Insights
Heidrick & Struggles: Transforming Asia: The Search for Digital Leaders
Digital transformation requires the right leadership, and difficulty in finding seasoned executives with the necessary digital skills makes the task all the more complex. Asia Pacific is witnessing unprecedented rates of technological disruption, and competition for digital leaders is fierce. However, there is no unified regional market for talent, and understanding national nuance is critical if leaders are to prove effective.
Thus, finding leaders who can digitally transform a business is a particular challenge in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. To find out how APAC companies can succeed, Heidrick & Struggles surveyed 307 corporate leaders from across the region to determine how they were aligning their leadership and talent pool with digital transformation.
Definitions of digital transformation vary across organizations and industries, but our survey highlights that a big part is optimizing customer experience, which is a focus of the digital strategies of three-quarters of respondents in our survey, while almost two-thirds cite the use of data and analytics to drive business development as their focus. In terms of investment, mobile apps are the most common means to achieve digital transformation (picked by 57%), ahead of cloud computing (42%) and e-commerce (37%).
Heidrick & Struggles address the following topics in their latest white paper:
- Generational and monopoly shifts push digital change
- Shifting to a digital structure and culture
- Navigate Asia by understanding talent pockets and mobility limits
- Disrupted sectors produce insightful leaders
- The path forward for APAC digital transformation