The uncomfortable truth is about nine out of ten digital transformation initiatives fail. Executives who chased the latest technology ended up wasting capital, time, and credibility. Why? Because they fell into the same anti-patterns: spray-and-pray, boiling-the-ocean, and groupthink packaged as “best practices.”
Three Anti-Patterns Every CEO Must Avoid
Spray and Pray
Executives often crowdsource use cases, rank them by committee, and spread bets across many small projects. It feels safe, but it guarantees mediocrity. Narrow disconnected initiatives never compound value, and committees tend to default to politically safe choices that kill bold outcomes. True growth doesn’t come from dozens of small, uninspired projects but from executing on leveraged asymmetric bets. In the Gulf, the trajectory of Careem makes the point clear. In its early days, Careem experimented with multiple scattered services, but the company gained real traction when it concentrated resources on ride-hailing and later food delivery. That focused leverage created a compounding flywheel that allowed Careem to dominate the regional market before being acquired by Uber.
Boiling the Ocean
Chasing every shiny tech tool or trend is expensive, short-lived, and mostly wasteful. Many companies spend heavily on upgrading all their off-the-shelf technology, yet this approach is capital intensive and yields a low return on investment. Rapid adoption of AI, cloud, or new platforms without a clear strategic lever is not transformation, it’s tech consumerism. As Charlie Munger warned decades ago, any potential productivity gains flow first to the vendor and eventually to the consumer, leaving little for the business itself. Companies that fall into this trap become mere buyers in an increasingly commoditized market. Contrast this with Qatar’s Hamad International Airport, which avoided boiling the ocean. Rather than blanket adoption of every new digital trend, it selectively implemented AI-driven baggage handling and predictive analytics to manage passenger flows. By applying technology as leverage instead of consumption, the airport improved efficiency and passenger experience while maintaining cost discipline.
Groupthink Packaged as “Best Practices”
Fear and novelty are the fuel for herd behavior, with vendors and consultants profiting from disguising groupthink as best practices. There are two thinking traps here. Some executives respond with reptilian thinking, freezing inside multi-year transformations to avoid accountability. Others use monkey thinking, craving excitement and social validation by chasing fashionable AI use cases. Together, these instincts drive executives to chase the same tech dreams as everyone else. Yet in a competitive market, doing what everyone else does will never lead to outperformance. Saudi Arabia’s STC provides a counterexample. Instead of following herd adoption of generic digital platforms, it invested in proprietary customer engagement tools and digital infrastructure tailored for its core markets. That move gave STC an edge in data-driven insights and customer stickiness, strengthening its moat in a crowded telecom sector.
From Consumer to Producer: Not Adoption but Leverage
Technology should never be the strategy. It should serve as leverage for a strategy rooted in your unique unfair advantages. These are assets, customer demand, non-digital strengths, and feedback loops that competitors cannot copy. Before spending, leaders must ask four ruthless questions. Is this leverage or average? Does it amplify something proprietary, or merely replicate what rivals can also buy? Is it creating a moat or accelerating erosion? Does it fuel growth or wastage? Is it counter-positioned or easily copied?
Only when the answer is leverage, moat, growth, and counter-positioning does an investment stand a real chance of paying off, compounding, and creating long-term advantage. The Gulf is uniquely positioned with state-backed visions like Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, Dubai’s Smart City agenda, and Qatar’s digital transformation programs. These provide capital abundance and ambition. But without discipline, they can easily slide into herd adoption. The winners will be those who use these state-backed visions as leverage for unique advantages rather than treating them as shopping sprees.
The Takeaway
Stop chasing the same tech dreams as everyone else. The first step is not adoption but restraint: save money by avoiding the anti-patterns. Spray-and-pray portfolios, ocean-boiling transformations, and vendor-driven groupthink don’t just fail. They actively erode your moat. Reallocate that saved capital into proprietary leverage in loyalty ecosystems, data engines, and closed-loop customer systems. Build moats that compound. In the end, customers don’t care what technology you buy. They care about how you delight them. A decade from now, the companies remembered in the Gulf and beyond will not be the ones that bought the same tools as everyone else. They will be the ones that bent technology to their unique strengths and built what nobody
