Why do digital transformation projects keep failing? Surveys consistently show that fewer than one in five digital transformation programmes deliver sustained performance improvement. The standard explanations point to technology choices, change management failures, or insufficient investment. Mission to Transformation argues that these explanations are symptoms. The root cause is structural: organisations pursue transformation without ever anchoring it to their stated mission and vision, because the management discipline required to make that connection has never been properly taught, modelled, or demanded. Written by Rob Salter, a PhD researcher, healthcare technology executive, and digital transformation specialist with over thirty years of practitioner experience, this book constructs a rigorous, theoretically grounded framework for mission-aligned transformation. Spanning sixteen chapters and engaging the work of more than seventy scholars across management science, organisational sociology, information systems, and evaluation theory, it addresses the full anatomy of the problem: from the way organisations articulate purpose without ever acting on it, to the specific mechanisms by which technology investments become disconnected from strategic intent. What this book covers The book opens by distinguishing between digitisation, digitalisation, and genuine transformation, establishing a precise vocabulary that the field frequently conflates. It then dissects the anatomy of organisational purpose, explaining why mission statements exist on walls but rarely in practice, and what it takes to make strategy a living operational discipline rather than executive wallpaper. Subsequent chapters examine the mechanisms of misalignment in detail: the institutional pressures that produce ceremonial conformity and organised hypocrisy; the funding traps that generate goal displacement; the political dynamics behind pet projects and manufactured urgency; and the quiet distortions of capital camouflage, where operational expenditure is reframed as transformation investment. A dedicated chapter on culture examines it as the silent architect of everything that formal strategy cannot reach. The final chapters turn to practice: designing outcomes that are meaningful rather than merely measurable; building measurement systems that create accountability rather than performance theatre; governing transformation with structures that actually govern; and constructing business cases that are honest rather than merely persuasive. The book introduces an original diagnostic, the risk register test, which holds that if a problem is serious enough to justify transformation investment, it should already appear in the corporate risk register. If it does not, the urgency is manufactured after the solution was found.
