Why business leaders need to go beyond technology in the digital-first era

Author Mahadeva Matt Mani on the seven leadership imperatives the UAE can adopt to shape its future

Mahadeva Matt Mani is a principal with PwC US. He leads the transformation platform for PwC and for its strategy consulting business, Strategy&, advising executives on business model transformations and operational value creation and productivity programs.

He is a co-author of Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transforms their Organizations and Shape the Future along with Paul Leinwand, who is the global managing director for capabilities-driven strategy and growth at Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. He is a principal with PwC US, and an adjunct professor of strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Mani spoke to Khaleej Times about the inspiration behind writing his latest, which is a labour of love after three years of extensive research, and how the UAE can adopt these leadership imperatives.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

What was the inspiration behind writing Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future?

We were hearing from so many executives about the sheer number of digital initiatives they were running, the huge multi-million dollar investments they were making on digital programmes, and the constant pressure they were under to have a digital strategy. Yet despite all their programmes and investments they weren’t moving ahead of the competition. They weren’t really creating substantive competitive differentiation. So, we wanted to study what it really takes to succeed in a digital era.

Why is digital transformation critical if it’s no longer a differentiator?

“Digital” transformation is perhaps a misnomer, because what we learned is that it has little to do with digital. Companies that succeeded with their transformations actually went well beyond digital to address more fundamentally how they create value as an organisation — and then used digital as one element to enable that outcome. This is because just digitising what you currently do doesn’t really add anything - other than automating your old business, or getting you to operate faster. The problem is that everyone else is digitising too, so all you end up doing is just speeding yourself up to an undifferentiated future.

Instead, companies have to understand that some key things have changed that require them to rethink their approach and to transform beyond just digital. You have to recognise that the value creation model for all organisations is impacted by three main changes:

What all this adds up to is a very different model of value creation. And given that the model of value creation is so different, companies can’t just digitise what they’ve been doing. They need to step back and answer two fundamental questions: 1) what value do we need to create to fulfill the needs of customers and society, and 2) how do we uniquely contribute to creating that value

That’s why transformation in today’s age is critical — and then including digital as an important element in that transformation

What are the seven leadership imperatives for transforming companies in the new digital era?

Your book took three years of extensive research. What are the 12 companies that you looked at for your book and why did you choose them?

We started with a broad global survey to ask leaders of companies across industries which companies they wanted to learn from — which companies did they admire. We then shortlisted a number of companies who had been through digitally enabled transformations and had achieved sustained results. Then, we reached out to the leadership teams of these companies to interview them and learn from them about what they did and how they did it. We learned both about their successes and failures.

These companies range across regions such as:

And across industries, including:

What’s the mantra behind a lasting business?

I’m not sure we’ve any mantra, but I would say that businesses today need to recognize that transformation is continuous. They cannot rest and simply accept that they’ve arrived and try to protect their positions. As we’ve seen viscerally in the last two years and even now, disruption and change is a constant. So as a business you have to continually challenge yourself around the two fundamental questions:

To borrow a phrase from Jeff Bezos, you have to operate like “every day is day one”.

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