10 of Our Favorite MIT SMR Reader Comments This Year

A great part of working at MIT SMR is hearing from our readers. After all, you are the ones seeing important changes happening in business and in management and putting the lessons and research from our authors into practice. Here are 10 comments from the past year that we found especially insightful.

On what “digital transformation” really means:
“Firms need to develop a leadership capability for virtually constant business transformation — not a ‘digital’ strategy, [but] a capability with competencies in collaboration, ecosystem alignment, operational excellence, organizational change, talent development, and technology as well as leadership.”
— Bob Akerley from “Your Company Doesn’t Need a Digital Strategy”

On the future of work:
“… a proclivity to community is going to be increasingly important (to the future of work), too: Not just online community, but those person-to-person connections (in all three dimensions) are going to be increasingly key.”
— Greg Tutnjian from “Planning for the Future of Work”

On leading by example:
“It is vital for managers to model the new behaviors and values they are expecting from their staff. Too often managers merely do the telling — but their example is more powerful. As well, research reported by Gallup and in the Harvard Business Review … has shown most managers don’t have the skills for coaching their employees, so a program of coaching the coaches is needed in such change activities.”
— Kim Harrison from “Using Digital Communication to Drive Digital Change”

On strategy:
“Too often ‘strategy’ becomes hostage to the faddism and ideologies that come and go. In my time in the corporate sector, strategy has proved elusive, like finding cadence in jazz. I know it’s there; however, if rationale, diagnosis, process, and logic play their important parts — genius is the usual casualty. Great strategies seem to have a provocative discord and sense of a different tune being pushed.”
— Adrian Jobson from “What Sets Breakthrough Strategies Apart”

On the need for innovation in a digital landscape:
“In a digital world, the outcome-based approach rests on two fundamental assumptions: You can measure business outcomes, and you can manage speed of delivery. Traditional operating models are not equipped for these challenges, hence there is a tremendous need for management innovation during digital transformation.”
— Hakan Altintepe from