Leg 9. From Newport to Cardiff (VII). Wrap up! Mission Accomplished.
Good Morning.
It is 10:17 am (CST), and we have to finish our last theme for Leg 9. It is the turn for Digital Disruption Summary and Conclusions.
At this specific moment, the fleet is doing all its efforts by sorting out the tides. Brunel is leading, but with less than one nm of advantage from Akzo Nobel. It is going to be a neck on neck fight until Cardiff. We have read that “while the lack of breeze isn’t helping, the real challenge will be to navigate the tidal current the fleet will encounter in the Bristol Channel”. Let´s see where we are:
The position of the Fleet 28-May-2018 (10:17 am CST)
Since we are so close to Cardiff, but not there yet, let´s start with the Summary and Conclusions wrap-up. Some of the most relevant highlights from Leg 9 as follows:
- We started Leg 9 with an introduction of the theme Digital Disruption. We saw different concepts associated with this term. Nevertheless, we decided to stick to the original concept of Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald (2015):“Disruption describes a process whereby a company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Specifically,
- As incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others.
- Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a foothold by delivering more-suitable functionality— frequently at a lower price.
- Incumbents, chasing higher profitability in more-demanding segments, tend not to respond vigorously.
- Entrants then move upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents’ mainstream customers require while preserving the advantages that drove their early success.
- When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants’ offerings in volume, disruption has occurred.”
- We also discussed the importance of doing innovation with wisdom. And it seems to us that we are missing a couple of steps in our ladder to create digital transformations.
- We also discussed the fact that when doing disruption, business leaders are doing the business decision making with capped minds… What is decision making with capped minds?
- Lack of Wisdom: First of all business owners are doing businesses or deciding about how to do disruption, with capped minds. We trigger, promote and do inventions and innovations based on basic knowledge, not based on wisdom.
- Legacy Blindness: Second, business owners create or pay others to help them to decide without discernment in terms of the consequences for the next 4 generations.
- Promoting Disruption instead of Balanced Evolution: We are all the time rushing to disturb instead of promoting equilibrium.
- Later on our journey, we compared digital disruption with digital transformation. And why we should promote digital transformations instead of disruptions.
-
Digital Transformation is better than Digital Disruption. It requires wise savvy multidisciplinary teams which need to be educated for the digital era. We advised to not try replacing your best employees. Educate them to be ready to guide digital challenges. The digital transformation must be slow enough to make it right. But fast enough to continue generating profits. Educating people (inside our organization) takes a while.
- A successful digital transformation takes a modern, human, inner and outer market perspective to guide cross-functional research, pilot projects, testing and fine-tuning, collaboration, learning from mistakes, and do it again.
- Next, we shared about digital leadership. We have discovered the importance of leading with wisdom. The CDO (Chief Digital Officer) or Digital Ambassadors are merely facilitators which have to tackle the following main obstacles (Peledeau, Herzog & Acker, 2017)
- “Ad hoc digital initiatives spread throughout a large organization,
- Lacking central oversight;
- A traditional culture that resists change;
- A gap in the talent required; and
- Legacy systems and structures that threaten to derail their digital ambitions”.
- When a company decides to go digital, everyone inside the company has to go digital (from the CEO to the janitor or the security team member who opens the entrance door).
-
Digital Leaders must help to barren immoral practices in businesses. These non-ethical practices can be eliminated by the nature of the digital technologies: by installing transparency and collaborative systems. Building a good society starts with building good and transparent businesses. The Digital Transformation is the opportunity to create transparent systems and working structures with ethics at the core…
-
Afterward, we passed the topic Digital Technologies Ratings. Here we use the word rating as a synonym of classification or ranking. The word rating comes from the verb “rate” (rate means to estimate, appraise, evaluate, value, rate, assess: to judge something with respect to its worth or significance). We shared several ratings related to different variables such as geography readiness, investments attraction to VC´s, the degree of importance, and digital advancement of the industry or economic sector.
-
- Finally, we reviewed the impact of digital technologies in education. The impact of digital technologies in education has to be analyzed with a holistic approach beyond the classroom direct participants. Each university and school must have to develop a Digital Ethics Division o Department or Center.
This is all for today. We are done and finished with Leg 9. We are arriving at Cardiff before Team Brunel and the rest of the teams.
Alex Guillermo Lozano Artolachipi, we did it together. Cheers!
Thank you.
San Salvador -12:57 pm (CST)
Disclaimer: All the presentation slides shown on this blog are prepared by Eleonora Escalante MBA-MEng. Nevertheless, all the pictures or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy 