Great culture and an engaged Human Resources team are the critical ingredients I see missing in many digital transformations.

It's really ironic - I grew up in technology. When most people come to me, they are looking for a "tech-forward" point of view. Then they are absolutely surprised when I collaborate with people who understand the basics.

- Merchandising, merchandising, merchandising. I find many B2B organisations don't have a merchandising group - that's what the sales team is for.

- HR. The absolute first thing I look for in any company looking to transform is high retention rates. Where companies have low retention rates, they keep hiring outside consultants over and over, because there is not enough institutional knowledge to drive change.

You can't fill a leaky bucket.

- Second point related to HR is organizational structure. Often I find the problem here is the CEO trying to shoehorn innovation into an old-school organization. That is a clear way to kill any innovation.

What do you think a KPI-driven leader will do if 99.9% of their bonus is tied to the existing (EBIT-focused) business and 0.01% of the revenue is coming from the new business. You only get one guess

- and of course, a solid analytics program. Can't drive innovation without data.