Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Tunde Olanrewaju, Kate Smaje, and Paul Willmott for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. They explain how and why, to stay competitive, companies must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses. They identify and discuss seven traits that successful digital enterprises share.

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The age of experimentation with digital is over. In an often bleak landscape of slow economic recovery, digital continues to show healthy growth. E-commerce is growing at double-digit rates in the United States and most European countries, and it is booming across Asia. To take advantage of this momentum, companies need to move beyond experiments with digital and transform themselves into digital businesses. Yet many companies are stumbling as they try to turn their digital agendas into new business and operating models. The reason, we believe, is that digital transformation is uniquely challenging, touching every function and business unit while also demanding the rapid development of new skills and investments that are very different from business as usual. To succeed, management teams need to move beyond vague statements of intent and focus on “hard wiring” digital into their organization’s structures, processes, systems, and incentives.

There is no blueprint for success, but there are plenty of examples that offer insights into the approaches and actions of a successful digital transformation. By studying dozens of these successes—looking beyond the usual suspects—we discovered that effective digital enterprises share these seven traits.

[Here are the first two traits.]

1. Be unreasonably aspirational

Leadership teams must be prepared to think quite differently about how a digital business operates. Digital leaders set aspirations that, on the surface, seem unreasonable. Being “unreasonable” is a way to jar an organization into seeing digital as a business that creates value, not as a channel that drives activities. Some companies frame their targets by measures such as growth or market share through digital channels. Others set targets for cost reduction based on the cost structures of new digital competitors. Either way, if your targets aren’t making the majority of your company feel nervous, you probably aren’t aiming high enough.

When Angela Ahrendts became CEO of Burberry, in 2006, she took over a stalling business whose brand had become tarnished. But she saw what no one else could: that a high-end fashion retailer could remake itself as a digital brand. Taking personal control of the digital agenda, she oversaw a series of groundbreaking initiatives, including a website (ArtoftheTrench.com) that featured customers as models, a more robust e-commerce catalog that matched the company’s in-store inventory, and the digitization of retail stores through features such as radio-frequency identification tags. During Ahrendts’s tenure, revenues tripled. (Apple hired Ahrendts last October to head its retail business.)

Netflix was another brand with an unreasonably aspirational vision. It had built a successful online DVD rental business, but leadership saw that the future of the industry would be in video streaming, not physical media. The management team saw how quickly broadband technology was evolving and made a strategic bet that placed it at the forefront of a surge in real-time entertainment. As the video-streaming market took off, Netflix quickly captured nearly a third of downstream video traffic. By the end of 2013, Netflix had more than 40 million streaming subscribers.

2. Acquire capabilities

The skills required for digital transformation probably can’t be groomed entirely from within. Leadership teams must be realistic about the collective ability of their existing workforce. Leading companies frequently look to other industries to attract digital talent, because they understand that emphasizing skills over experience when hiring new talent is vital to success, at least in the early stages of transformation. The best people in digital product management or user-experience design may not work in your industry. Hire them anyway.

Tesco, the UK grocery retailer, made three significant digital acquisitions over a two-year span: blinkbox, a video-streaming service; We7, a digital music store; and Mobcast, an e-book platform. The acquisitions enabled Tesco to quickly build up the skills it needed to move into digital media. In the United States, Verizon followed a similar path with strategic acquisitions that immediately bolstered its expertise in telematics (Hughes Telematics in 2012) and cloud services (CloudSwitch in 2011), two markets that are growing at a rapid pace.

This “acqui-hire” approach is not the only option. But we have observed that significant lateral hiring is required in the early stages of a transformation to create a pool of talent deep enough to execute against an ambitious digital agenda and plant the seeds for a new culture.

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

’Tunde Olanrewaju and Kate Smaje are principals in McKinsey’s London office, where Paul Willmott is a director.

The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of Tomas Jones to this article.