Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change

Company leaders feel the urgency to transform their organizations in the face of digital disruption. New rivals are digitizing whatever can be digitized to attack incumbents’ value chains, gaining market share, eroding margins, and wreaking havoc to the competitive landscape in virtually every industry.

For large and midsized companies, the imperative to transform is clear. How to transform is another matter.

The hard truth is that despite leaders’ best efforts, and billions spent in pursuit of digital transformation, the vast majority of organizational change programs fizzle, falling well short of their expected impacts. Because failed transformation programs put incumbents behind the eight ball in dealing with disruptive competition, organizations can ill-afford for their transformation programs to flop.

With this important new book, Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change, the team at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative, set out a new prescription for getting transformation right.

The piecemeal strategies and pilot projects that are hallmarks of conventional transformation programs are hopelessly inadequate for the intricate, sprawling organizational environments found in most companies. Transformation practitioners need a different mindset and a new approach to executing change that can handle the complexity and scale of today’s market leaders. Orchestration—"mobilizing and enabling so as to achieve a desired effect”—paves the way for a new, more holistic view of organizational resources and how they work together to drive change synergistically. 

The follow-up to 2016’s award-winning Digital Vortex, Orchestrating Transformation is packed with quantitative and qualitative insights from years of applied research and engagement with executives around the world. A unique and indispensable guide for practitioners, the book moves past traditional change management doctrine to show how a connected approach to change can change everything.

“Orchestrating Transformation is an exceptional read for CEOs in this age of frequent technological disruption. You’ll get timeless tools, tactics, and frameworks to help you transform your business and adapt as artificial intelligence and digital technologies reshape your industry.”

 — Kai-Fu Lee, founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures

“The reason many digital transformation programs fail has little to do with ambition and technology. It is mainly about execution. Digital transformation, at scale, respects none of the traditional organizational boundaries that we have created. In Orchestrating Transformation, the authors dig deep into the “How” of digital transformation and provide hard-won lessons from many companies’ successes and failures. As we face perpetual cycles of increasingly complex digital change, this book is timely for both practitioners and business leaders who want to turn the odds of transformation in their favor.” 

— Didier Bonnet, co-author, Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation and SVP and global practice lead, digital transformation, Capgemini Consulting

“Business models are expiring faster than ever before across industries, often due to digital disruption. Orchestrating Transformation shows you how to stay relevant in this environment by reimagining company resources and how they can work together to foster organizational change.”

 — Alexander Osterwalder, co-author, Business Model Generation, and co-founder, Strategyzer

“Orchestrating Transformation is a must-read for those leading digital transformation as well as those trying to understand the enablers of change for an organization at a time when the speed of change and uncertainty are unprecedented. The value of this book is the practical and illustrative way that the authors address transformation challenges, using examples that are relevant and relatable to the managerial challenges faced, whatever the type of organization.”

— Charlotte Lindsey-Curtet, director of Digital Transformation, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

“As I read this book, I found myself nodding in agreement and scribbling down ideas at so many moments that were virtual playbacks of my own experiences as a transformation practitioner at Citi. Orchestrating Transformation is a powerful work that should be on the reading list of any executive serious about executing business transformation for results.”  

— Amy Radin, author of The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation In Any Company