I will not say that it attracted me, but I can say that an interesting professional thesis had a refreshing effect on me. I was collecting material for my favorite topic, the relationship between business leadership and digital transformation, when I came across a doctoral thesis written by someone who had a job to write it. I’ll tell you why.
■ strategy
The heat downloadable, The work is titled “Digital Leadership Lens to a Physical World: Digital Transformation Control Tools for Incumbents” Michael J. Sales It was created by him, and he received his degree with this work from the Doctoral School of the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
I looked up the author, and in our current context, the only thing worth mentioning about him on the world wide web is that he is the Vice President of Business Strategy and also the Director of IT for Hussmann Corporation. The word “all” could even be deleted from the previous sentence, because it might suggest that there is nothing special about the fact that a senior manager is responsible for these two areas at the same time. I think it could be really interesting to oversee these two professional areas at the same time, especially at Haussmann, who definitely deserves a thin paragraph.
This company is over 110 years old and manufactures and services refrigeration equipment for retail food stores. Headquartered in Bridgeton, Missouri, it has local representation in 43 locations across the United States. Haussmann makes massive real machines from real materials, and is a typical example of companies whose core business cannot be described as digital in any way.
What would someone look for in senior management for such work at a university’s doctoral school? -We can ask the false question, to which Sales’s thesis provides a reliable answer.
In his thesis, Sells calls companies that deal with things that belong to the physical world incumbent companies, for which finding the way to the future is a major challenge, that is, embarking on digital transformation. Even these companies, which can be called traditional in the strict sense of the word, do not avoid major transformations, says a senior business manager and IT director who works at one of his existing companies. He adds emphatically that to all this it is absolutely necessary for members of senior management to acquire a new kind of digital leadership capability, which he calls “digital acuity” in his work, which we can initially translate as digital acuity. For a second attempt, a little closer to the everyday style, I would call it Digital Sharpness, which clearly sets the high level of expectations.
It would be interesting to consider what circumstances might have motivated Michael J. Sales in choosing the topic of his doctoral dissertation. We can identify one of them easily and with little risk: You may have daily experiences of how challenging it is for senior managers in a traditional company to virtuously understand the opportunities offered by modern digital technologies. It may have occurred to him countless times how much easier it would be for him as VP of Strategy to demonstrate the future course of the company if his fellow executives could clearly understand what he was saying as CIO.
