ABSTRACT
Organizational digital transformation and digital business capabilities depend on employee digital business competencies (e.g. to lead digital transformation and digital innovation efforts, to effectively leverage digital technology tools). These competencies, in turn, depend on employees’ ability to keep up with and, therefore, be able to leverage digital technology advancements. Keeping up with digital technologies is increasingly becoming a critical component of the expert leadership required for digitalizing and fully becoming a digital business. As a result, it is increasingly critical to the effectiveness of accountants’ leadership roles. In this chapter, we conceptualize keeping up with digital technologies as an accelerated learning practice. That is, accountants can keep up with digital technologies to the extent that they can accelerate or align their learning rate to the rate of change in digital technologies. Accelerated learning, or learning efficiency, has individual belief / attitude / trait levers which can be influenced, and it has learning strategy / practice / habit levers which can be adopted / learned. In this chapter, we unpack each of these lever types, and explain how they interact together to drive the accelerated learning / learning efficiency necessary to keep up with digital technology advancements.
