Leadership in the Digital Age

06 Dec 2021

Leadership in the Digital Age

Takeaways from Professor Linda Hill’s discussions with global executives

Re: Avid Duggan (MBA 2006); Sunand Menon (MBA 2001); Linda A. Hill (Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration); By: April White

Topics: Leadership-Leading Change Innovation-Innovation and Management Research-Research and Development

Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. Photo by Susan Young

As Professor Linda Hill set out to study “digital leaders,” the first thing she learned is that there is no such thing. All leaders—regardless of their sector—must think differently to lead a successful company in the digital age, explains Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. That’s because the challenges that executives face today aren’t issues of technology but a question of “how to create an organization that can actually utilize digital tools and data to drive decision making and foster agility.”

Hill, an ethnographer by training, researched the connection between leadership and innovation for her 2014 book Collective Genius, which focused primarily on startups built from the ground up to be agile. To better understand the challenges faced by established companies eager to become more responsive organizations, Hill turned again to the collective expertise of the global business community. She was supported in her research efforts by project leader Sunand Menon (MBA 2001) and former HBS Executive Fellow Ann Le Cam, both of whom have extensive backgrounds in digital technology.

With the assistance of six HBS Global Research Centers, Hill and her Leadership Initiative team hosted a series of virtual roundtable discussions on the pressing issues that accompany digital transformation. The goal: to examine how leadership has evolved in the 21st century and to produce research, case studies, and courses based on that knowledge to educate a new generation of executives.

“It’s impossible to lead an organization today without a deep understanding of how to build and run a truly data-driven organization. That includes having the right culture, processes, governance, et cetera,” says Avid Larizadeh Duggan (MBA 2006). The venture capital investor, who serves as a non-executive director for Barclays UK, participated in a roundtable organized by the Europe Research Center.

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One takeaway from the conversation was the urgency of adapting to this new era, even when that change is daunting. “It’s easier if you’re a startup,” Larizadeh Duggan says, “but if your company is 30, 40, 50, 100 years old—or in my case, 300 years old—that transformation is more difficult. But you can’t continue to be successful otherwise.”

Hill heard the same sentiment from many of the approximately 175 people she and her team talked with around the world over the last year. From London and Johannesburg to Manila and Atlanta, a few common themes emerged, she says.

For instance, leadership in the digital age means building a customer-focused organization. “You really have to earn the trust of your customer to collect their data,” Hill explains. “The needs and desires of the customer should be driving why you are collecting data and how you are using it.”

Participants also agreed that running a company in the modern day requires distributed leadership and decision making. “The democratization of data is critical to creating an organization that is agile and can continuously learn,” Hill notes.

But regional gatherings also highlighted issues that were of particular concern to leaders in different parts of the world.

Many executives who joined the roundtable hosted by the Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Harvard Center Shanghai discussed the rapid pace of technological advancement and how to respond quickly to customer demand for frictionless mobile interaction, both in the B2C and B2B spaces. In a conversation organized by the Latin America Research Center, there was significant discussion about how the recent influx of venture capital money will reshape the business environment and how established companies can respond to more digitally savvy startups. And executives brought together by the Africa Research Center and Middle East and North Africa Research Center highlighted the importance of building the infrastructure necessary to undertake digital transformation.

These are all long-term tasks and big-picture questions with unclear outcomes, Hill notes, but leadership in the digital age means being comfortable with uncertainty. These leaders know how to adopt new approaches quickly, they admit failure, and they welcome collaboration, Hill says. “Today’s leaders must be informed about technological trends and the possibilities they present to continually improve operational efficiencies and—even more importantly—customer experiences.”