Abbie’s Blog.

I'm thrilled to be joining MIT Sloan Management Review as its next editor in chief. It's one of a very few media brands offering world-class research and insight into how digitization is transforming our world while also providing leaders with practical guidance to put these powerful new ideas to work. If you’re not already familiar with MIT SMR or if it’s been a while, please do check us out and follow us on LinkedIn - we'd love to include you in our community.

I'll be shutting down Lundberg Media. Over the past 12 years, I've worked on so many great projects with such smart and interesting people. I've had an amazing career so far, and I'm incredibly excited for what comes next and to be an editor again.

I'll leave this site up for a while because it has links to some really great content. But from here out, Lundberg Media is closed for business. 

Warm regards, Abbie

The landscape for performance management is changing dramatically. Business leaders know they can get more value using performance management as a tool to engage and develop people rather than to just assess them. However, while they recognize the link between employees’ level of engagement and their performance, most organizations still operate performance management and employee engagement on separate tracks, according to this recent research report I wrote for Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.

Digital leaders share three common attributes.

1. Leadership: In addition to having a formal digital strategy, digital leaders are much more likely to have the CEO leading their digital transformation. But CEOs don’t work in a vacuum; two-thirds of respondents view their CIO as critical to the success of their digital transformation as well.
2. Data & analytics: Digital leaders use data and analytics to a much greater degree – both to understand what customers want and to improve operations and forecasting.
3. Open to taking risk: Innovation, invention and change all involve risk, and digital leaders are significantly more open to taking risks in pursuit of new digital business opportunities than are hybrids and non-digitals. And they build this into their culture.

New research reveals an alarming reality. Digital disruption is upon us, yet a significant percentage of organizations are doing nothing to increase their digital abilities.

Eighty percent of nearly 800 business leaders surveyed by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services say their industry will be disrupted by digital trends, and most of those said their industry has either passed the tipping point of disruption (28%) or will by 2020 (56%). However, nearly a quarter of respondents to the Microsoft-sponsored research have done little or nothing to become more digital.

It is becoming increasingly common to hear CIOs say that any new applications their enterprises adopt should be cloud-based, with SaaS as the first option (will an existing service fill your needs?), and with custom-developed applications written to be cloud native. But what about the many legacy systems already running in your organization? After you've done an initial triage (see my previous post), large enterprises are left with significant portfolios of important and value-adding systems. According to a Computerworld interview with Stephen Orban, head of enterprise strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), "now that major enterprises have gotten their feet wet with smaller cloud projects, they're beginning to focus on migrating large, critical legacy workloads."

So here's my take on how to approach this.