This book was awarded the 2019 Axiom Business Book Award - Business Technology, Bronze Medal.
Users of twenty-first century, digital-era technologies are "technology takers," accepting of and adjusting to whatever the market offers them. Similar to small firms that lack the market power to set prices and are economic "price takers," managers today are increasingly unable to customize the digital-era technologies their organizations use. Technology takers have little influence over the capabilities of the technologies they adopt; they cannot expect to improve on or customize for themselves the features of Facebook, Google, the iPhone, the blockchain, cloud-based enterprise resource planning systems, or other game-changing and often disintermediating technologies.
The inability to modify available information technologies is a shock to leaders and managers alike. Cloud-based technologies arrive with set processes developed by others, and users must learn new ways of working each time the technologies themselves evolve. But refusing to adopt and adapt to digital-era technologies is, increasingly, not an option. Change in the digital era is constant and behavior-transforming. Managers must respond to these changes, or they will get left behind by those who do. The constancy of change also means that organizations have to do more than launch typical, one-off change management or transformation projects to succeed.
To adopt efficiently and adapt effectively to behavior-changing technologies, astute leaders should employ change leadership techniques as a strategy for the digital era. This book offers technology takers a playbook to manage change, create value, and exploit the digital era's strategic opportunities. The book draws on research and recent case studies to explain what it means to be a technology taker. Organizations and their managers are offered change leadership plays, which emphasize the iterative nature of change management in the digital era. The book also describes how technology taking can create value through data stream analytics and be used strategically to respond proactively to the challenges of the digital era.
Jens P. Flanding trained as an economist at Royal Holloway College and McGill University and earned his doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Faculty for Designing and Managing Organizational Change at the United Nations System Staff College and a Member of the Change Management Peer Network of the UN Laboratory for Organizational Change and Knowledge. He has led strategic change initiatives for Deloitte Consulting clients and senior staff member at the IMF, UNHCR, UN Environment, and PAHO/WHO. He authored, with Genevieve and Sheila Cox, award-winning The Technology Takers: Leading Change in the Digital Era (Emerald Publishing, 2019).
Genevieve M. Grabman is an attorney and expert on strategic planning, governance, and risk management. Based in Washington, DC, she has advised public, private, non-profit, and United Nations organizations and helped draft and pass organizational policies and procedures, national laws and regulations, and international treaties. Ms. Grabman holds a master's degree in health policy and management from Johns Hopkins University and earned a Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center. Ms. Grabman is passionate about using digital-era initiatives and the perspectives of human rights and diversity to achieve good governance and institutional change.
Sheila Q. Cox leads transformational change at the intersection of technology and human behavior. After graduating from Harvard, Ms. Cox became a systems engineer at IBM, designing and implementing application software. She earned an MBA at the University of Chicago and worked as a management consultant at BearingPoint. Combining hands-on experience in information systems implementation with an in-depth understanding of organizational, team, and individual behavior, Ms. Cox founded Performance Horizons, a change management firm in Charlotte, NC. For more than 30 years, Ms. Cox has helped management teams successfully adapt to rapid changes within their industry.
