David J. Morrison

Becoming a digital business: ‐ it’s not about technology

Many senior executives equate “going digital” with specific phenomena such as the advent of the personal computer, the proliferation of e‐mail, the growth of enterprise resource planning systems, or the popularity of the Internet. But to think of digital business design as the sum total of the high‐tech innovations multiplying around us is a fatally incomplete view. The discipline of digital business design is about serving customers, creating unique value propositions, leveraging talent, achieving order‐of‐magnitude improvements in productivity, and increasing and protecting profits. Learn from the companies that have created great value propositions for customers and employees, achieved significant improvements in productivity, created a robust profit model, and protected both their profit streams and their customer relationships from being eroded by competitors.

Pattern thinking:: a strategic shortcut

This article describes the application of pattern thinking to strategy. Patterns provide a powerful discipline to see order beneath the surface chaos. Pattern thinking can help entrepreneurs, managers, investors, and key talent to anticipate the likely direction of changes even before they happen. It reveals the economic meaning of these changes and provides the tools to capitalize on them. The authors report on groundbreaking research into over 200 companies in 40 industries, and they cite several examples of companies which have profited from analyzing their opportunities according to the profit pattern matrix.