Digital Leadership

Experimentation is a key capability for any business to develop and master. Learn how to leverage data to build knowledge and apply this knowledge to improve business outcomes and create strategic advantages.

This course is part of both the Digital Product Management and Digital Leadership MicroMasters programs. In it, you will learn to develop iterative business experiments using agile methods. This capability is central to digital businesses as it allows them to sustain competitive advantage through both incremental improvements as well as significant, disruptive innovations when opportunities and conditions warrant them.

This course focuses on experimentation across the three layers of a digital business:

(1) the capacity of the technical infrastructure to provide an iterative and operational process that uses experiments to gather data and develop knowledge

(2) the ability to use agile methods and manage the knowledge interfaces among experts at the organizational layer to derive insight from data to create knowledge and ultimately drive improvements in products and processes.

(3) the capability to use the technical and organizational infrastructures to drive experimentation at scale in order to deliver digital transformation.

Want to be the leader with the winning business strategy for the digital future?

Ambitious digital-driven startups are creating and cornering new markets in every sector. And yet, most legacy businesses continue to operate by old playbooks. Most are not keeping pace with the changes in their industry, let alone leading the way―what are you and your company doing?

In this course, part of the Digital Leadership MicroMasters program, you will understand the three types of players that are shaping the new business landscape; the three phases of transformation that every firm will encounter on its journey to business reinvention; and the three winning moves that will ensure your business success along the way.

With current case studies and practical experience-based advice, learn how to rethink traditional business models from the outside in, assemble the right team for the journey ahead, and make bold strategic choices along the three phases of digital transformation.

Digital Implications of COVID - we piloted “Office Hours” in our prior run for Verified Learners. This is a closely curated faculty discussion board to capture real-time, global feedback. Learners appreciated relating the course content to today’s operating challenges.

We had an interesting response to questions including:

• What are the operational and strategic implications of COVID?
• What role does digital play if any in how management responds?
• What have you learned in the process?

Look forward to engaging and learning from you as we all navigate these complex times.

Taught by a professor with expertise at the intersection of business and digital strategies, this course will equip managers to step up to play important roles during the digital transformation processes within companies. Chances are that the company where you work now is engaging in some digital transformation activities and this course will provide you with skills and perspectives to play pivotal roles and guide your company.

The Digital Age is here. It is enabling the most comprehensive transformation of our work and personal life in history. The Digital Age promises a more prosperous and fulfilling life for everyone globally. But that promise is only as good as the capability of leaders at all levels of the organization to lead their units to success in a challenging and uncertain future.

Leading in the Digital Age developsa new mindset and fiveSkill Sets needed for success in the Digital Age:

1. Leading Beyond the Edges of the leader's unit, organization, geography, and formal authority, enabled by Digital Age tools, to provide innovative solutions to customers and other stakeholders.
2. Building Deep Trust Relationships: In the Digital Age, trust replaces formal authority as the basis for leadership.
3. Forming and Leading Virtual Teams: The Digital Age relentlessly shrinks time space. Properly formed and led, virtual teams turn this challenge into an advantage over traditional teams.
4. Collaborating and Co-Creating the Future with customers and other stakeholders. Multi-organizational value networks formed from a portfolio of relationships are replacing single-company-owned, linear value chains. Leading in this new business model requires a "co-creation skill set."
5. Learning Dynamically: The only sustainable competitive advantage in the Digital Age is the capability to learn, adapt, implement, and learn as you go, faster and better than your competitors.

Leading in the Digital Age uses interactive tools to help you apply in real time what you learn from the content, other participants, and your own experience, to dynamically lead continuous innovation and change.

Virtually all managerial and leadership positions in the digital economy increasingly rely on data-driven decision making. Recent studies have shown companies who adopt "Data-Driven Decision Management" achieve significant productivity gains over other firms.

Having a solid grasp of the end-to-end process of making effective decisions with data will give you an edge, both in performing such analyses yourself, as well as in effectively managing teams of business analysts and data scientists.

In this course, part of both the Digital Leadership and Digital Product Management MicroMasters programs, you will learn the tools and techniques to become a data-driven or "evidence-based" manager.

You will learn the process of reframing a business question as a data question, reasoning about what data might be of assistance and how to obtain it, integrating and cleaning the data, performing the analysis, deriving and communicating insights from the analysis, and building the managerial culture to operate in this way and create competitive advantages from enterprise data.

This course is unique in the sense that it aims squarely at the needs of a manager in an analytically focused enterprise by providing both a hands-on introduction to the concepts, methods and processes of business analytics as well as an introduction to the use of analytics as the basis for creating a competitive advantage.

Software Requirements

Completion of this course requires the use of Microsoft Power BI Desktop. Unfortunately, there is currently no version of Power BI Desktop for macOS or Linux operating systems. We encourage learners to secure access to a Windows environment, but if that is not possible, macOS and Linux users can run Power BI Desktop in a virtual Windows environment. The course provides steps for installing such an environment.