Digital strategy: The four fights you have to win McKinsey & Company

If there's one thing a digital strategy can't be, it's incremental. The mismatch between most incumbents' business models and digital futures is too great--and the environment is changing too quickly--for anything but bold, inventive strategic plans to work. Unfortunately, most strategic-planning exercises dogenerate incrementalism. We know this from experience and from McKinsey research: on average, resources don't move between business units in large organizations. A recent book by our colleagues, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, seeks to explain what causes this inertia (strategy's social side, rooted in individual interests, group dynamics, and cognitive biases) and to suggest a way out (understanding the real odds of strategy and overhauling your planning processes to deliver the big moves that can overcome those long odds). All this holds doubly true for digital strategy, which demands special attention.