By Wan Nurul Atiqah
GOMBAK, 15 February 2022: To achieve a competitive advantage, digitisation is no longer sufficient to be catered in today’s organisations, instead, being able to set yourself apart from anyone else is one of the rules of digital leaders, according to Mohammad Iesa Morshidi, the Director of Price Water Cooper Malaysia (PWC).
He shared his view on digital leadership in an online conference, AKEPT Higher Education Summit (A-HEALS) 2022, held by Akademi Kepimpinan Pendidikan Tinggi (AKEPT) today.
Mohammad Iesa is a Human Resource (HR) practitioner with more than 25 years of experience in corporate HR and consulting.
Beyond digital, Mohammad Iesa explained, can be interpreted as organisations having a balance between driving performance and transforming using digitalisation.
Mohammad Iesa emphasised, “Digitisation enables the business to stay in the game, meanwhile transformation is more about moving a real long-term competitive advantage for the organisations to succeed.”
“PWC engaged successful organisations that undergo digital transformation and try to understand what the core imperatives are that have driven digital leadership,” he added.
In today’s world, Mohammad Iesa stated that “creating value is very crucial and it is all about building scales in capabilities rather than building assets; not just like in the past, most organisations merely focus on developing assets”.
In the past three years, PWC had conducted research on 12 leading established companies that are looked upon and admired by most organisations in the industry such as Microsoft, Honeywell, Adobe, Hitachi, Komatsu, Titan, Philips, Inditex, STC, Cleveland Clinic, Citigroup and Eli Lilly. The research was intended to learn the key success in the transformation beyond the digital world.
He highlighted that the research revealed seven leadership imperatives as follows for organisations to create value and secure place in the future:
1. Reimagine the organisation place in the world
2. Embrace and create value via ecosystems
3. Build a system of privileged insights with customers
4. Make organisations outcome-oriented
5. Invert the focus of the leadership team
6. Reinvent the social contract with people
7. Disrupt own leadership approach
To succeed with the transformation, these seven imperatives need to be executed as a coherent effort to help the organisations to prepare and face the outside world as well as to assist organisations in leading and creating fundamental advantages.
Mohammad Iesa further addressed that as leaders in the industry, it is important for them to recognise the imperatives to drive the organisation towards success and beyond digitalisation.***