Abstract of Leadership in Disruptive Times (2020, 1^st ed.)

Digitalization is rapidly changing the way companies operate and create value in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The emergence of technology-centred business models is also challenging established organizations to reimagine and reinvent themselves to remain relevant to the marketplace.

Digital readiness is of importance as it seems that while many organizations are either experiencing or expect to experience some form of significant digital disruption, few appear genuinely prepared.

Digital Transformation (DT/DX) is the process of integration and leveraging of digital technologies (including but not limited to artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Internet-of- Systems (IoS), big data, cloud computing, and blockchain technologies) into all aspects of an organization. It transcends traditional roles like sales, marketing, operations, finance, strategy, IT, and customer services to create new or enhance existing business processes, culture, and customer experience (CX) to meet changing market requirements.

DT/DX is not just about disruption or technology. It’s about creating and delivering a compelling value proposition and a digital-drive culture that focuses on the integration of three pillars of strategy: people, process, and technology (PPT) as seen in Figure 1 below.

It is the reimagining of the business in the digital era with an obsession with the customers and with everyone adopting a customer-centric mindset (which begins and ends with how the organization thinks about and engages with its customers). DT/DX also focuses on delivering value for various stakeholders (particularly its customers) and continuously innovating and acquiring the relevant digital capabilities in response to the rapidly

The urgency for organizations to transform themselves in the face of technology-fueled disruption has been a critical challenge in many industries. In the banking sector, incumbent players are dealing with the emergence of financial technology, or fintech, firms that threaten them in a range of business segments. One bank that has taken this challenge head-on is Singapore-based DBS Group, which embarked on an organization-wide transformation in 2009 (Bawany 2020).

As DBS embarks on DT/DX at the workplace, the CEO, Piyush Gupta create a culture in which everyone is digitally savvy and demonstrates a set of values, competencies, and practices where they can continuously seek to redefine how they create and deliver value for customers by leveraging on digital technologies. These would include customer-centricity, innovation-driven, data-driven decision-making, intra & inter-team collaboration, an open and trust-based partnership, disruptive mentality, and agility and flexibility in managing challenges (see Figure 2).

To change behaviors, the transformation team settled on five key traits or DNA for the digital culture: agility, being a learning organization, being customer-obsessed, being data-driven, as well as experimenting (innovation), and taking risks. The team targeted inefficient meetings as a barrier to change and a hindrance to innovation. Meetings often started and ran late without leading to decisions. Worse, meetings often lacked purpose and were dominated by a few voices, while others sat in defensive silence. In 2019, DBS was ranked by Harvard Business Review as being among the top 10 companies in the world to have made successful strategic transformations in the last decade.

In addition to transforming customer-facing applications, DBS also uses digital to empower its employees, helping them to work smarter and driving gains in efficiency and productivity. Moreover, employee-focused aspects of digital complement efforts to improve the banking experience for consumers. By providing more and better digital services, DBS can capture data and generate a refined, high-resolution profile of its customers’ preferences and behaviors. Still, that data is meaningless unless employees can readily access it and use it to improve the bank’s offerings.

At DBS, people are the key differentiator, forming the cornerstone of the bank transformation strategy, as it aspired to cultivate its people to embrace start-up qualities of being customer-obsessed, data-driven, risk-taking, agile, and continually learning. The bank is passionate about being a learning organization and has created a culture that allows the people a myriad of opportunities to learn, reskill, and upskill to equip them with digital capabilities,

especially its legacy workforce, some of whom had been with the bank for over 30 years.

As part of the DT/DX strategy, the bank focuses on changing its culture to a start-up culture by being “Agile,” focusing relentlessly on the customer, using data to help the employees make better decisions, being digital to the core, and continuously experimenting and innovating to improve and enhance its corporate sustainability. One of the initiatives that the bank implemented was to experiment with agile workspaces by adopting “Design Thinking” and creating what is known as JoySpace, which enables the employees to work in squads for better collaboration and ideation, breaking down silos, and focusing relentlessly on the customer.

The lack of buy-in and involvement of the CEO and senior leadership team may reflect on their underestimating or misunderstanding of the strategic importance of culture in the DT/DX journey of their organization. As with any transformation, leaders who guide a DT/DX are often preoccupied with structural and process changes and overlook the people’s side, only to wonder why the effort faltered.

It’s well established that cultural change is a crucial determinant of a successful transformation, especially for DT/DXs. The behaviors that embody a digital culture represent a significant shift from long-standing norms and particularly challenge traditional power structures, decision-making authority, and fundamental views of competition and cooperation among employees. The People ahead of Process and Technology (PPT) mantra is a major imperative.

The Centre for Executive Education (CEE) digital transformation consulting engagements over the years validated by the recent research by the Disruptive Leadership Institute (DLI) as published in the book, Leadership in Disruptive Times (2020) have identified several best practices, all of which make a digital transformation more likely to succeed as seen in Figure 3 below.

Digital transformation is occurring at an unprecedented pace, creating a more connected world, and providing new opportunities for businesses to grow and create value. The disruptive impact of technology on organizations of every size and sector is infinite, and we know the pace of disruption is accelerating. Leaders must be ready to lead in the digital age.

It’s also worth noting that today’s organizations are in different places on the road to digital transformation. If you are feeling stuck in your digital transformation work, you are not alone. One of the hardest questions in digital transformation is how to get over the initial humps from vision to execution. Even organizations that are well down the digital transformation path face tough ongoing hurdles, like budgeting, talent struggles, and culture change.

Resolving these challenges would require “disruptive digital leaders” who are visionary when it comes to the technology frontier. However, all decisions are still rooted in fiscal discipline and overall enterprise mission. This demands a risk-tolerant mindset—future technologies are volatile, and user adoption is challenging to predict. However, a true disruptive digital leader is driven by the challenge and potential for creating new business value by harnessing breakthrough technology.

Digital transformation can be viewed as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Beyond that, it’s a cultural change that requires organizations to challenge the status quo continuously, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure, as could be observed in organizations such as Microsoft, Starbucks, Grab and DBS Bank as featured in the book ‘Leadership in Disruptive Times’ 1 (Bawany, 2020).

A survey of the current research and perspectives on high potentials who could be future disruptive digital leaders as well as similar research on disruptive and digital leadership indicates specific disruptive leadership qualities.

These include but are not limited to, a combination of variables such as visionary and entrepreneurial skills, innovation-driven mindset and experimentation (disruptive mentality), cognitive readiness and critical thinking (mental agility), emotional resilience, empathy, and social skills (people agility), driving for success (results agility), and resilience and adaptability (change agility). (See Figure 4).