Digital Disruption – Beyond The Tech Buzz

Adrian Hornsby - Award-Winning Writer
 
A top management consultancy firm recently went into a big multinational and proposed a new, 7-point digital strategy. They took the company’s seven existing silos and added the words ‘digital’ and ‘unicorn’ to each: ‘digital marketing unicorn’, ‘digital sales unicorn’, ‘digital supply chain unicorn,’ etc. It was magical thinking, and didn’t go anywhere in the real world.
The problem is, digital isn’t really about digital. It’s about making things better, faster and cheaper for customers. Companies that use digital effectively to do this disrupt others, but digital itself is only ever the means to an end.
Here’s a simplified example, and let’s use Tesla because it’s easy. A traditional car manufacturer makes a car, ships it, and hopes for the best. Then sometime in the next business cycle they look at high-level results – how are sales, how many cars are crashing?
Then they maybe start thinking about making some improvements. But with Tesla,...