1. Continuous Business Transformation: What Is It All About?

Business transformation is a long and complex process. It is an attempt to answer the greatest challenge that any business leader faces today: How to stay competitive amid a wide variety of internal and external triggers? And while the term is frequently used by management consultants and strategy writers, there is considerable confusion on what business transformation is all about. This chapter sorts through the chaos of opinion and hype; it examines the myriad usage of the term in practitioner and academic writings. In order to allow for a meaningful discussion toward the common goal of making organizations more competitive in the current dynamic marketspace, the various types of business transformation approaches are defined in a two-dimensional framework, which evolves around the key issues of the nature and scope of strategic change. Within this framework, continuous business transformation is understood as an approach to reach a new state through incremental steps in an evolutionary way rather than through a revolution. It occurs within the organization’s existing paradigm, and because it never stops, it helps the organization to accelerate, build momentum, and deliver impact. However, for a successful execution, it has to be underpinned by a winning strategy and an organizational structure. The employees go through a trajectory of their own; the Four Rooms of Change model is used to help provide existential insights into what is happening in an organization as it experiences strategic change.