and competitors can test new concepts rapidly while maintaining business as usual. The pace of change today is faster than ever before.

Doing business effectively naturally means we must look at the marketplace in which we operate and assess our environment and our competitors. Most businesses do this already, often intuitively, but as the speed of change in the environment increases, being able to turn the resulting data into something more meaningful becomes difficult. In the era of Big Data one enabler for making sense of those data is having the competency to convert the data into information and information into insight. Insight gives us the ability to make management decisions more clearly and quickly based on a timely understanding of market intelligence.

Imagine presenting a spreadsheet full of numbers to an accountant. You ask them for their opinion on the data. They shrug and say it’s meaningless. Next you tell them, “It’s a profit and loss account and balance sheet.” At this point, they can state the obvious characteristics of the report, but the data are still of no great value to either party. Next you ask, “We’re considering buying that business, do you think we could reduce its costs and merge it with our business?” The accountant and the data are now able to add value to business decision making. Without the strategic questions and near-term challenges, both the accountant and data are of little use. Put strategy, data, and analysis together and now we have a powerful combination that leads to fact-based decision making.

In a similar context, keeping a close eye on the competition is a critical priority for any leadership team. Knowing what to do with information about your competitors is not an automatic consequence of having it, however. Knowing what a competitor is doing, and what technologies they are deploying, is not an advantage in and of itself.

All businesses demonstrate their culture through their behaviors and ways of doing business, but what distinguishes digital businesses is that they are inherently collaborative. For example, digital businesses engage and cocreate with customers to solve challenges and tasks they know exist; they have a sense of ambition and of challenging the status quo—classic qualities of the entrepreneur. They are marketing-oriented and realize that success lies not in what the technology can do but rather in what customers want to do with the technology and that this is where the value exists in that context. Such businesses know that success is all about having a true marketing orientation based on marketing-informed strategy.

While technologists often have a large role to play in ensuring that new digital concepts fly, they are fixers rather than solvers. It is not the responsibility of the technologists to create the vision and strategy of the business. Technologists should be helping to implement a marketing-oriented direction that has been effectively communicated by the leaders. Chief information officers (CIOs), chief marketing officers (CMOs), and chief digital officers have a part to play; ultimately, CEOs and their executive board should guide the decision making and formulate the strategy for change, for opportunity exploitation, or indeed for transformation.

In much of current marketing thinking, we see real challenges around who is driving the firm’s digitized market engagement. CIOs have by default been key players in his process, often because CMOs have been poor at providing insights into how new technology can be deployed in a marketing-oriented way that would allow the organization to capitalize on the added value such technology could create for their customer. There is currently a leadership capability gap, and much international academic research, industry research, and commentary from professional bodies [e.g., Chartered Institute of Marketing in UK; CMOs in the United States, Deloitte, WARC, the chartered management institute (CMI), and the management and leadership network (MLN)] continue to evidence increasing competency gaps within marketing staff in areas related to digital technology and its deployment—especially in customer-facing activities and processes.

For any digital business, there are prerequisite building blocks that leaders must create if they are to succeed. We argue that the most critical building block, the starting point for any organization wishing to transform themselves into digital innovators, is that of the digital business strategy.

Once the digital business strategy is created, it must be adopted internally and the business aligned to support it. Quite often businesses are not actually blindsided by disruption in the marketplace but rather become aware of it on the horizon, through the media, through business contacts, or through marketing campaigns. It emerges as a graduated process rather than as a more visceral response suggested in the word “disruption” itself. Once managers realize that change is coming to their industry, they understand instinctively that something must be done to counter the disruption and ensure that their own business survives—and thrives—through it. Challenges arise in understanding how best to navigate from the point of identifying a potentially disruptive force to the point of having formulated an effective strategy to counter it. In the context of the pervasive and often disruptive change that digital technology brings to markets, and being mindful too of the digital competency gap identified in marketers internationally, this book provides a framework and sequential process to help navigate the first change block effectively, that of strategy. The framework will provide methods that afford firms the opportunity to understand the shifting landscape as it is moving and see ways of capitalizing on that change more immediately.

