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listen. Welcome to the HBR IDEA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. By now there were probably few

companies or CEOs out there who don't buy into the need to incorporate

digital plans and to the overall plan for the company.

But for too many leaders investing in digital just means the tactical, the piecemeal, the incremental.

That's not really enough to stay competitive in today's market, even for non-tech companies, argues

Sunil Guopdak.

So the challenge for a legacy company is they have to strengthen the core of what they have and build for the future at the same time.

So the analogy I use is like changing the engine of a plane while it's flying.

And many times the plane is going to go down first and that's a scary thought before it goes up.

To tackle that challenge, Gupta says leaders should integrate digital into the bigger picture strategy.

Look at the ways digital companies survive and thrive and then see how that can apply to your own business.

Sunil Gupta is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of

driving digital strategy a guide to reimagining your business. Sunil thanks for

being here. Thank you for having. So when you say digital strategy, my impression of sort of looking, especially legacy businesses, is that they'll say we

need a digital strategy and that usually means like a strategy for this digital world.

They don't think about changing their own overall business

strategy. It's more like we need an app. Exactly. Either a website or an app that's

how most people started. But in all fairness I think people have moved beyond that.

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