BLOCKCHAIN and the CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER How Distributed Ledger Technology Will Change Strategy Design and Delivery
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BROUGHT TO YOU BY BLOCKCHAIN AND THE CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER How Distributed Ledger Technology Will Change Strategy Design and Delivery Kirsten D. Sandberg, Ricardo Viana Vargas, Edivandro Carlos Conforto, and Tahirou Assane Oumarou Blockchain Research Institute and Brightline Initiative July 2019 A BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE BIG IDEA WHITEPAPER Realizing the new promise of the digital economy In 1994, Don Tapscott coined the phrase, “the digital economy,” with his book of that title. It discussed how the Web and the Internet of information would bring important changes in business and society. Today the Internet of value creates profound new possibilities. In 2017, Don and Alex Tapscott launched the Blockchain Research Institute to help realize the new promise of the digital economy. We research the strategic implications of blockchain technology and produce practical insights to contribute global blockchain knowledge and help our members navigate this revolution. Our findings, conclusions, and recommendations are initially proprietary to our members and ultimately released to the public in support of our mission. To find out more, please visitwww.blockchainresearchinstitute.org . Blockchain Research Institute, 2019 Except where otherwise noted, this work is copyrighted 2019 by the Blockchain Research Institute and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. To view a copy of this license, send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA, or visit creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode. This document represents the views of its author(s), not necessarily those of Blockchain Research Institute or the Tapscott Group. This material is for informational purposes only; it is neither investment advice nor managerial consulting. Use of this material does not create or constitute any kind of business relationship with the Blockchain Research Institute or the Tapscott Group, and neither the Blockchain Research Institute nor the Tapscott Group is liable for the actions of persons or organizations relying on this material. Users of this material may copy and distribute it as is under the terms of this Creative Commons license and cite it in their work. This document may contain material (photographs, figures, and tables) used with a third party’s permission or under a different Creative Commons license; and users should cite those elements separately. Otherwise, we suggest the following citation: Kirsten D. Sandberg, Ricardo Viana Vargas, Edivandro Carlos Conforto, and Tahirou Assane Oumarou, "Blockchain and the Chief Strategy Officer: How Distributed Ledger Technology Will Change Strategy Design and Delivery," foreword by Don Tapscott, Blockchain Research Institute, 17 July 2019. To request permission for remixing, transforming, building upon the material, or distributing any derivative of this material for any purpose, please contact the Blockchain Research Institute, www.blockchainresearchinstitute.org/contact-us, and put “Permission request” in subject line. Thank you for your interest! Contents Foreword 4 Idea in brief 5 Overview: Solving for trust 6 The impact of trust on strategy 6 Why the chief strategy officer and why now? 9 How the Bitcoin blockchain solves for trust 10 Do these parties own what they claim to own? 10 Will these parties hold up their end of the bargain? 11 Distributed building blocks of strategic liquidity 13 Shared ledger 15 Smart contracts 17 Smart assets 19 Strategic liquidity 22 Chained Finance 23 Sweetbridge 24 CSO responsibilities 27 Strategy design 28 Collaborating on governance 28 Identifying growth opportunities 32 Monitoring long-term trends 33 Managing the strategic planning process 37 Strategy delivery 38 Cost improvements 40 Business model innovation 41 New business incubation 44 Dynamic deployment of resources and project portfolios 47 Conclusion and challenges 48 The need for more basic and applied research 51 Governance 54 Integration, interoperability, and scale 56 Research across industries 57 The need for foundational education at all levels 58 The need for policy development and regulatory clarity 58 Recommendations 59 Take a hard look at enterprise data governance 60 Share what the enterprise already knows 61 Develop enterprise blockchain fluency now 61 Kick the tires with customers 62 Try design sprints and dogfood 63 Think outside the blockchain 63 Be open to other solutions 64 About the authors 65 About the Blockchain Research Institute 67 About the Brightline Initiative 68 Notes 68 BLOCKCHAIN AND THE CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER Foreword Rarely does the word, trust, surface in conversations about strategy. Executives more often talk about implementation risks, information asymmetries, and moral hazard, and they use scenario planning to imagine multiple futures. Yet, if we learned only one thing from the last economic downturn, it was that multiple parties could fail to act with integrity or otherwise perform their fiduciary duties, so that even the best-laid plans were doomed to go awry and without recourse. Blockchain reduces the need to trust other parties in the development and implementation of strategy. It helps to create and align incentives for performance. We see it as an important new platform for the chief strategy officer (CSO) in the design and delivery of strategy. This research takes on the challenge of describing how blockchain technology supports the CSO in innovative enterprises. It lays out the key challenges facing corporations especially around the areas of trust, describing how blockchain proves to be a useful tool to address deficiencies. It illuminates key concepts such as the shared ledger, This research details how smart assets, and smart contracts. It describes how blockchain supports CSO responsibilities such as maintaining collaborative blockchain technology governance, identifying growth opportunities, monitoring long-term supports strategy design trends, and managing the strategic process. It also outlines how and delivery in innovative blockchain enables important strategic delivery components including enterprises. cost improvements, business model innovation, new business incubation, and optimizing capital expenditures. Since this paper addresses a forward-thinking organization’s goals at the highest level, it is a must-read for all leaders. We recruited an impressive all-star team for this research. The lead author is Kirsten Sandberg, editor-in-chief of the Blockchain Research Institute. In this role, she deeply influences every one of our research deliverables. I’ve worked with Kirsten over the years, most recently in the research and writing of Blockchain Revolution. For more than a decade, she was an executive editor at Harvard Business School Publishing and has worked with some of the brightest minds in strategy and technology. In this project, I challenged her to move beyond the concept of strategic agility, which tends to depend on organizational culture. Building on ideas of many prescient thinkers in the space, she did the research necessary to define and demonstrate the idea of strategic liquidity, made possible by blockchain technology. Her collaborators from the Brightline Initiative are equally impressive. They provided valuable feedback throughout the development process. First is Ricardo Viana Vargas, executive director of Brightline and one of the world’s leading experts in the field of project management. He has worked as a portfolio manager, has written fifteen books, and hosts the sageFive Minutes Project Management 4 © 2019 BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE BLOCKCHAIN AND THE CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER podcast. Dr. Edivandro Carlos Conforto, head of strategy research at Brightline, and a global thought leader on organizational agility, strategy implementation, and agile transformation. Tahirou Assane Oumarou, director of operations at Brightline, was the deputy director of infrastructure and project management group in the United Nations Office for Project Services. In that role, he managed peacebuilding, humanitarian, and development projects globally. It is this diversity of experience and perspective that makes the paper all the more worth reading for members of the Blockchain Research Institute and the Brightline Initiative. DON TAPSCOTT Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Blockchain Research Institute Idea in brief » In times of technological disruption, organizations need members of the C-suite to take action in their domains, preparing their people, processes, and practices for change and then leading the transformation. The chief strategy officer has a special role in coordinating the direction of these efforts: where officers of marketing, finance, operations, and human resources are moving over the hill in front of them, the CSO is looking several hills and valleys ahead. » Blockchain technology is such a disruptive innovation, one that hinders enterprise strategies that are centrally controlled, designed, and delivered in favor of those that are coordinated with collaborators, automated wherever possible, and distributed across industries, supply chains, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. » The new distributed building blocks of strategy are shared ledgers, smart contracts, and smart assets—all software, to be coded, plugged, and played across blockchain networks. Used in combination, they instantiate the concept of The distributed building strategic liquidity, the degree to which an enterprise can exploit strategic options