On Disruption:

The term “disruptive innovation” when applied to business has become distorted through misunderstanding and misuse. Clayton Christensen was the first person to define organizational disruption in his 1995 book The Innovators Dilemma. He explains that not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. For example, the automobile was not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market for transportation essentially remained intact until the debut of the lower-priced Ford Model T in 1908.

However, in the past decade, driven principally by Silicon Valley technologists, the term used in common parlance has broadened and is often used to describe a new way of working. It often ignores the Christensen requirements that to be disruptive, the new innovation must be more affordable, effective, and convenient than the predecessor.

For a prime example of what the Valley would call disruption, we need to look no further than the arena of competitive athletics. Anyone with even a passing interest in the high jump event will have heard of a technique called the “Fosbury Flop,” where the jumper approaches the bar diagonally, turns, and goes over the bar head first, horizontal to the floor, and backward. The eponymous Dick Fosbury first used this technique in the 1960s, in the face of much skepticism. Prior to this, there was little variation in high jump techniques. Despite their initial skepticism about Fosbury’s new technique, his coaches were forced to concede that the technique was superior to anything they’d seen before, when he consistently smashed records during his high school and college years. Fosbury went on to use his technique with great success in athletics competitions, culminating in his taking gold at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and breaking the standing Olympic record. At the Olympics in Munich, 4 years later, 28 of 40 high jumpers used the Fosbury Flop technique. Of the Olympians that won medals between 1972 and 2000, almost 95 percent have used the Fosbury Flop technique.

It is accurate to say that Fosbury created disruption within his industry and forever transformed how athletes approach their high jumping technique. This is the same sort of disruption that we perceive in business. Disruption, then, is the discontinuous innovation, rather than a continuous innovation—it represents the creation of a new idea, driving an entirely different way of doing things—a revolutionary change, rather than an evolutionary one, but it would be remiss of us to consider Fosbury’s own journey a revolutionary one, without considering the evolutionary method by which he developed and improved the Fosbury Flop technique. Fosbury’s personal evolution caused a revolutionary change in the world of athletics.

When we consider this connection between evolutionary change at an individual level and revolutionary change at an industry level, we can translate it to our business leaders. The leaders must evolve himself/herself, and they must be attuned to the emerging trends in their industry or sector and certain at the level of their customers. In short, they must evolve as a marketer to lead success within their company and to preempt the potential disruption that new technology can bring.

Digital disruption is happening all around us, in almost every industry in the world. Because the technologies at our disposal are new, it is tempting to mischaracterize digital disruption as being something for the young, but as we noted earlier, technologies are increasing in number and proficiency at an exponential rate, meaning that in terms of how they relate to business success, the technologies available in industry are often as unfamiliar to the young as they are to the old.

It was a pleasure to visit the headquarters of SAP in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and meet with the people heading up their innovation department. SAP is one of the biggest enterprise software companies in the world. To give a sense of scale, upon reaching the campus I boarded a bus that drove me through tree-lined streets named after various SAP founders and products. The walks between buildings are long, and the campus accommodates the equivalent population of a small town. While I was talking to the innovation team, they made the astonishing claim that they may no longer be in the software industry in 20 years. I asked them to explain further, and they explained it to me as follows:

Nobody really wants a boiler in their house. Nobody wants plumbing, heaters, or air-conditioning units. Nobody cares for these things. What people want is a constant temperature of 70°F when they’re at home and hot water on demand. Ideally, they want these things at a fixed price. The plumbing, boilers, and heaters are a means to reaching this end. Redolent of Levitt’s classic essay “Marketing Myopia” and of the need to focus on benefits not on features, SAP is looking to the future as a corporation that intends to create solutions and benefits for their customers, not to develop features for their products. This has a profound effect on how SAP innovates. SAP is attempting to future-proof their business for the next 15 to 20 years by realizing that the innovators of today will be disrupted by the innovators of the future, unless they continually transform.

