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By 2025, Malaysia expects the digital economy to contribute 22.6% to its GDP by creating 500,000 new jobs while expecting 100% of households to enjoy Internet access which in turn will enable all youth to have complete access to an online learning environment.

Malaysia is also keen to attract the business sector to invest RM70 billion into its national digitalization agenda, which is expected to foster e-Commerce adoption by an expected 875,000 micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.

Through research, we conducted across 645 Malaysian corporations, with 314 private limited and 331 beings of the micro (21%), small (30%), medium (24%), and large-sized corporations (25%), we have uncovered the significance of specific leadership capabilities across four digital transformation phases.

The 4th phase, Mature involves the migration of business processes comprehensively to a digital platform across functionalities.

Three specific leadership capabilities are required at the Start phase of a digital transformation journey: For example, a business leader with curiosity to learn and enhance their skills should not have trouble reaching higher digital maturity and developing evolving skills needed as the transformation happens.

In the Seek phase, two leadership capabilities are pivotal: having an architectural view of digital threats, opportunities, and digital entrepreneurship traits that empower others.

Digital leadership capabilities at this phase are about having a digital-savvy business nuance, hybrid people-centric skills, and having an architectural view of talents (which is about having a holistic understanding of the evolving nature of the skills required to sustain the transformation journey).

As the organization is maturing in its digital transformation and outputs are experienced, leadership needs to be aligned toward data-driven decisions, thus creating an efficient funnel to protect business value.

Leadership key to the digital transformation journey While digital transformation is a buzzword today, our research clearly shows that leaders must acknowledge and practice unique and dynamic leadership.

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