Future Ready

A book review.

Future Ready

The Four Pathways to Capturing Digital Value

by Stephanie Woerner, Peter Weill, Ina M. Sebastian

published: 2022.10.08

ISBN: 9781647823498

genre: Business (Management)

reviewed:2023.12.08

👍🏼 recommended

This is an excellent book on transforming your company from a non-digital business with "silos and spaghetti", meaning ossified corporate structure and technology that is lying about with many old connections, high expense, and little flexibility. It helps you understand that viable digital business models must fit in two dimensions: proximity to the client and whether they fit into someone else's marketplace/ecosystem. It emphasizes the importance of leadership during the effort to become digitally savvy, and presents four distinct pathways: operational excellence; customer intimacy; product leadership; and business model innovation. Each has its own challenges and opportunities, "explosions" and accelerations..

It offers four clear paths to the promised land. Either you first industrialize: that is you spend great effort on streamlining your processes and make your business highly functional Or you first move in the direction of delighting your customers by developing new capabilities or services without paying attention to efficiency, cost effectiveness, or acting on complementary activities. But in either case you will wind up doing both. There's a third path in which you attempt to both at the same time in small increments. And then there's a fourth path in which you set up a new business unit that simply dispenses with the old ways and grow that while the old business withers.

This book was widely read at our office and we refer to its key concepts all the time. In fact we have a major initiative across all business units with a name that was lifted from this book.