Orion: Rose, what on earth could a 19th-century president teach a 21st-century product manager about digital transformation?

Rose: Orion, when you put it like that, it sounds like the start of a very strange joke. But honestly, I'm intrigued. My interest in Lincoln has always been about his leadership during a time of absolute, soul-crushing crisis. It's about mindset. And in the business world today, it feels like we're in a constant state of low-grade crisis, doesn't it?

Orion: That is the perfect way to frame it. Because the book we're diving into today, "Leading Digital" by Westerman, Bonnet, and McAfee, argues that we're living through a 'second machine age.' A period of change so profound, it's redrawing the map of entire industries. And just like in Lincoln's time, it requires a completely new kind of leadership.

Rose: A new mindset. I'm with you.

Orion: Exactly. And the stakes are incredibly high. The authors did a massive study of over 400 firms and found that the companies who get this right—the ones they call 'Digital Masters'—are not just a little better. They are 26% more profitable than their average industry competitors.

Rose: Twenty-six percent. Wow. Okay, that's not a small number. As a product manager, a 2.6% advantage is a win. 26% is a different universe. So, what's the secret?

Orion: Well, that's what we're going to unpack. Today, we'll dive deep into this from two perspectives. First, we'll explore the DNA of a 'Digital Master,' breaking down why simply buying the latest tech—a trap many marketing teams fall into—isn't enough. Then, we'll focus on what we could call the 'Lincoln Mindset'—the single most important leadership skill for driving real, lasting change.

Orion: So, to your question, Rose: what is the secret? The authors say the biggest mistake companies make is thinking digital transformation is about, well, digital. They argue that true mastery is built on two distinct, but equally important, pillars. 1. This is the 'what.' It’s about using technology to transform your customer experience, your operations, and even your business model. 2. This is the 'how.' It’s about crafting a vision and having the leadership to actually execute it, to drive the change through the entire organization.

Rose: That makes immediate sense. The 'what' without the 'how' is just a bunch of expensive software licenses gathering dust.

Orion: Precisely. And the authors created this brilliant 2x2 matrix to show what happens. In the bottom left, you have 'Beginners'—low on tech, low on leadership. They're falling behind. In the top right, you have the 'Digital Masters'—high on both. They're the ones reaping that 26% profit advantage. But the other two boxes are where it gets really interesting for someone in your field.

Rose: I'm listening.

Orion: In the bottom right, you have 'Conservatives.' They have strong leadership and vision, but they're too cautious with technology. They're disciplined, but they're missing opportunities. But my favorite, and the one I think you'll recognize, is in the top left: the 'Fashionistas.'

Rose: Oh, I think I know these people.

Orion: You definitely do. Fashionistas are high on Digital Capability—they buy everything! Every new digital bauble, every trendy app, every new analytics platform. They look great on the surface. But they are low on Leadership Capability. There's no central vision, no governance.

Rose: It's chaos.

Orion: It's digital chaos! The book gives this perfect, painful example. In one company, different business units all decided they needed employee collaboration platforms. Great idea, right? But with no central leadership, each unit went out and built its own. They all chose different, incompatible technologies. So the marketing team could only collaborate with other marketers. The engineers could only talk to other engineers. They spent a fortune to build digital walls inside their own company.

Rose: Orion, that is so painfully familiar it hurts. In the product and marketing world, we call that 'shiny object syndrome.' A new social media listening tool comes out, and one team buys it. A new customer journey mapping software is released, another team gets that. Everyone is busy, everyone is 'doing digital,' but none of the data connects. You can't get a single view of the customer. You're just creating these expensive, disconnected digital islands.

Orion: Digital islands! That's the perfect term for it. And the authors' data shows that Fashionistas are actually profitable than the do-nothing Beginners. All that spending, all that activity, and it actually makes the company perform worse.

Rose: Because it creates complexity and friction without creating value. It's activity without progress. It proves the point, doesn't it? The technology itself is not the answer. It's the leadership that wields it.

