A New Management Orientation for the Digital Economy

The accelerated pace of market change demands a new management orientation. This framework identifies four pillars of management that guide corporations through the digital economy — from sensing market shifts to making effective entrepreneurial decisions at speed.

Four Pillars of Management to Guide Corporations Today “The accelerated pace of product and market change will require that tomorrow’s firm have wide-open ‘windows of perception’…a keen sense of anticipation of potential threats from rival technologies and rival firms…[and]the ability to make effective entrepreneurial decisions…” In this time of digital transformation, these words could have been spoken by any of today’s Chief Executives. But this passage appeared in 19651 in a Harvard Business Review article written in by H. Igor Ansoff, a professor and mathematician the Economist refers to as the father of strategic thinking . In his article, Ansoff was interpreting the impact of then-new computer and information technologies on the state of business and suggesting that corporations needed to manage themselves differently in the face of that change. “New technologies,” he wrote, “will continue to spawn new products and invade older technologies. . . life cycles of products will become shorter.” In order to appropriately respond to this kind of upheaval, Ansoff counseled corporations to institutionalize continuous R&D and make their organizations “flexible and responsive to changes...” Uncertainty driven by technology has always changed business. But today is different. Today’s digital economy is defined by ever-accelerating waves of transformational technologies (data, AI, 5G, automation, etc.) and the consequent seismic impact those technologies are making in economics, industry structure, and the landscape for innovation. Corporations are recognizing the far-reaching implications: “It’s been a long time since you could talk about sustainable competitive advantage. . .” Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico has observed. “The rule used to be that you’d reinvent yourself once every seven to 10 years. Now it’s every two to three years.” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, commented “there are hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives

By Andy Annacone at TechNexus Venture Collaborative