Technology leadership, rewired
We’ve brought together this special collection of insights for SAP’s Sapphire 2025. You’ll find our latest thinking and research on leading your tech agenda, yourself and your teams, and your organization. These articles are intended to help frame your personal development goals and to help achieve the next tech evolution for your team and your organization.
Leading your tech agenda
Building a robust investment case is a baseline from which you can lead positive change in your organization toward resilience, productivity, and growth. To do this, you will need strategies to successfully scale gen AI and agentic AI, moving beyond compliance to driving real impact.
We are in the midst of a rapid shift from experimentation to delivering business value that creates competitive distance. This means that chief information officers (CIOs), chief technology officers (CTOs), chief digital and information officers (CDIOs), and other tech leaders are now on speed dial to deliver this often-elusive goal against a constantly shifting macroeconomic backdrop.
The pressure is on, and the opportunities for tech leaders have never been greater. In “A new dawn for the technology officer,” we demonstrate how to assume the roles of chief orchestrator, builder, protector, and operator across the entire business. Further on in the collection, “Generative AI in finance: Finding the way to faster, deeper insights” explores how to capture the value of new technologies, based on real-world observations. From starting with high-impact internal use cases to optimizing prompts, building the right test environments, and putting effective governance systems in place, you’ll find helpful examples as you navigate other functions in the business.
Leading yourself and your teams
Leading others means first leading oneself. For many IT leaders, directing an agenda that goes beyond technology requires a focus on both personal and team growth. This means overcoming both personal and organizational challenges while building an effective development path. In your role, you must be able to answer, “How can I foster a culture of innovation and excellence and ensure that my teams are equipped to thrive?”
A constructive step towards this would be to look at The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, in which McKinsey senior partners lay out a step-by-step approach to transforming leaders both professionally and personally. It’s a book not only for CEOs. The Journey of Leadership shares how leaders hone the psychological, emotional, and ultimately, the human attributes that result in success in today’s most demanding jobs.
In the 1980s, McKinsey’s then Global Managing Partner Ron Daniel coined the term “leadership factory” to describe the process by which people become leaders. He highlighted the development of individuals who invested their time in other colleagues, provided regular feedback, and shared personal and collective insights.
These principles of leadership are still relevant today. McKinsey’s current Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels and the co-authors of “The art of 21st-century leadership: From succession planning to building a leadership factory” have updated and expanded that concept. They identify six traits that leaders need to be able to tackle in today’s uncertain environment: optimism, selfless leadership, continuous learning, resilience, levity (yes, levity!), and stewardship.
Leading your organization
The next phase of this leadership journey is to connect the tech agenda with operations. This combination propels organizations forward—making them resilient, relevant, and robust in terms of current and future operations. Productivity stagnation needs to be addressed in many economies, and the stakes could not be higher. Growing productivity is the only way to raise living standards amid aging populations, enable the energy transition, successfully reconfigure supply chains, and address inflated global balance sheets. We’ve included the report Investing in productivity growth.
Then, in “Delivering the strategy: The COO agenda,” we provide insights into the world of the COO and how they must foster relationships to deliver their agenda and drive the organization forward.
Leaders also need to work with others to make their organizations more robust and responsive amid the current uncertainty of international trade relations. With tariffs and their consequences redrawing much of the trade landscape, many organizations need to assess supply chain vulnerabilities and explore alternatives. Read more in our article “Tariffs on the move? A guide for CEOs for 2025 and beyond.”
Now is the time to lead
Organizations are in acute need of the next generation of tech-aware leaders. If you have the ambition to lead today, you must be ambidextrous in tech and transformation. You must also master the wider business agenda. Leadership relies on forging new relationships—with both your team and the wider organization. More than that, it’s about maintaining those relationships, which can sometimes be the greater ask.
With this increased complexity and scope of leadership roles, few candidates are able to tick all of the boxes all of the time. Being a true leader today means recognizing that you will need help, counsel, and guidance at varying stages on this journey.
We hope you find this collection helpful as you continue to broaden your own strategy and tech agenda. And of course, if you need any further support, please reach out. We are ready to connect and hear how we can help you realize your ambitions for what’s next.
Learn more about McKinsey at SAP Sapphire here.