About the Author

For over three decades, Tony Saldanha has been a globally recognized business and technology leader on the forefront of the global business services and information technology industry. This book is the culmination of personal experiences in hands-on operation, disruptive innovation, and strategy over this time.

Tony’s experience in digital transformation runs deep. During a twenty-seven-year career at Procter & Gamble, he ran both operations and digital transformation for P&G’s famed GBS and IT organization in every region of the world, ending up as Global Shared Services and Information Technology Vice President. As a well-known industry thought leader, he has led GBS design and operations, held CIO positions, managed acquisitions and divestitures, ran large-scale outsourcing, created industry-wide disruptive innovation structures, and designed new business models. He was named on Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Professionals list in 2013.

Tony has had a ringside view of the transformative power of digital technology all his life. Growing up in India in the ’70s and ’80s, he personally experienced the dramatic change that software technology brought to individuals, organizations, and societies. That firsthand experience of the digital revolution continued through his work in sixty-plus countries and by having lived in six countries. Tony created business efficiency via standardization in the 1990s when he gave out PCs with free order-processing software to all P&G distributors in Asia. PCs were not cheap then, but the standardization that P&G got in return was worth much more in operational efficiencies. He helped the development of the outsourcing industry when he program-managed the biggest global IT outsourcing deal in the world, worth $8 billion in 2003 for P&G. Tony led the absorption of the $10 billion Gillette company’s operations into P&G systems as Gillette CIO in 2005. In 2009, he moved on to creating new digital business models while leading P&G IT and shared services for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The new technology-enabled capabilities for selling and distribution ended up providing better performance in places such as Nigeria than in the entire developed world.

The recent opportunity to redo digital capabilities for Global Business Services at P&G, by using exponential digital capabilities from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, has brought together all of Tony’s digital transformation experiences against the big challenge of industry-level disruption. In tackling this monstrous challenge, it became apparent that this transformation would be successful only if he could beat the 70 percent failure odds of digital transformation projects. Driven by this insight, Tony’s focus over the recent years has not been on technology but on the anthropological and engineering rigor that is necessary to deliver successful digital transformations.

Tony is currently an advisor to boards and C-suite executives on digital transformation. He continues to be a sought-after speaker in his spare time. Tony also advises several start-ups and venture capitalists. He has founded a blockchain-based company to help the IT industry commercialize disruptive software. Tony’s prior board experience includes IT advisory board memberships at the University of Cincinnati, the Indiana University business intelligence program, and the University of Texas. He has been on the customer advisory boards of Cloudera, Box, and High Radius. Among nonprofits, Tony was the founding member and chairman of the board for the INTERalliance of Greater Cincinnati and is currently on the boards of Community Shares of Greater Cincinnati and Remineralize the Earth.

Tony and his wife, Julia, have two daughters. They reside in Cincinnati, Ohio.