Why Digital Transformations Fail

The Surprising Disciplines of How to Take Off and Stay Ahead

Tony Saldanha

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler, 2019, 218 pages

ISBN: 978-1-5230-8534-7

Keywords: Change Management

Last modified: June 5, 2021, 5:51 p.m.

Former Procter & Gamble Vice President for information technology and shared services Tony Saldanha gives you the keys to a successful digital transformation: a proven five-stage model and a disciplined process for executing it.

Digital transformation is an existential threat for most organizations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds are becoming ever more blurred. But fully 70 percent of digital transformations fail.

Why? Saldanha, a globally awarded industry thought leader who led operations around the world and major digital changes at Procter & Gamble, discovered it's not due to innovation or technological problems. Rather, the issue lies in how transformation is executed: without clear goals and a disciplined process for achieving them. Using the checklist methodology that has made the execution of operations highly reliable, evidenced by its implementation in the airline and healthcare industries, Saldanha lays out a five-stage process to successfully make digital technology the very backbone of your organization's operation. For each of these five stages, Saldanha describes two associated disciplines vital to the success of that stage and provides a checklist of questions to keep you on track.

You want to disrupt before you are disrupted — be the next Netflix, not the next Blockbuster. Using dozens of case studies and his own considerable experience, Saldanha shows how digital transformation can be made routinely successful and be turned into an opportunity of a lifetime.

  1. Why Digital Transformations Fail and What to Do about It
    1. How to Survice an Industrial Revolution
    2. The Disciplines to Move Up to Stage 5 Transformation
  2. The Five Stages of Digital Transformation
    • Stage 1: Foundation
      1. Committed Ownership
      2. Iterative Execution
    • Stage 2: Siloed
      1. Disruption Empowerment
      2. Digital Leverage Points
    • Stage 3: Partially Synchronized
      1. Effective Change Model
      2. Strategy Sufficiency
    • Stage 4: Fully Synchronized
      1. Digital Reorganization
      2. Staying Current
    • Stage 5: Living DNA
      1. Agile Culture
      2. Sensing Risk
  3. Winning with Digital Transformation
    1. P&G's NGS Transformation
    2. How Digital Transformations Can Succeed
  • Resource A: Checklist of the Surprising Disciplines
  • Resource B: How to Use the Five Most Exponential Technologies