Have you ever sat in a meeting, seminar or conference and someone in the crowd has the nerve to ask, "I don't know what that means, could you please explain it?" How refreshing and we should all emulate that because brilliant people ask questions and know enough to realize that they don't know everything. So, can everyone be honest and say they don’t know what a real Digital Strategy looks like and are afraid to ask? We know it because it's our jobs and we live and breathe Digital Strategy and Digital Transformation, but when we ask that question, most CEO’s give us a lot of stuttering and blank looks, or a scattered strategy that’s as messy as an 6 year old’s bedroom.

The problem is most CEOs don’t actually know what a Digital Strategy is but they think they do. According to Forresters 2014 State of Digital Report, 74% of CEO’s polled say they have a digital strategy. However, just because you know someone’s name doesn’t mean you actually know them — Digital Strategy is a virtual stranger to most CEOs. Drill down further into the numbers and only 21% of CEO’s of firms with more than 250 employees set a clear vision for digital. This is no surprise — the digital skill set needed to set a clear vision just isn’t there.

Forrester also reports that in all but the biggest firms, CEO’s are most likely to lay out the overall digital strategy for the business but as the company size increases the CMO plays a significant role. HERE IS THE PROBLEM. Digital Strategy is not a CEO effort, an IT effort, or a marketing effort. It is a company effort and it is every executive’s, and employee’s, future reason for being. Or, at the very least, their job security. Of course things like marketing are a component of a Digital Strategy or a Digital Transformation, but it is not the whole strategy, a complete strategy or even the pinnacle. It is only one component.

To take this further and start looking at your company's digital transformation as a culture. In fact, a culture that constantly searches for the next step in your digital evolution and subsequently, your business model. If you do this, you will find that you gain an awful lot of horsepower from the culture and the ideas and energy within your business will be percolating.

OK, here is the last shocker and brace yourself for this one— only 15% of CEO’s believe their company has the capabilities to execute a Digital Strategy. This is a serious lack of digital expertise and is starting to look like DEFCON 2, or 3 at the very least. Let’s challenge all our fellow CEO’s to come forward and say, “We don’t have a Digital Strategy, and we don’t even know where to start.” This sets a clean slate to work from and one that will set you on the road to developing not only a real Digital Strategy, but one that creates real results and results are the reason for doing all of this in the first place?

Digital Transformation and creating a comprehensive Digital Strategy isn’t just a priority — to be blunt, it’s a full scale emergency. Let’s stop avoiding the question and wake up from the nightmare so we can evolve, grow, and profit.

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