Lamarre, Eric, Kate Smaje, and Rodney Zemmel. Rewired for Digital: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting with Technology. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2023.
Much of today’s business writing is reductionist, focused on clean cause-and-effect narratives. This isn’t a flaw; most of the time, what organisations need is tactical advice: if you have X, do Y. Rewired is a strong example of this genre, offering a practical guide to how contemporary organisations structure, run, and deliver technology.
But we’re not in a steady state. We’re at the end of an era shaped by firm-centric efficiency, and entering one defined by networked coordination, contested data, and shifting boundaries of control.1
We’re living through a transition, away from the familiar paradigms of the last 30 years, and toward something still taking shape. In that context, advice grounded in what worked before may be increasingly ill-suited to what comes next. The book excels at guiding firms through internal change, but falters when the real challenge is how firms relate to everything outside them.2 Rewired is useful for what it is. But how useful that is, right now, is an open question.
Rewired is a short book made up of 35 terse, direct chapters. It covers the full arc of contemporary “digital transformation” practice, from:
- setting a transformation roadmap (Part 1),
- building digital talent (Part 2),
- redesigning operating models (Part 3),
- scaling agile delivery (Part 4),
- driving data-centricity (Part 5),
- encouraging user adoption (Part 6), and
- stitching it all together with case studies (Part 7).
Its strength is clarity: the book distils a decade’s worth of working models into an accessible, practitioner-focused summary. But its limitation is just as clear. Rewired focuses on how technology is delivered within firms, not on the broader shifts reshaping industries and ecosystems.
Take operating model design. The book treats it largely as a shift to a Silicon Valley–style product model. But this misses what’s more fundamental: firms are transforming operationally because they are externalising more and more of what they do. Consider Australian super funds. They’re handling inflows of around $5 billion per week, yet operationally, most are lean entities, SMBs relying on ecosystems of vendors, partners, and platforms.
That may sound orthogonal to the book’s focus. But it matters. The push for “data-centricity,” for instance, assumes you can bring fragmented, outsourced activities onto a common data grid. But you can’t. Ecosystem participants have their own interests: vendors won’t tightly integrate with competitors, and partners will cap data access to protect their own business models. APIs are all you’ll get, and even those may be throttled.
We’ve moved complexity from inside the firm out into the ecosystem where it’s easier to manage. The problem for many firms won’t be to establish a single truth, but to manage conflicting truths from its ecosystems of suppliers and partners. Seen this way, Rewired becomes less a map for the future and more a snapshot of a fading mode of coordination: useful, but incomplete.
The delivery and measurement assumptions baked into Rewired assume a world that we’re leaving behind. What Rewired presents as “best practice” may in fact be the codification of a waning moment: a time when firms could still treat transformation as an internal matter, rather than a renegotiation of their place in a changing system.
This growing gap between “best practice” and market reality is what’s producing today’s ambiguity. In that light, Rewired is not wrong, but it may be answering a question fewer firms are still asking.
What would a book for this emerging era look like? It would start with ecosystem design rather than operating model design. It would treat data integration as a negotiation problem, not a technical one. It would focus less on scaling agile delivery and more on managing interdependent delivery across organisational boundaries. Most fundamentally, it would recognise that transformation is no longer something firms do to themselves, but something they do with—and sometimes despite—the networks they’re embedded in.
We don’t yet have that book. Until we do, Rewired remains useful for what it is: a clear guide to optimising internal capabilities. But as the locus of competitive advantage shifts from what firms control to how they coordinate, that usefulness has an increasingly short shelf life.
3/5. A guide to yesterday’s problems, just as tomorrow’s are coming into view.
- Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “The Great Unraveling.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), March 20, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling. ↩︎
- Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “Unravel, Rebalance, or Reinvent.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), April 30, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/unravel-rebalance-or-reinvent. ↩︎