Your RFP is Useless with Paul Leonardi, Duca Family Professor of Technology Management, UCSB

03/01/23 • 57 min

It’s time to launch your digital transformation – but first you’ll need new tools. Buyer, beware: Technology selection is tough because it’s impossible to predict the future. How can leaders take this journey with clarity and confidence? In this episode, Satyen interviews professor Paul Leonardi, author of The Digital Mindset, to learn the answer.

Paul is an expert in digital transformation and organizational change, Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara, author of 4 books on technological innovation, and consults major tech companies like Google and Microsoft. Satyen sits down with Paul to discuss the skills leaders need to thrive in a digital landscape, how to demonstrate ROI with data, and why beta testing new software is critical for successful tech selection.

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“Many of our organizations today are not used to thinking about data as a byproduct of actions that we take on the suite of tools that we use to do our work. And a data culture, for me, is one that recognizes that almost everything we do produces data in some way, shape, or form. And we can use those data, maybe to our advantage, but at least we can use those data to explore, ‘Can they tell us things that we might not know or otherwise have access to, if we aren't perceptive and thinking about where those data exist and how we might use them?’” – Paul Leonardi

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Time Stamps

*(01:47) How an organizational change expert views behavior and data

*(15:04) The importance of beta testing technology’s functionality

*(18:04) Skills digital leaders need to thrive in the world of digital algorithms and AI

*(22:17) Paul’s inspiration behind authoring The Digital Mindset

*(27:42) The 30% knowledge rule of surviving in a digital environment

*(38:52) Paul breaks down what a digital mindset is

*(46:11) How to successfully convince executives to invest in technology

*(54:12) Satyen’s Takeaways

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