George Westerman is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. His work connects executive leadership with technology strategy, examining how organisations translate technological possibilities into changes in their business and operating models.
Before earning his doctorate at Harvard Business School, Westerman spent more than a decade in product development and technology leadership roles. This experience informs a research career focused on the relationship between technical capability and the management decisions needed to use it effectively.
His book Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation, co-authored with Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee, helped frame the executive discussion of digital transformation around both digital capability and leadership capability. His earlier work, including The Real Business of IT, examines how IT can become a strategic contributor rather than being managed only as a cost or a technical service.
Westerman’s research extends into digital-ready culture, workforce transformation and the organisational challenges of AI. He is the founder of the Global Opportunity Forum, which addresses workforce learning, and co-chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Awards. His public work connects continuous innovation with the conditions that allow people and organisations to adapt, including the technical foundations and leadership support behind an AI strategy.
For executive audiences, Westerman is particularly relevant when digital investment needs to be connected with a clearer account of business change. A useful brief might concern the gap between successful pilots and an operating model, the skills required for implementation or the cultural conditions for experimentation. His perspective asks leaders to define what should become different and then align the organisation around it, rather than treating transformation as a collection of technologies that can be installed independently of the work.