A short Internet documentary film titled “Humans Need Not Apply,” produced by C.G.P. Grey and later featured in The Economist, garnered widespread public attention. Within 2 months of upload, the documentary had received almost 3 million views. In it, Grey examines how technologies, that are already available, or on the horizon, might cause disruption in industry. He demonstrates how no industry is safe—technologies already in existence are coming to displace human workers engaged in everything from coffee making to medical diagnoses.

Grey’s film is not the only cautionary tale. Another short film by The Economist, entitled “How Computers Threaten the Jobs of Mid-Skilled Workers,” details more ways in which technology might create future disruption in industry. All areas of industry are at risk, it says, and it details ways in which technologies already in development can do manual, cognitive, and even creative work traditionally reserved for human workers.

To deal with this oncoming disruption, businesses will need to transform if they are to stay relevant, survive, and indeed thrive.

Founded in 1996, Google is a company specializing in Internet-related products and services. Gaining initial dominance in the field of search engines, to the point that “Google” is now considered a transitive verb, Google has branched out and is now part of a larger parent company called Alphabet. It has repeatedly caused—or responded to—industry disruption. In July 2014, the government of the UK announced that from January 2015, it will allow driverless cars to be used on its public roads. Having anticipated and indeed helped shape this eventuality, Google already has a fully developed driverless car (referred to as an “auto”) that uses sophisticated lasers, sensors, global positioning system (GPS), and processors to get around safely. In 2014, The California Department of Motor Vehicles insisted that Google installs a steering wheel and pedals into the vehicle before they would pass it as roadworthy—Google didn’t see the need. Since then Tesla has advanced faster in this market than the powerful Google.

The next vehicles we buy may not be driverless, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the ones we buy after will be—if we even need to own a vehicle at all. The vision is that autos will be automated and ubiquitous. Rather than having a car and the related costs and issues that can come with storing and maintaining it, we may be able to simply hop into and out of autos that transport us around.

This change, from human-operated, gasoline-guzzling vehicles to ones that are powered by electricity and operated by software, will have a profound effect on many industries. How does a car insurance company justify itself, when traffic accidents and car ownership are a thing of the past? How does a gas station profit, when vehicles are largely powered by electricity? How do traffic systems work? What will cities look like when cars can communicate with each other and self-organize, removing the need for traffic signaling? What will happen to public transport? What will happen to retail, mining, logistics, warehousing, and distribution when vehicles are driverless? Who will be the first customers for these new vehicles; how will different sets of consumers and buyers respond to this new innovation; what groups of consumers will be laggards; and to what extent does a residual opportunity remain in serving the needs of these people too? These are not questions for the future; these are questions for now. Within 5 to 10 years, businesses will be forced to respond to these questions with relevant, strategic transformation or potentially face extinction.

To use another example of rapidly approaching disruption, Google and e-commerce giant Amazon are currently developing ways of delivering their products to customers via unmanned aerial vehicles (commonly known as drones). Imagine a world where you’re in the middle of cooking dinner and realize that you’re out of peas. Rather than having to leave the house and hop into your car (or auto) to go to the store, you can pick up your smartphone and order your peas from a nearby grocery store; 10 minutes later, you are alerted via app that your peas have arrived by drone. You go outside to accept delivery, your peas are winched down to you, and you can continue with cooking dinner. That world is not the future. That world is now—and it has ramifications for businesses. Drone delivery is likely to completely change the way we perceive the procurement of goods, and the businesses that win will be the businesses that effectively transform.

Disruption is not only happening in terms of digital technology and software. Recently, Chinese researchers¹ announced that they have been able to use a method of supercavitation in conjunction with submarines to greatly increase the speed of underwater travel. Put very basically, supercavitation involves the creation of an air pocket around an object in liquid. This air pocket reduces drag on the object (in this case, a submarine) and permits it to travel at much higher speeds. The researchers have tentatively projected that this technology will be available within the next 10 to 15 years.

If supercavitation permits high-speed underwater travel, it has the potential to disrupt the way that we travel and the way that we transport our goods. We’ve become so accustomed to looking to the skies for faster travel solutions that few people have considered that the next generation of long-distance travel may occur under the seas. The impact on the air travel industry could be huge. Airline companies tend to receive their airplanes up-front and pay for them over following years, so financial difficulty could follow. If underwater travel becomes a popular mode of travel, will we see seaports expanding in the same way that airports have? These are the questions that businesses will need to ask themselves when they’re considering future disruptions.

