Hitting the ‘reset button’: The role of digital reorientation in successful turnarounds

Authors

Michael A. Abebe, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Chanchai Tangpong
Hermann Ndofor

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-2024

Abstract

Seismic shifts in industries brought about by radical technological innovations usually lead to a misalignment between the capabilities of many incumbent firms and the requisites of their new environment, and eventually, organizational decline. The current turnaround literature, while emphasizing operating and strategic responses to organizational decline that focus on efficiency and fine tuning product/market strategy respectively, ignores such organizational decline that requires fundamental reengineering of the whole firm and its value chain. This paper introduces the concept of digital reorientation as a long term turnaround strategy to respond to situations in which a firm’s environment has been fundamentally restructured. Digital reorientation is a technology-enabled, simultaneous and multilevel change that transforms the organization’s core architecture and the way it serves its customers. We develop a framework to understand this turnaround strategy relative to traditional operational and strategic options and formulate propositions on internal and external contingencies that will likely influence the effectiveness of its implementation. Finally, using the newspaper publishing industry as an example of an environment that has undergone such disruptive change driven by digital technological innovations, we examine how the use of digital reorientation could help declining firms in that industry successfully turnaround their performance.

Comments

Original published version available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2021.102102

Recommended Citation

Abebe, Michael A., Chanchai Tangpong, and Hermann Ndofor. "Hitting the ‘reset button’: The role of digital reorientation in successful turnarounds." Long Range Planning (2021): 102102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2021.102102

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Long Range Planning

DOI

10.1016/j.lrp.2021.102102