Narrator: Imagine a massive copper mine, one of the largest in the world. Its leaders are facing an immense challenge: they need to increase production by 5%, the equivalent of building an entirely new processing facility, but without spending the hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to do it. It seems impossible. Yet, by leveraging artificial intelligence and completely rethinking their operations, Freeport-McMoRan unlocked that value, boosting production without laying a single new brick. This wasn't a simple software upgrade; it was a fundamental rewiring of the entire business, from the C-suite to the frontline operators.

This is the central promise and challenge explored in Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI by Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Rodney Zemmel. The book argues that for most companies, digital transformation fails because it’s treated as a series of isolated tech projects. True, sustainable success comes only when leaders orchestrate a holistic transformation across six critical dimensions: roadmap, talent, operating model, technology, data, and adoption.

Narrator: The book asserts that the most common point of failure in any transformation is a flawed beginning. When digital initiatives are delegated to the IT department or pursued as a fragmented collection of "pet projects," they are doomed. A successful transformation begins with a business-led roadmap that functions as a binding contract for the entire C-suite. This requires a shared vision, deep alignment on priorities, and an unwavering commitment to funding and execution.

The authors identify several "serious sins" that derail these efforts, including a lack of a common language around digital, an over-scoped ambition that tries to boil the ocean, and a failure to address the people and capability needs from day one. The key is to "pick battles big enough to matter and small enough to win."

A compelling example comes from the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. The company found its digital efforts were fragmented, with too many competing priorities diluting their impact. To fix this, the leadership team ruthlessly prioritized its projects, investing more resources in a smaller number of high-value initiatives. They used agile methods, involved users directly in the development process, and focused on building a critical mass of digitally savvy talent. The result was faster build cycles, more impactful solutions, and a more collaborative leadership team that understood its role was not just to approve projects, but to own the transformation's outcome.

Narrator: While consultants can provide a temporary boost, Rewired argues that long-term competitive advantage in the digital age is impossible without a strong bench of in-house talent. Companies must move away from outsourcing critical digital functions and instead focus on building their own capabilities. The authors recommend a strategic goal of having 70 to 80 percent of digital talent be full-time employees who understand the business context and are invested in its success.

This requires a talent roadmap as detailed and strategic as the technology roadmap. It’s not enough to have a digital team; that team must have the right skills. A financial services company learned this the hard way when a new sales support tool failed to scale. An assessment revealed that only 20% of its 100-person digital team had passing coding skills.

To avoid this, companies must get serious about talent acquisition. A large agricultural business provides a powerful case study. Needing to quickly build its digital capabilities, the company established a "Talent Win Room" (TWR)—a specialized, agile team dedicated to recruiting digital talent. The TWR modernized the entire process, from sourcing candidates to elevating the interview experience with coding exercises. In just six months, they successfully built an 80-person digital bench, proving that even a traditional company can attract and retain top tech talent if it creates an environment where they are taken seriously.

Narrator: Many organizations adopt the ceremonies of agile—like daily stand-ups and sprints—without changing the underlying command-and-control structure. This is merely "doing agile." To truly benefit, companies must transition to "being agile" by adopting a new operating model. This model is built around small, cross-functional, and empowered teams, often called "pods" or "squads," that own a product or service from end to end.

This requires a fundamental shift in how work is organized and how leaders lead. Instead of managing tasks, leaders must create the space for their teams to innovate. The book highlights the journey of Johnson & Johnson's corporate technology division. CIO Tom Weck moved the organization from a project-oriented model, where team members were partially allocated to many different tasks, to a squad-based model. Each squad was given the autonomy and resources to manage its own product. The focus shifted from simply delivering projects on time to improving the employee experience. This empowerment not only led to more innovative solutions but also freed up managers from being a bottleneck for every decision.

Narrator: Legacy technology and siloed data are the boat anchors of digital transformation. To enable speed and distributed innovation, companies must build a modern, decoupled architecture. This means moving away from monolithic systems and toward a structure of modular, reusable components connected by APIs. This allows hundreds of teams to work independently and in parallel without breaking the entire system.

The same principle applies to data. The authors state that in many companies, up to 70% of the effort in an AI project is spent just wrangling and cleaning data. The solution is to treat data as a product. This means creating curated, high-quality, and easily accessible data sets that teams across the organization can consume.

Emirates NBD, a bank in Dubai, provides a powerful example. Hindered by its legacy IT systems, the bank embarked on an 18-month journey to build an API-first architecture. They created roughly 800 reusable microservices, which fundamentally changed their innovation speed. This new architecture enabled them to rapidly develop and deploy analytics and AI-based solutions, moving from a laggard to a leader in digital banking.

Narrator: Developing a brilliant digital solution is only half the battle; the other, often harder, half is getting people to use it and scaling it across the enterprise. Rewired offers a critical rule of thumb: for every dollar spent on development, a company should plan to spend at least another dollar on adoption and scaling.

This requires a dedicated focus on change management. The energy company Vistra illustrates this well. When scaling an AI model to optimize its power plant fleet, it didn't just hand over the software. It embedded designers with plant operators to ensure the tool was intuitive and integrated into their existing workflows. It modularized the code so it could be easily customized for each plant's unique conditions. And it built a robust MLOps infrastructure to bring live data from every power unit into a single database for continuous monitoring and improvement. This holistic approach, which combined technology with a deep focus on the human element, ensured the solution was not only deployed but fully adopted, delivering significant operational value across the entire fleet.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Rewired is that digital and AI transformation is not a menu of options from which a company can pick and choose. It is a single, integrated journey. A world-class talent strategy is useless without an operating model that empowers those people. A cutting-edge technology stack will fail without clean, accessible data. And a brilliant solution will deliver zero value if it is not adopted and scaled. Success depends on advancing capabilities across all six dimensions in a coordinated, holistic way, because the system is only as strong as its weakest link.

The book's most challenging idea is its assertion that this process never ends. The authors state, "Business leaders will be digitally transforming their companies for the rest of their careers." This isn't a project with a finish line; it is the new, permanent state of how modern businesses must operate to survive and compete. The ultimate question Rewired poses is not whether to begin this journey, but whether an organization has the discipline and fortitude to embrace it as a constant, unending evolution.