The medical industry is not immune to disruption either. Ever-increasing computing power is powering the unraveling of the mysteries of genetic code. This is the new field of genomics and it’s pointing the way to a new future.

Already it’s having an impact on cancer. Mapping the cancer genome is giving hope that a cure to cancer may soon be within reach. New cancer therapies are being created that treat patients based on their cancer’s genetic makeup, rather than just on where the tumor is located. Combined with new immunotherapies, these approaches are radically changing how the entire pharmaceutical industry will work in the future. No longer will one pill to cure a problem be considered a reasonable response to a life-threatening disease.

In the near future, a new technique called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) will allow scientists to actually edit DNA sequences. It will soon be commonplace that medical practitioners disable key genes in human immunodeficiency virus, deactivate others gone awry in an autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis, or reprogram yeast DNA to create petrochemicals like plastics.

Genomics is little more than a decade old, but early indications are that dozens of industries and their business models are heading for constant disruption and transformation.

New technologies will transform our industries too. Quantum dots are a new revolutionary material used in electronic devices. They create everything from more efficient computers to cheaper and sharper televisions. Graphene, another nanotechnology material, is increasingly being used to make a wide variety of products from superstrong, but incredibly light, prosthetics to superconducting wires.

Take, for example, the energy industry that makes up 8 percent of gross domestic product. It is predicted that these technologies will reduce the cost of solar power creation to around one-fifth of what it is today. Add to that Tesla’s new home battery storage that can harness this natural resource for reuse when needed and we’ll see a transformative effect on not just companies but entire markets.

In recent years, we’ve seen smartphone apps—from the simple to the sophisticated—causing disruption in many industries. Even the most regulated, unionized, legislated professions are vulnerable. One such app is Uber—an app that allows people to use their smartphone to hail a cab to their location. The cab need not be metered, since the Uber app has the ability to measure the distance of the journey via GPS and calculate a price. If there’s room in the cab, other passengers can get in or out along the route, reducing the cost to the customer.

This one app was the cause of strikes that took place across much of Europe and the United States, when cab drivers noted a drop in business—a disruption. It would be easy to look at the Uber app and conclude that it is successful because it’s a new, smart piece of technology that effectively undercuts a competitor—but that is not quite the whole story. Backers of the Uber app include multinational investment banking firm Goldman Sachs and other organizations, all of whom understand how disruption works. Uber has clearly come from a clinically planned and well-executed strategy, designed to create a point of disruption. Uber was designed to hail cabs and does it very effectively—the strategy was designed to create disruption, and it has.

Here we can see that the technology output (in this case, the app) is only part of the solution—the front-end user interface. This app required a huge amount of strategic planning, investment, and understanding of how the business could grow to take on a market sector that was heavily regulated and very manual. The disruption of these heavily regulated and manual industries drive the point home that no industry is safe.

What are the implications for smaller enterprises with limited resources, shorter planning cycles, and less sophisticated marketing and business skills? How can we take the lessons learned from the big winners and translate them to smaller companies? If you deal with the distribution of goods, from furniture to food and materials, what do you do?

To start with, we must accept that innovation is rarely a single eureka event. It requires compound discovery of new insights, the engineering of solutions around those insights, and then the transformation of an industry or field. Technology does not produce progress by itself; we need to find important problems for it to solve and then must change how we work in order to take advantage of it.

Further on in this book, we will drill down into the details of digital business strategy, but for now, let’s look at this simple case study:

Case Study

This is a true story, only the names have been changed in the interest of commercial sensitivities.

Picture a scenario where a local company servicing the hospitality industry suddenly finds itself under threat from a new market entrant that has been growing rapidly in neighboring territory. We’ll call this business “New Competitor.” We can call the existing local small business “Goods and Stuff.”

