Here is a summary:
Transforming a legacy business into a disruptor faces three main challenges:
Overcoming these challenges to becoming a fast-scaling insurgent is not all about investing in the right technology or platforms. Instead, success hangs on having the right people and the right culture. And the greatest change is often needed at the very top of an organisation.
In many legacy organisations, the CEO develops the strategy which is then pushed down or “cascaded” through the organisation via the c-suite and often many layers of management. But successful disruptive strategies are more likely to have been built from pull, not push.
Pull means empowering the wider team, often those closer to the customer than senior management. It means giving smart people the authority to make their own decisions, knowing they will sometimes make the wrong choice, but from which they will learn and, as a result, gain muscle memory.
Digital and cultural transformation must be executed hand in hand. The CEOs of winning digital disruptors have evangelised a clear and compelling purpose for digitalisation, working with not to the team members who will catalyse the cultural revolution.
Next, senior management needs to invest time to communicate the company’s place in the world and market until everyone understands. An empowered and well-briefed team will know which decisions are in bounds and which are out of bounds.
This means that, in practice, successfully disruptive digital strategies are based on multiple smart decisions, never one big smart decision made by the CEO. CEOs of successful disruptors are secure in allowing individuals in their organisation to make decisions and make mistakes: they have the political will to democratise decision making.
A number of successful CEOs have built “lighthouses” in their organisation – a series of best practices aligned to the strategy and made known across the organisation. Around 12 lighthouses appears to be a good number; not too few to be too simplistic but not too many to be too complex.
For each lighthouse, companies have amassed the best cross-departmental talent to work together on them. These small working groups take responsibility for communicating and explaining to their colleagues how to put the best practices each lighthouse covers into action. That way best practices and preferred ways of working don’t cascade from above, they emerge from within the organisation.
The panel also came up with some thought-provoking maxims: