Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business

Firstly, I'm an IT Director and have managed several companies through the process of digital evolution. These companies are typically transitioning from legacy systems to new platforms and in the process, rediscovering the core values and energy that originally went into establishing the company in the first place. The passion for me is exploring the business narrative from early inception, through the innovation arc to establishing a prosperous and successful company with all the determination and grit. Those stories represent a heritage that most are trying to preserve and maintain. In my work, I get to steer the narrative into the future and help sustain these great businesses by helping them redefine and reinvigorate the company.The challenge is straddling the technology and operations side along with the change management implications. Often these pivot points are areas of huge resistance. Often mature companies are riddled with complacency and refusing to acknowledge failing business models. The speed at which business models are reinvented now requires that companies implement digital strategies and change their mindset to act quickly or get disrupted in the current marketplace. The speed of this shift is staggering and understanding this dynamic in the context of the way the current business environment works is crucial.Sunil has effectively simplified the process and outlined a roadmap that works as a sort of framework to assist in this process. He's captured the main elements of this new rapid business environment and how some big-name companies have embraced these new rules of survival and have weatherproofed themselves into the future.It's a great read, well-paced and deep but not mired in details. The book outlines a practical way to approach strategy in this new paradigm and helps outline exactly what these successful companies are doing to reinvent themselves strategically and how incredibly successful companies can be if they do the work to rediscover themselves and the value they bring to customers.

The book offers a framework to guide a digital transformation in any business. Gupta offer use cases as examples of how ubiquitous and relevant a digital transformation can be an integral part of strategy.

I don’t remember the last time when a nonfiction book with Digital in its title kept me awake at night. Driving Digital Strategy by Sunil Gupta did. This book is practical, comprehensive, actionable, insightful and immediately applicable irrespective of your industry or role. During my conversations with customer, organizations typically follow some combination of three strategies as Sunil explains:1. Creating small, independent units or startups within the larger organization2. Doing a series of digital experiments3. Leveraging technology to cut costs and improve efficiencyAll with limited success. Sunil provides a very simple and comprehensive framework for Reinventing business encompassing:1. Reimagining your business (Scope, Business Model, Platform)2. Reevaluating your value chain (R&D, Operations, Omnichannel)3. Reconnecting with customers (Acquiring, Engaging, Measuring)4. Rebuilding your organization (Transition, Organization Design, Skills / Talent)If you are looking for latest and greatest in technology, you may need to look elsewhere. This is a book about business, strategy and results.This is Sunil’s masterclass and Sunil is a gifted storyteller. As a Harvard Professor, his approach is case based. He will tell you stories after stories and as you are totally convinced, he tells another story.I have used the quotes / instances / cases / approach in this book during most of my client meetings in the recent past and every single time, the message has resonated.

Easy read with lots of good cases and recommendations. The first part gives you a lot of examples of businesses that transformed themselves. As always some of those businesses did well and some did poorly (like GE). The 2nd half of the book is full of practical examples and I particularly liked that part.

I went into this book with high hopes, as my company is current making a big shift to digital and I was looking for a toolkit to help smooth this transition. Here's what I found: The first half of the book seemed like a conglomeration of short articles from Forbes, never diving too deep, only providing a few paragraph case study on a topic. On several occasions, the author mentions topics like AI, machine learning, deep learning, and so on, but treats them only as buzz words. The book seems to be targeted toward those who do not keep up with current trends in business. It does not provide much useful information for successful navigating a digital strategy, only THAT one should make the transition. The exception to this statement is the small sections on acquiring and engaging customers which I thought were very well done. However, I still feel that both sections could have been a long feature in an online magazine which a person could have read for free. Do not expect an excellent HBR article like 'Diamonds in the Data Mine' or the like. If, however, you've been living under a rock, this is the book for you!

Provides numerous examples of various industries to explain digital transformation in a holistic manner. It has a simple and non-technical vocabulary which eases understanding. Supported on strong evidence!

I highly recommend this breakthrough book