Becoming Future Ready Requires Organizational Explosions

MIT CISR

Stephanie Woerner reads MIT CISR's August 2018 research briefing, which she co-authored with Peter Weill and Nick van der Meulen. See the text version and related content at https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/2018_0801_PathwaysExplosions_WeillVanderMeulenWoerner. Abstract: Many companies plan to achieve breakthrough performance via digitally enabled business transformation. They are now in the middle of the hard work of execution—implementing the difficult organizational changes needed to succeed. We call these changes “organizational explosions” because that’s what they feel like; they are significant, disruptive changes that affect most of a company’s customers, employees, and partners. In this briefing we share insights from the digital transformation journeys of companies in our research and we describe the four organizational explosions. We also highlight the impressive differences we observed in performance when we grouped these companies by whether they had completed more or less than 50% of their journey.