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Companies must be open to radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of revenue.n her allotted 15 minutes of fame. But in the three decades since her debut album, she has managed to remain a media icon.

When Madonna burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, there was little reason to suspect that she’d have more than her allotted 15 minutes of fame. But in the three decades since her debut album, she has managed to remain a media icon.

Her secret? “Madonna is the perfect example of reinvention,” Janice Dickinson, renowned talent agent, has said. Fittingly, the name of Madonna’s sixth concert tour was “Reinvention.”

Madonna may seem like an unlikely touchstone for modern businesses, but her ability to adapt to new trends and set some others offers a lesson for companies struggling with their own digital revolutions. That’s because the digital age rewards change and punishes stasis. Companies must be open to radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of revenue. Incremental adjustments or building something new outside of the core business can provide real benefits and, in many cases, are a crucial first step for a digital transformation. But if these initiatives don’t lead to more profound changes to the core business and avoid the real work of rearchitecting how the business makes money, the benefits can be fleeting and too insignificant to avert a steady march to oblivion.

Simply taking an existing product line and putting it on an e-commerce site or digitizing a customer experience is not a digital reinvention. Reinvention is a rethinking of the business itself. Companies need to ask fundamental questions, such as, “Are we a manufacturer, or are we a company that enables customers to perform tasks with our equipment wherever and whenever they need to?” If it’s the latter, then logistics and service operations may suddenly become more important than the factory line. Netflix’s evolution from a company that rented DVDs to a company that streams entertainment for a monthly subscription to one that now creates its own content is a well-known example of continuous reinvention.

Reinvention, as the term implies, requires a significant commitment. From our Digital Quotient® research, we know that digital success requires not only that investment be aligned closely with strategy but also that it be at sufficient scale. And digital leaders have a high threshold for risk and are willing to make bold decisions.1But companies don’t have to wait far in the future to realize those benefits. We’ve found that 60 to 80 percent of total improvement targets can be achieved within about three years while also laying the foundation for future growth.

For all the fundamental change that digital reinvention demands, it’s worth emphasizing that it doesn’t call for a “throw it all out” approach. An engine-parts company, for example, will still likely make engine parts after a digital reinvention, but may do so in a way that’s much more agile and analytically driven, or the company may open up new lines of business by leveraging existing assets. Apple, with its move from computer manufacturer to music and lifestyle brand through its iPhone and iTunes ecosystem, reinvented itself—even as it continued to build computers. John Deere created a whole series of online services for farmers even as it continued to sell tractors and farm equipment.

There are many elements to a transformation, from end-to-end journey redesign and embedding analytics into processes to open tech platforms. They require a myriad of capabilities, from artificial intelligence and agile operations to data lakes, cloud-based infrastructure, and new talent. Many of these elements have been written about extensively, and each can absorb a significant amount of executive time. What’s often missing, however, is a comprehensive view of how an organization sets the right ambition, how to architect the right elements for the transformation, then how to systematically and holistically undertake the change journey.

What the “core” is and why it needs to change

“Think of your core muscles as the sturdy central link in a chain connecting your upper and lower body.” That was the guidance from Harvard Medical School on how to stay in shape. The authors defined the core as the central set of muscles that helps a body maintain its power, balance, and overall health.

That’s the essence of what we mean when we talk about changing the core of the business—the set of capabilities that allows the entire business to run effectively. A company’s core is the value proposition of its business grounded in strategy as enabled by its people, processes, and technology. These elements are so intrinsic that any transformation that doesn’t address them will ultimately underwhelm and fizzle because the legacy organization will inevitably exert a gravitational pull back to established practices.

Value proposition: Any digital reinvention must address the value the company provides to customers (whether existing or new) through its products and/or services. Inevitably this is based on a clear strategy that articulates where value is being created, shifted, or destroyed. Crucial to getting this right is identifying and evaluating existing assets that are most important and understanding what customers actually want or need. This can be surprisingly difficult to do in practice. The value that Amazon originally provided, for example, wasn’t selling books online but rather providing convenience and unheard-of selection. Understanding the real source of its value allowed Amazon to expand exponentially beyond books.

People: Of course talent is important, but a reinvention needs to involve more than just hiring a CDO or a few designers. Talent priorities should be based on a clear understanding of the skills needed at all levels of the business. This requires investing in building relevant digital capabilities that fit with the strategy and keep pace with customers as they change the way they consider and make purchases. At the same time, targeted hiring should be tied to those capabilities that actually drive financial performance. (For more on talent, please read “Raising your Digital Quotient.”)

Enabling that talent to thrive requires a digital culture, i.e., one that is customer centric and project based, with a bias for speed and continuous learning. In fact, cultural and organizational issues can lead to the squandering of up to 85 percent of the value at stake. Making sure the new culture sticks requires rebuilding programs that reward and encourage new behaviors, such as performance management, promotion criteria, and incentive systems.

Processes: Rewiring the mechanisms for making decisions and getting things done is what enables the digital machine to run. Digitizing or automating supply chains and information-intensive processes as well as building new capabilities like robotic process automation or advanced analytics, for example, can rapidly increase the business’s clock speed and cut costs by up to 90 percent.4

One temptation is to focus on simply digitizing existing processes rather than really rethinking them. Often, the most productive way to tackle this issue is to identify the customer journeys that matter most to the business and then map out the touchpoints, processes, and capabilities required to deliver on them—without regard to what is already in place. Rearchitecting processes requires establishing governance and decision rights to provide clarity and accountability, as well as embedding advanced analytics, automation, and machine-learning capabilities. (For more, please read “Accelerating the digitization of business processes.”)

Technology: While digital reinvention is more than just a technology overhaul, technology is crucial to it. Leaders need to ensure that each IT investment responds to clear and robust business needs, and does not devolve into “tech for tech’s sake.” They also need to identify how best to work within an ecosystem of partners and vendors, and assess which legacy systems to keep, which to mothball, and—critically—determine how to help legacy technology work in a digital world.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Peter Dahlström is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office, where Liz Ericson is also a partner; Somesh Khanna is a senior partner in the New York office; and Jürgen Meffertis a senior partner in the the Düsseldorf office.