The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical

The grounded, clear-sighted guide you need to blend digital and traditional business functions for long-term competitive advantage

Business leaders are continually told they need to embrace digital disruption wholeheartedly to thrive in the 21st Century. Legacy companies, we hear, are all doomed to fail unless they double down on the latest digital innovations, and disruptors are ordained to take over the world. Digital innovation is the answer to everything.

False! Nothing in life or business is ever that simple.

In The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical, venture capitalist and Stanford Business School lecturer Robert Siegel brings the digital innovation conversation back down to earth. He shows that, while important, digital is only part of the answer―and it’s never the only answer. The vast majority of successful leaders from both incumbents and disruptors focus as much on things like logistics, manufacturing, and distribution as they do on digital innovation. In fact, many established companies are successfully countering young upstarts in other creative ways, and many new organizations are learning from their older brethren.

Siegel shows how to create lasting profits and growth in the smartest way possible: by creating a solid partnership between digital innovation and traditional business operations—in other words, by marrying brains and brawn. He lays out the core competencies that today’s industry leaders have mastered and explains how:

• Charles Schwab uses cutting-edge analytics to better serve millions of investors without violating its original code of values.
• Align Technology transformed orthodontia by developing creative new business models along with new products.
• Kaiser Permanente taps into the power of empathy to improve patient satisfaction while controlling costs.
• Instacart balances ownership and partnerships to balance the needs of four key constituencies.
• Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot found different ways to blend the best aspects of physical retail with innovative e-commerce.
• Desktop Metal is innovating high-volume yet affordable production methods that can revolutionize manufacturing.