Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2021), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 49 No. 4, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-07-2021-0069

In this issue the authors offer guidance on important new skills corporate leaders need to master in this rapidly evolving digital era:

• Connecting employees with corporate purpose.

• Learning how to innovate and manage ecosystems.

• Enabling mature companies to transform into businesses with digital native agility.

• Mastering the digital transformation mindset.

• Operationalizing experience marketing.

• Understanding experience design principles.

Hubert Joly served as CEO of Best Buy Co. from 2012 to 2019 and continued as Executive Chairman until June 2020. The interaction between purpose and people that was essential to the successful turnaround and transformation of the company is detailed in his article “Purpose before profit: unleashing individual and collective ‘human magic.’” His message to corporate leadership: “It is time to move past the quest to drive the behavior of a collective workforce, and instead seek to inspire people by connecting with what matters to each one of them.”

“Mastering the challenge of business ecosystems” is a critical survival skill of the digital era, explains Agile researcher Stephen Denning. As he describes the new model, “An ecosystem business is a way of transcending the boundaries of a firm to include additional producers to provide more value to customers and also by making customers active partners.”

The inner workings of the Infosys Live Enterprise model – a digitally enabled, human-centric, designed-to-evolve model of the modern enterprise based on the principles of adaptive, living systems – are described in an interview with Infosys executive Jeff Kavanaugh, “Designed to evolve: digital transformation the Infosys way.”

He told his interviewer, S&L contributing editor Brian Leavy, “The idea behind the Live Enterprise is to enable mature companies to transform into a business with digital native agility, with many small teams innovating while leveraging shared digital infrastructure, in an environment of continuous evolution and learning.”

Analyzing the priorities of the most successful leaders in their recent study of 3,000 senior corporate executives, Haynes Cooney, Peter Korsten and Anthony Marshall, researchers at the IBM Institute for Business Value, found that “‘Dynamic CEOs’ see a competitive landscape which is defined by emerging technologies, recognize the value of investing in technology to seize growth opportunities, and they work toward achieving the organizational agility needed to grow their businesses.” They layout the executives’ successful actions in their article, “How ‘Dynamic CEOs’ outperformed by adopting a transformation mindset.”

John Lloyd, a former firm executive, tells how “Land Rover Ltd. transformed the automobile test drive into a personal learning and loyalty experience for their customers and potential customer ‘Guests’ at a global network of Land Rover Experience Centres.” His article, “The Land Rover ‘Guest experience’ marketing concept,” offers a frontline view of the operational process he managed.

“A five-step experience design ideation lesson for corporate leaders” by Kevin M. Dulle maps out how, “Experience designers use creative ideation as an effective method to help understand how to elevate an offering transaction to memorable customer experience.” Experience design has become a key skill for executives now that the competitive advantage and the economic value experiences create has become a critical success factor for corporations in many markets.

Good reading!