Does Your C-Suite Have Enough Digital Smarts?

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, March 3, 2021

by Peter Weill, Stephanie L. Woerner, and Aman M. Shah


Image courtesy of Anna & Elena Balbusso/theispot.com

There’s little doubt that the future of business is digital. Companies that are in the lead implementing digital technologies have radically improved their operational efficiency and their customers’ experiences. And, even more important, the new capabilities unlocked by digital technologies have allowed them to reimagine their purposes and their business models.

Having a digitally savvy top leadership team — that is, a team in which more than half of the executive members are digitally savvy — makes a huge difference. Our latest research shows that large enterprises with digitally savvy executive teams outperformed comparable companies without such teams by more than 48% based on revenue growth and valuation.

Digital savviness is an understanding, developed through experience and education, of the impact that emerging technologies will have on a business’s success over the next decade. Sharing this understanding across the top management team is a key ingredient in the success of corporate transformation. As Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chairman and CEO of energy management company Schneider Electric, told us, “When every business becomes a digital business, every executive needs to take digital transformation personally. The last thing you want in your team is the belief that digital is somebody else’s problem.”

Unfortunately, the demand for digital savviness in the upper echelons of leadership has grown far more quickly than the supply. In 2019, when we studied the boards of directors in 3,228 large U.S.-listed companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues, we discovered that only 24% of boards were digitally savvy. In 2020, we extended our research to encompass top management teams — C-level executives and leaders of functions and geographic territories — in 1,984 large companies globally. Our new findings indicate that only 7% of companies have digitally savvy executive teams.

In this article, we report the findings of our research into the level of digital savviness among top management teams, the business value it delivers, and the actions that companies can take to increase the digital savviness of their senior executives. Read the rest here.