The Digital Transformation Playbook

**Author:** David L. Rogers

**Estimated Reading Time:** 42 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why digital transformation fails when treated as a technology project - How to rethink customers, competition, data, innovation, and value for the digital age - How to build platforms that benefit from network effects - How to run experiments that reduce risk and accelerate learning - How to adapt your business model before disruption forces your hand - How to lead organizational change that sticks

**Who This Book Is For:**

This book is for leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, and strategists who sense that the old rules of business no longer apply but are not sure what should replace them. It is for anyone who has watched a once-dominant company collapse under the weight of digital disruption and wondered how it could have been avoided. If you are responsible for guiding an organization through change, or if you simply want to understand why some companies thrive in the digital age while others disappear, this book will give you a clear framework for thinking and acting differently.

Every few decades, the fundamental rules of business change. The industrial revolution replaced craft production with factories and scale. The rise of mass media created modern marketing and brands. The internet and mobile computing have now triggered another shift, one that is still unfolding around us. The evidence of this shift is everywhere. Kodak invented the digital camera but still went bankrupt. Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars and passed. Borders outsourced its online bookstore to Amazon, then watched Amazon eat its business. Taxi companies dismissed Uber as an illegal fringe player until it was too late. These are not stories of companies that failed to adopt technology. Kodak was a technology company. Blockbuster had a website. Borders sold books online. The problem was never technology. The problem was thinking. David L. Rogers argues that digital transformation is fundamentally a strategic challenge, not a technological one. The companies that fail are not the ones that ignored digital tools. They are the ones that applied digital tools to old ways of thinking. They used websites to distribute the same products, data to optimize the same processes, and social media to broadcast the same messages. They digitized their businesses without transforming their assumptions. The core problem is that most leaders learned strategy in a world that no longer exists. They learned that industries have stable boundaries. They learned that customers are passive recipients of marketing messages. They learned that data is a tool for measuring past performance. They learned that innovation is expensive and risky. They learned that value is created through a linear chain of production and distribution. None…