Essential Reading for your Digital Transformation Journey
Developing a yearly conference and daily updates to our content platform requires an open mind, never-ending curiosity and constant learning. Instead of sharing the hundreds of books we read throughout the year, we wanted to trim them down to five books you should have in your office, on your eReader or nightstand before you head out to THINK 17. If you’re looking for the perfect reading material for the plane ride, here it is.
“Cities in the past were built on riverbanks. They are now built along highways. But in the future they will be built based on availability of optical fiber networks and next-generation infrastructure.” – Narendra Modi, Prime Minister, India
Digital technology is transforming entire industries, including financial services, within a very short time, and there is exponentially more change to come. In “Digital to the Core,” Mark Raskino and Graham Waller of Gartner, Inc. explain how leaders today must bring digital to the center of everything they do. They discuss how digital businesses will cause greater disruptions and require more significant organizational and business model changes than the internet of times past ever did.
Executives must understand the critical forces driving digital to the core of products and services and learn how to redesign their industries, remodel institutions and reinvent themselves to take digital to the core of their leadership. A guide for leaders looking to make bold strides in their digitization journey, this book identifies three major disruptive forces in the digital era:
- Resolution Revolution: allows us to accurately measure and precisely control things and events.
- Compound Uncertainty: requires that leaders assess the tipping points of technology, culture and regulation.
- Boundary Blurring: occurs when the digital and physical worlds merge and alters industries as we know them.
- Remake yourself: Who do you need to be and how do you have to change to become a digital leader?
- Remodel your credit union: What does your credit union need to become and how will you redefine your institution?
- Remap your industry: How do you need to change your world view, and what credit union paradigms do you need to rethink?
- Challenging Orthodoxies: questioning deeply entrenched beliefs and assumptions, and exploring new and highly unconventional answers. Think Martin Luther, Newton, Elon Musk, Apple stores and Chipotle. Innovators are often seen as troublemakers, contrarians, heretics and rebels; their challenge of orthodoxies becomes the cradle of creativity.
- Harnessing Trends: recognizing the future potential of emerging developments, and using these trends to open up new opportunities. Think Amazon Kindle, Starbucks’ mobile payments app and Waze. Innovators are not necessarily futurists, but they are imaginative and have an ability to use the power of change. As Rowan Gibson says: “Innovators tend to have a wider field of view and an amazing sharp-sightedness.”
- Leveraging Resources: understanding our limitless capacity for redeploying skills and assets in new ways, combinations or contexts. Think Disney, Corning and Amazon’s expansion into numerous fields. Successful innovators develop, stretch and synthesize resources, and focus on organizational creativity.
- Understanding Needs: paying attention to issues and frustrations others have ignored, and experimenting with new solutions to problems. Think Dyson vacuums, Nest and Diane Hevin (women-only gyms). Based on human-centered design thinking, companies need to balance technical R&D with customer research to meet the unmet needs and frustrations that everyone else is simply ignoring.