Leadership in the age of disruption: How to rise to digital transformation

Brad Parks, VP of Business Development at Morpheus Data, looks at what it takes to be a leader in the age of disruption

Technology has been transforming business since the invention of the wheel and with each era of innovation, traditional industries are forced to reinvent themselves. The digital transformation now underway is perhaps unique only in the breadth of scope. From banking to retail, to entertainment, to food services… virtually every company in every industry is shifting how they engage with customers and markets. This is driving the cloud and DevOps changes we see every day.

The same reinvention can be true of leadership. A recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article put it well when they said that “leadership styles have their times as well as their places” and went on to propose that certain styles may be more favourable when there is both ambiguity and opportunity – such as what we see in digital transformation.

That same HBR article presented data that came out of a study of teamwork and leadership at MIT. Or in their case what ended up being ‘anti-leadership’. High functioning engineering organisations such as those at MIT (and those found in many disruptive projects) seem to be drawn more to a problem-led version of leadership. The real leaders are those that frame problems in new ways that draw the right people into the effort.

Researcher and business-transformation pioneer Simon Chan provides a layman’s definition of digital transformation which I think is pretty easy to align around: “Using technology to create differentiating ways of doing business with the aim of driving growth in new and existing markets.” That describes most of the large enterprises that Morpheus works with every day. Centralised IT Ops teams now have a mandate to ‘get out of the way’ so that developers, researchers, and others can accelerate transformation efforts. New generations of IT leaders are those that recognise this change and reframe IT in new ways. Those that fail to adjust their leadership context will be left behind.

The Enterprises that Morpheus works with on CloudOps and DevOps projects are disrupting old markets to drive new growth.