Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions―but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental.
The authors draw on four years of research, conducted in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, surveying more than 16,000 people and conducting interviews with managers at such companies as Walmart, Google, and Salesforce. They introduce the concept of digital maturity―the ability to take advantage of opportunities offered by the new technology―and address the specifics of digital transformation, including cultivating a digital environment, enabling intentional collaboration, and fostering an experimental mindset. Every organization needs to understand its “digital DNA” in order to stop “doing digital” and start “being digital.”
Digital disruption won't end anytime soon; the average worker will probably experience numerous waves of disruption during the course of a career. The insights offered by The Technology Fallacy will hold true through them all.
A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review.

Organizations have long sought to improve employee performance by managing knowledge more effectively. In this paper, we test whether the adoption of digital tools for expertise search and access within an organization, often referred to as a support to an organization’s transactive memory system (TMS), improves employee performance. Using three years of data from more than 1,000 employees at a large professional services firm, we find that adopting an expertise search tool improves employee performance on financial dimensions, which results from improvements in network connections and information diversity. However, it does not affect all employees equally. We find that two types of employees appear to benefit from adoption more than others. First, traditionally information-disadvantaged employees (junior employees and women) appear to gain more from the adoption of Digital TMS tools (DTMS) because the tool overcomes the institutional barriers to resource access that these employees face in searching for knowledge. Second, employees with greater structural capital at the time of adoption also benefit more, because the tool eliminates natural networking barriers present in traditional offline interpersonal networks, allowing these employees to network more strategically. We also find that communication volume increases more for junior employees and women and increases it less for people with strong social networks, suggesting the mechanisms that benefit people with strong networks differ from those for women and junior employees, a finding consistent with our theoretical mechanisms. Taken together, an important implication of these findings is that implementing and adopting expert search tools for TMS has the potential to shift organizational sources of power and influence away from demographic-based characteristics and toward network-based ones—a characteristic we call “network-biased technical change."