Orion: Exactly! And that failure of vision, that lack of leadership, is the perfect bridge to our second topic. It's not enough to have the tools; you need the leadership. And the book is clear that the absolute starting point for that leadership is crafting a transformative vision. Not an incremental one. A transformative one.

Rose: So we're not talking about 'let's improve our website's click-through rate by 5%.' We're talking about something much bigger.

Orion: Much, much bigger. And the story they use to illustrate this is just incredible. It's about a company called Pages Jaunes, the French equivalent of the Yellow Pages.

Rose: Oh wow. Talk about an industry on a burning platform.

Orion: You couldn't find a more flammable platform. This was around 2009. Their print revenues were declining by over 10% a year. Google, Yelp, and others were eating their lunch. The company was a hundred-year-old institution, and the employees were deeply skeptical. They'd seen tech fads come and go. They thought this was just another one, or maybe just bad management.

Rose: So, total denial. A classic organizational response to disruptive change.

Orion: Total denial. Then, a new CEO comes in, a man named Jean-Pierre Remy. And he doesn't come in and say, 'We need to make our books better' or 'We need to sell more ads.' He stands in front of his entire company and completely redefines their reality. He delivers a new vision. He says, and this is the key, "We are not in the business of producing heavy yellow books. We are in the business of 'connecting small businesses to local customers.'"

Rose: Chills. That one sentence changes everything. It's a complete mindset shift. He's not trying to save the old product; he's defining a new purpose that technology can actually serve better.

Orion: Exactly. He then sets this audacious goal: shift from less than 30% digital revenue to over 75% in five years. He freezes investment in the print business. He retrains the entire sales force to sell digital services. It was brutal. There was resistance. The recession hit, making things even worse. But he held that vision.

Rose: You know, hearing that story, I can't help but think of the custom theme we discussed—Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, his vision wasn't just to win battles. It was to. He was holding onto a vision of a unified future, a re-imagined America, even as the country was literally tearing itself apart. This CEO, Jean-Pierre Remy, he was doing the same thing for his company. He was holding a vision for the future while the present was falling apart around him.

Orion: That's a brilliant connection, Rose. It's leadership as an act of preservation and transformation at the same time. Remy was preserving the core purpose—connecting businesses and customers—while transforming the vehicle from paper to digital. Just as Lincoln was preserving the nation's founding ideals while transforming it into a country without slavery. The vision has to be that powerful.

Rose: And as a product manager, that resonates so deeply. My job is to create a vision for a product. But this is a vision for the entire company's reason for being. It's about answering the question, 'What business are we in?' And in a digital age, that answer might be completely different from what it was ten years ago.

Orion: So, as we wrap up, we have these two incredibly powerful ideas from 'Leading Digital.' First, that digital mastery is a two-part challenge: you need the 'what'—the Digital Capability—but it's useless without the 'how'—the Leadership Capability. You have to move up and to the right on that matrix.

Rose: And avoid being a Fashionista at all costs!

Orion: And avoid being a Fashionista. And second, the 'how'—the leadership journey—begins with the 'why.' It starts with a transformative vision, a 'Lincoln Mindset' that redefines your entire purpose, just like Pages Jaunes did.

Rose: It all comes back to mindset. It's not a technical problem to be solved; it's a human and strategic challenge to be led.

Orion: Perfectly said. So, Rose, as a product manager speaking to your peers out there, what's the one actionable takeaway from all this?

Rose: I think for any product manager, marketer, or really any leader listening, the takeaway is a simple question you can bring to your very next meeting. The next time your team discusses a new digital tool, a new feature, or a new campaign, stop the conversation for a moment and ask: "Is this helping us print a better yellow book, or is it helping us connect with our customers in a fundamentally new way?"

Orion: That's powerful.

Rose: It changes the entire conversation. It forces you to elevate from tactics to vision. And according to this book, getting that question right is the first, most important step to becoming a Digital Master. It’s the difference between just being busy, and actually building the future.