Goods and Stuff becomes aware that it has a competitor entering its territory. Upon investigating the competitor, the CEO notices that New Competitor has a brand new, state-of-the-art website. Perceiving this as the reason for their rapid growth and potential disruption, the CEO contacts a web designer and commissions a website with roughly the same specification.

When the web designers arrive, they look at the competitor’s website for reference:

In response to this threat, the web designers make a very similar website to combat the new force that they perceive will soon engulf their clients as they have done in neighboring territories.

Goods and Stuff’s new website uses the identical technology to that of their competitor and takes no chances by mirroring many of the design features of New Competitor.

Within months they realize that their efforts are not halting the advance of New Competitor. Using the Seven Principles of Digital Business Strategy, they soon start to examine their own competitive advantage when compared to that of New Competitor. They don’t get beyond the home page of their new market entrant before questions start to emerge.

Your competitor offers next-day delivery—do you?

Your competitor has a 365-day returns policy—do you?

This company stocks around 18,000 products, all available online—do you?

This company will sell to retail and wholesale channels at the same time—can we respond to this apparent conflict in channel distribution?

The answer to all these questions is no. Goods and Stuff has a fleet of vans that travel a delivery route once or twice a week, they offer a 7-day returns policy, they stock around 2,000 products, and most of their sales are made via sales representatives on the road.

Suddenly it’s apparent that these two businesses are vastly different. Goods and Stuff is coming from a world of face-to-face selling, with 21 sales representatives on the road, while the competitor is coming from a world of catalog sales. The competitor has momentum that can easily be swung in the direction of online sales and is investing millions because that is its route to market. Goods and Stuff is hoping to invest perhaps $20,000–$30,000 to procure a marketing executive and compete at the same level. The reality is that this strategy is doomed. Goods and Stuff needs to transform.

Goods and Stuff has two options.

Option 1

Look at disassembling its transport logistics systems and switching to something more efficient. Adjust its customer returns policy to something that aligns better with the market. Increase the number of products it stocks, and switch to online-only sales. It must decide if it’s going to supply retail and wholesale at the same time and not in some disguised half-hearted two brands (one for retail and one for wholesale) way.

Option 2

Look at a different model entirely, which leverages the advantages of having 21 salespeople on the road compared with the competitor’s none. The competitor is having to send out catalogs, while Goods and Stuff can provide solution selling. The competitor has call centers, while Goods and Stuff has face-to-face relationships.

The differences between Goods and Stuff and their competitor may initially be seen as an Achilles’ heel, but when we look at the two options, we see that they can be turned into advantages if leveraged correctly. Attempting to compete via Option 1 would be too costly and unlikely to succeed, given the head start of the competitor.

The strategy, then, is for Goods and Stuff to pinpoint and integrate their advantages to overcome the advantages of the competitor, to ensure that the customer values the advantages of Goods and Stuff over the advantages of the competitor.

This sort of strategic analysis leads to business alignment changes, business strategy changes, and cultural changes in an organization. Cultural change is often a stumbling block that requires leadership and management. A change in the culture of a business naturally requires senior leaders to effectively understand, communicate, and lead the change.

One of the challenges we’ve seen time and time again in businesses small, medium, and large, is that when the emphasis is placed on technology and tactics, this too often displaces the importance of the customer and marketing-led culture change. Two factors appear to compromise the necessary focus on marketing-oriented change; the first is the competency gaps in marketing managers internationally. Being busy “doing marketing” as before, they find it difficult to replace or complement what has been done before with what needs to be done now in the disruptive digital market context. They also lack the necessary digital skills and an understanding of the implications of such digitization on customers and markets. Second, there is a leadership vacuum where issues of generational difference, time pressures, and a fear of “saying the wrong thing” keep senior directors and CEOs nervous about, and distanced from, the digital agenda.

Organizations commonly lack a strategic narrative that is digitally sensitive and in the absence of that narrative executives in the business default to digital tactics—“doing digital.”

The following case study illustrates the disconnect.

During a Local Authority Council meeting in the UK, the board discussed—and agreed to—the use of a “pooper scooper” app, which constituents could use to alert the council when a dog walker had failed to clean up after their dog. The app received this board-level attention because the technology was perceived as new and innovative, and the council board members wanted to be perceived as modern and in touch with the digital world inhabited by their constituents. When pressed about what other technology they were employing to keep in touch with their constituents, the board members mentioned Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and other social media sites, which were overseen by two full-time members of staff.

