• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Experts highlight seven factors that beat digital adoption

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Organisations that plan to win in today’s market have to go beyond merely implementing digital initiatives and reimagine the compelling value they will offer and how they will create it in a unique way.

At a workshop hosted by Strategy & PwC’s global strategy consulting business for business leaders in West Africa, Paul Leinwand and Matt Mani, co-authors of the book Beyond Digital, said that although the digital transformation is critical, winning requires more than digitisation. Organisations have to understand the nature of competitive advantage has shifted, hence, being digital is not enough.

“One of the things that stood out in our research is how many leaders emphasized that they themselves had to transform at least as much as their companies did. Today’s business leaders need to be strategists and executors; tech-savvy and deeply human; good at forming coalitions and making compromises, all while being guided by their integrity,” Matt Mani said.

According to Mani, there are seven leadership imperatives that are essential for companies to transform their organisations and shape the future. These include reimagining a company’s place in the world; embracing and creating value via ecosystems; building a system of privileged insights with clients; inverting the focus of the leadership team; reinventing the social contract with the company’s people; and disrupting the leadership approach.

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In his lead presentation at the event Matt Mani one of the co-authors noted that their findings in the book are based on three years of research with 12 companies that have executed business-wide transformation strategies: Adobe, Citigroup, Cleveland Clinic, Eli Lilly, Hitachi, Honeywell, Inditex, Komatsu, Microsoft, Philips, STC Pay, and Titan.

The session featured a panel discussion with Abubakar Sulieman, MD/CEO of Sterling Bank, Oluwafemi Lawal, Head of Digital Transformation at NLNG, and Vish Ashiagbor, Country Senior Partner for PwC Ghana and the firm’s Advisory Leader for West Africa. According to the panelists, to make the best use of innovations, today’s companies must reimagine who they are, open new pathways to value creation, and transform their business.

Uyi Akpata, Country Senior Partner for PwC Nigeria and Regional Senior Partner for West Africa, described the event as an opportunity to introduce PwC’s global strategy consulting business in West Africa.

“Strategy& is the only at-scale strategy business inside a professional services network and with this new practice, we are able to combine our strategic foresight with the experience of frontline teams across PwC, to transform perspective into pragmatism, and ambition into action thus helping you drive those results that ensure sustainable outcomes,” Akpata said