The document discusses the evolution of leadership analyses and perspectives over time. Leadership has been studied from various angles such as considering personal characteristics of leaders, their behaviors, impacts on organizations, and more recently from the perspective of digital transformation. Effective leadership requires promoting creativity, driving organizational change, and ensuring teams achieve objectives. Leaders must develop digital competencies to lead digital transformations, including understanding technological waves, integrating long-term vision and strategy, and designing future-oriented organizations.

1. EDX Leadership in digitalera
Summary :
Leadership analyses have gone through diverse concepts and perspectives. For example, leaders
have been studied:
 Considering their personal features and characteristics. In this sense, historical leaders have been
identified by their courage and capacity to guide others to achieve a goal. The leader’s capacity
and efficiency to run an organization is the focus of the study.
 Based on their behavior and performance.
 Considering the premise of whether it is the leaders who influence the organization or the other
way around, if it is internal and external aspects that define leaders.
 From a mythological perspective. We find leaders in every tale and religious/historical document
from every culture.
 From the impact of their performance on the organization and its members.
 From an institutional perspective; that is, leaders represent the interests of someone else (i.e. a
company’s shareowners), but they are tempted to defend their own interests. For instance, the
CEO of a company who wants to acquire another one without taking into account the economic
consequences of such transaction as he/ she thinks he/ she could hold a more important position
once the deal is closed.
 From the premise that leadership is either a natural skill or a trained capacity.
 From the perspective of organizational and psychological behavior.
 From the perspective of economics, history, politics, and more recently, digital transformation.
 From the perspective of relational leadership to underline and analyze the situation between
leaders and their teams. Leaders’ capacity to set and maintain balance between team members
and the bonds they create to achieve better performance.
 From a transactional leadership point of view, which focuses on defining and measuring the
completion of team goals they are in charge of. It does not attempt to make organizational
changes.
The objective of transformational leadership, moreover, is promoting the team’s creativity and driving
all the changes necessary to make an organization successful.

2. Porter & Nohria (2010), for example, define the characteristics of a CEO with respect to the
organizational strategy and point out that a leader must:
Wakeman & Hackman (2010), on their part, establish that leaders must guarantee their teams reach
objectives. To do so, they defined three core functions:

3. Next Document:

4. There are a number of sources that will help you broaden your leadership knowledge
1. The Boston Consulting Group is constantly publishing articles about leadership
Boston Consulting Group
https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/people-strategy/leadership-development
2. EGADE Business School publishes several articles as well.
EGADE Ideas
https://egade.tec.mx/es/egade-ideas
3. This is an excellent book list published by Adam Grant on LinkedIn.
The 20 New Leadership Books for 2020
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20-new-leadership-books-2020-adam-grant/

6. In this section, we will present some digital competencies proposals that every leader in the
organization must develop in order to head a digital transformation campaign.
We are living in a time of changes and great challenges. In previous sections, we have covered
different formative concepts to develop a true understanding of the challenges that a deep and true
digital transformation implies.
We have insisted on presentations and interviews that digital transformation goes beyond a simple
technological integration. While this element will define the means, to achieve transformation, the
organization and its leaders must first fully understand the macro tendencies and identify how they
will influence the sector or industry where the organization works. Afterwards, we feature several
elements to understand the business model and the organizational strategy, emphasizing that the
digital transformation strategy is part of a larger strategy involving the reconversion and
transformation of the business model. Finally, we will talk about the concept of leadership and its
evolution through time. Leadership has different perspectives.
In this section, we will feature a number of concepts that will complement the concepts from the
previous section. Initially, we will present some of the elements that a leader must develop to identify
as a prime digital leader.
However, what do we mean by digital competencies? A skill refers to the necessary knowledge,
abilities and attitudes that any leader must develop. In this case, by digital competencies we refer to
the ones that allow us to head a digital transformation inside the organization.
A digital transformation encompasses the integration of three large areas of the organization –
Human Capital-Processes-Technology. In this context, the leader of the digital transformation, while
not necessarily an expert in technology, must develop a clear understanding of how to unite these
three elements in a concerted and integral way.
Among other things, our recommendations are:
1. Have a clear vision of technological waves. While we are already part of a digital
age, the future will feature additional waves in which the digital and physical worlds
will interact more intensely.
2. The leader must develop the ability to integrate the operation in the short term, but
with a long-term business vision.
3. It will be essential to distinguish between the current processes and products, and
how to evolve them into a new era of digital economy.
4. Of course, the leader must have an ability to evaluate the transformation cost and
define how to guide the organization within the new types of markets, customers and
interactions. He must be able to identify the different sources of income and their
location inside the new business model. He must be aware of the company´s level of

