Company leaders feel the urgency to transform their organizations in the face of digital disruption. New rivals are digitizing whatever can be digitized to attack incumbents’ value chains, gaining market share, eroding margins, and wreaking havoc to the competitive landscape in virtually every industry.

For large and midsized companies, the imperative to transform is clear. How to transform is another matter.

The hard truth is that despite leaders’ best efforts, and billions spent in pursuit of digital transformation, the vast majority of organizational change programs fizzle, falling well short of their expected impacts. But organizations can ill-afford for their transformation programs to flop. Failed transformation programs put incumbents behind the eight ball when it comes to dealing with disruptive competition.

With this important new book, Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change, the team at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative, set out a new prescription for getting transformation right.

The piecemeal strategies and pilot projects that are hallmarks of conventional transformation programs are hopelessly inadequate for the intricate, sprawling organizational environments found in most companies. Transformation practitioners need a different mindset and a new approach to executing change that can handle the complexity and scale of today’s market leaders. Orchestration—"mobilizing and enabling so as to achieve a desired effect”—paves the way for a new, more holistic view of organizational resources and how they work together to drive change synergistically.

The follow-up to 2016’s award-winning Digital Vortex, the book is packed with quantitative and qualitative insights from years of applied research and engagement with executives around the world.

A unique and indispensable guide for practitioners, Orchestrating Transformation moves past traditional change management doctrine to show how a connected approach to change can change everything.

Michael Wade