What It Takes to Lead Through Digital Disruption.

The article focuses on leadership strategies necessary to navigate digital disruption effectively, based on multi-year research involving nearly 300 leaders across various industries and geographies. It identifies seven key tensions between traditional and emerging leadership behaviors, emphasizing that the most critical is the balance between "prospector" behaviors—broad curiosity about internal and external opportunities—and "miner" behaviors—the focused discipline to deeply develop selected ideas. Successful leaders cycle between exploring widely for new trends and committing to in-depth execution, a duality especially vital in rapidly evolving contexts like generative AI. Organizations can foster this balance by training leaders to develop both skill sets or by assembling teams that combine prospectors and miners. The study illustrates how this approach enabled a pharmaceutical executive to transform rigid processes into adaptive systems that capitalize on digital opportunities.