7. indebtedness. The leader must know how and when the digital transformation will
become profitable for the organization.
5. As part of the digital transformation strategy, the organization and its projects must
have clear and precise measurements of the following key concepts: scale, scope,
timing and speed. These three elements will be an integral part of the strategy.
Scale refers to the relative size of the transformation, scope to define the aspects
and the way the digital transformation will take place. Timing refers to the correct
pace and moment for the transformation, while speed refers to the ability that the
leader will need to develop in order to measure internal and external forces, along
with the necessary resources to establish the rhythm and speed for the
transformation.
6. The leader must know how to present his/ her digital route and evaluate the cost
benefit of different technologies, thus distinguishing which technologies will be
adequate and relevant according to the business model and defined strategy.
7. Another important skill will be the design, integration and analysis, and strategic use
of data management, referring to business intelligence. As we know, collecting data
is worthless in a vacuum, and so the leader must be clear about how to collect,
structure, and analyze information. By doing these analyses, he can guide the
different teams to improve decision making, whether it is for productive processes,
design of new products, or the evaluation of the form and platforms to interact with
providers and customers.
8. He must prepare the Company for data integration as well as new technologies,
such as the internet of things.
9. Simultaneously, he must have the ability to design the organization of the future. For
this, he must separate the processes carried out within the Company and the ones
that can be handled by a third party.
10. In the new digital era, it will be essential to interact with intelligent societies and
cities. An important skill will be to visualize and commence an on-site-digital
interaction with society, with key impacts and indicators that provide a true benefit.
11. Finally, what we refer to as soft competencies will become even more relevant,
including self and group resiliency, the ability to cross-communicate, and negotiate
with different actors, some of which will be remote and unknown.

8. To learn more about the Digital Competencies topic, I encourage you to review the following
resources that will serve as a guide for the company to define its own model, based on the current
organizational structure.
1. Digital Competencies Mapping based on research from the European Commission.
European Digital Competencies Model
http://formacion.intef.es/pluginfile.php/43945/mod_imscp/content/2/modelo_europeo_de_compete
ncias_digitales.html
2. The Europe Commission publishes the EIDES 2020 yearly, where each country´s digitalization
advances are measured.
The European Index of Digital Entrepreneurship
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eides-2020-european-index-digital-entrepreneurship-
systems
3. This interesting video illustrates how the internet of things will become an ordinary element in our
lives.

9. How It Works: Internet of Things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSIPNhOiMoE&t=19s
Digital transformation is a process that will take place within a strategy. Companies must be precise
in defining their size, scale, scope, timing and resources.
To expedite the transformation, 4 digital enablers are established.
Lee cuidadosamente las instrucciones.
Read the instructions carefully.

11. Assignment
Title: Digital competencies
Objective: Identify the current and future state of the organization regarding digital
competencies.
Develop a step-by-step set of instructions to create the product or evidence.
1. Perform a gap analysis about the current digital competencies in your organization compared to
the digital competencies required to promote a digital transformation inside it.
2. Identify the benefits of possessing digital competencies in your company.
Include a submission format: submit as a PDF with a maximum of 2 pages.

12. 3…
Evolution of the interaction with customers
Next, we will show how relationships with customers have changed through time, revealing how
today the design centered on the user (human) is fundamental to implement any innovation and
digital transformation project.
Through time, the customer has always played a relevant role for all organizations, but the
perspective of the latter has not remained the same.
Every company emerges in order to offer something unique and differentiated in the market,
competing with many other factors, including price, quality, service, support, etc.
Nevertheless, the digital age came to break a great number of paradigms, including the relationship,
interaction and relative position between company-customer.
Historically, companies would have two great strategies to offer their products to the market.
Depending on the industry, the product or service cycles, the relative position of customer/supplier,
or even the season of the year, one could opt to “push” the products into the market, or allow the
market to “pull” the products itself. For different companies, for instance, their main objective has

13. been to offer a very good quality product, and depending on the type of market, at a perceived
adequate price.
Companies then put their products and services into consideration, and the customer decides
whether the value proposition, regarding the cost-benefit, is attractive enough, and based on that,
the amounts to be bought are determined. In general terms, this situation can be observed both in
customers of intermediate products and in final products.
This was the historical position of most companies, we cannot affirm that companies simply offer
their products or services. Even when it is clear that this added value offer included a range of
customer service provisions, trying to give the best service and to solve any operation or service
problem. Even with this, the mindset of many companies was historically based on the company
itself.
With the evolution towards a digital economy, where either gradually, or disruptively, new business
models with a digital culture or orientation have emerged, many of the paradigms of a pre-digital
economy have been questioned, and many organizations are incorporating new ways to create
value for the customer, now with a mindset centered on the latter.

14. Inside a digital strategy, which should the new paradigm of interaction with the customer be? Let us
think about the following concepts:

17. In order to learn more about the contents of the topic Evolution of the interaction with customers, we
recommend you to go through the following resources:
New schemes and models centered on the human being are constantly being developed:
We recommend the following texts to learn more about the topic:
1. The human touch at the center of customer-experience excellence.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-human-touch-at-the-
center-of-customer-experience-excellence
2. Leading and governing the customer-centric organization.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/leading-and-governing-the-
customer-centric-organization
3. Putting People at the Center of Change.
https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/change-management/putting-people-center-change
4. From 5 Star to 7 Star in Productivity: Excellence in Banking with Customer and Employee
Centricity.
https://www.bcg.com/en-mx/from-5-star-to-7-star-in-productivity-excellence-in-banking-with-
customer-and-employee-centricity