Digital to the Core – Why we wrote this book for you

October 20th 2015 is the official publication date for Gartner’s latest co-authored book – website here. This post also appears on Mark Raskino’s blog

If you are anywhere near the intersection of business and technology your world is changing radically. Back in early 2013 we started to realize just what was coming. Mark was formulating a piece called “every industry will be digitally remastered” – suggesting that sectors would be deeply impacted as their products and services were fundamentally redesigned for the digital age. Graham was increasingly concerned about the implications for leadership, especially as digital business doesn’t just disrupt markets, it disrupts tried-and-true management behaviors as well! Executives with an unconscious bias towards previous steady state management behaviors, now ill-suited to the unique demands of digital business, can be exposed to dangerous leadership blind spots.

Each of us had prior experience as management thinkers, coaches and book authors so we were keen to collaborate on a significant new work. It would aim to really help executives understand what is going on and orient themselves to the new leadership behaviors and styles that they must master to win – both personally and for their organizations. The difficulty is that the number of technologies in play – mobile, social, cloud, IoT, AI.. create a combinatorial explosion of creative possibilities. There’s no single technology trend above all others to pick out and analyze. So we took a step back and looked at the problem in a different way.

The result, two and half years later is our new book Digital to the Core. We offer you a framework to assess the impact of digital disruption on your industry and your company. The key question is how to lead others through the fog of uncertainty and complexity without getting lost yourself. No one company has figured out all the answers. So we went after many interviews with cases that had parts of the puzzle. GE and Babolat were our anchors because they were racing ahead in the quest to digitalize the products their sectors make, but we spoke with many others. Seoul National University Hospital Bundang, Zappos, Publicis Groupe, Ford, Orbitz, Visa, Shell, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), UK Gov, Volvo, BBVA, Tokio Marine. . The more executives we spoke with and the more we explored the spaces in between – the more the repeating patterns started to emerge.

If you are in a senior management or executive position and you need to understand how to lead your company through the deep digital business changes ahead – then this book is for you. We hope you find our analysis and advice valuable. We are very confident you will at least find all the great company stories compelling. Good luck on your digital business leadership journey ahead.

Digital to the Core is available from Amazon and all good booksellers from October 20 in Hardcover, Kindle and iBook (an audio book version will follow shortly). If you want to know a bit more about it start here: How Leaders Take Digital to the Core – Smarter with Gartner