The digital-value guardian: CEOs and digital transformations

The CEO is ultimately the only one who can shape and guide a successful digital transformation. Here’s the playbook.

An inconvenient truth for businesses undertaking digital transformations is that without focused and active CEO commitment, there is almost no chance of success. That’s because a digital transformation is a business-model reinvention that requires different functions across the organization to work together in new ways, and can happen only through large-scale investments in building an entirely new set of capabilities. The only person who can make that level of sustained change happen is the CEO.

Our work on digital transformations with more than 100 large incumbent companies over the past ten years has shown that there is a playbook for success to guide CEOs in focusing their interventions.