Upon analysis, it became clear that the pooper scooper app had been downloaded by 0.01 percent of constituents after 18 months. The two full-time staff employed to engage with the constituency through social media were engaging with around 0.3 percent of the constituency.

The board members were putting their emphasis in the wrong place, because the challenges that they faced in engaging with constituents were not properly diagnosed, understood, and translated between the senior management of the council and the information technology and marketing people executing solutions. There was a disconnect between senior management, the needs of the customer, and digital tools. In these situations, the usual response is that budgets are allocated by senior management and given to marketing, technology, and human resources departments, in order to pacify the perception that we need a whole new approach. This typically leads to frantic activity as though the future was unpredictable.

But the future is not entirely unpredictable and even where a degree of unpredictability exists much new thinking in the entrepreneurial marketing space uses effectual logic to propose how differential advantage can be secured in just such unpredictable environments. Management effectiveness in a digitized market environment requires, more than ever before, senior leaders in a business to understand what their vision of the business is, how the customer perceives value residing in that business proposition, and the likely actions of competitors to that proposition.

There are many books written about how to approach digital; “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries is a fine example for those starting a business. Part of the methodology of the Lean Startup involves the concept of pivoting, which is described by Ries as “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.” [p.149] For start-ups, pivoting is a fairly pain-free process, but how would we manage to pivot a business with 500 employees? And why should we pivot?

Very few businesses that start off with a concept and go on to pivot and pivot again win. They are the exception that has been sold as the new rule. In reality, they are not the new rule. The businesses that win are businesses like Uber. The type of business that wins starts off with a very clearly defined value proposition and a knowledge of where they want to take the business. The winners are not going through frenetic, constant change. They have a focus and use data with purpose to help ensure that their strategy is on course. The winners make their strategies with senior management understanding the opportunities, understanding the defined plays, and giving definitive direction to those that matter. Senior managers who succeed at this will manage to stay relevant—those who excel at it will become the creators of industry disruption or will thrive in contexts that are being disrupted by others.

In traditional business frameworks, there is a sequencing and organization of tasks mainly based on predictive logic. In modern-day digital business frameworks, data are more heavily used to understand the marketplace, to understand customer demands, to look at trends and changing trends, to spot disruption in the distance, and to be able to look for new waves and new opportunities for business.

As we discussed earlier, innovation is an essential success ingredient, but the winners and the losers are decided by the success of their innovation-to-execution cycles. As ever, management effectiveness comes from a marriage of thought and action, innovation and execution, and strategy and tactical implementation.

In older businesses that are heavily manual process driven, the real challenge is in making sure that the people within the business understand that the priority is no longer completing the process. The priority now is thinking about how the new digitized economy has impacted on the currency of those traditional processes. The priority now is using insight from customers and trying to imagine in what ways adaptations are needed to maintain market position or to create advantage.

Drawing from over 120 business case studies through Ireland, UK, and Europe as well as academic research over the past two decades conducted in the United States and Australia, this book provides the answer as to how to create digital business strategy. This is essentially business strategy created and implemented through the lens of digital. The environment has become digitized—strategy must follow if organizations are to be successful. By looking through the lens of digital, we propose digital modeling frameworks, we explore and understand business alignment challenges and cultural challenges, and we explore competency gaps that may act as barriers to success in this new context.

We must understand the ground rules and to make a distinction between businesses that do digital and digital businesses. The digital businesses are the ones that are winning. Senior managers can run digital businesses without fully understanding the inner workings of the technology to do so. The Seven Principles of Digital Business Strategy provides a framework where all strategic options are explored and directions proposed and explained. Whatever your business context and whatever your level of digital competency, this book will add value to your business in our digitized economy.

 

¹ See http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188752-chinas-supersonic-submarine-which-could-go-from-shanghai-to-san-francisco-in-100-minutes-creeps-ever-closer-to-reality.