Digital Transformation, One Discovery at a Time

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rita McGrath, professor at Columbia Business School, says the need for organizations to adopt digital business models is more important than ever. Change is accelerating as startups tackle incumbents. And suddenly the coronavirus crisis is forcing the hand of many companies that have put off digital transformations. She explains how established firms can avoid bet-the-farm moves and instead take small steps and quickly target their experiments. McGrath is the coauthor of the HBR article "Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you listen. Welcome to the HBRIDIA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. If your organization is not
0:50.2	native to the digital economy there's one question that can strike fear in the hearts of its leaders,
0:56.4	and that is, what is your digital strategy?
0:59.6	Answering that question has accrued more off-site retreats, consulting hours and digital
1:04.0	transformation meetings than anyone could ever count. And suddenly, like it or not,
1:09.1	organizations everywhere are having to answer that question on the fly.
1:13.0	What is our digital strategy?
1:16.0	Because the coronavirus pandemic has been such a titanic shift in worker and consumer behavior
1:21.0	that if you didn't have a digital strategy before you're
1:24.4	figuring it out now. As the CEO of Box Aaron Levy said on Twitter
1:28.6	some companies will move faster in this new reality and others will grind to a halt. The good news,
1:35.0	according to our guest today, is that this rapid change in fast decision-making can
1:39.6	feed right into a proven strategy for bridging the divide, the process called Discovery Driven Digital Transformation.
1:47.0	In fact, that's the title of her new article in the May June 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review that she co-wrote. Our guest today is Rita McGrath.
1:55.8	She's a professor at Columbia Business School and she joins me now.
1:59.2	Rita, thanks for being here.
2:00.3	It's a pleasure.
2:01.5	Thanks for having me. Let's just start with what do you mean by discovery driven digital transformation?
2:04.0	Digital transformation. Let's just start with what do you mean by discovery driven digital transformation?
	...

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