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The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental challenge for organisational leaders attempting to navigate digital transformation successfully. Despite widespread technological advancement, many organisations struggle to convert their digital investments into meaningful business results global failure rates hover between 70-80%. This research explores the leadership approaches that drive successful Industry 4.0 adoption across various sectors and geographies, closing the gap between what organisations can do technologically and what they're actually ready to accomplish. We employed a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative analysis of secondary data from 847organisations across 15 countries with qualitative document analysis of 85 corporate reports and industry publications. Our findings reveal that transformational leadership particularly when leaders articulate clear digital visions and empower their employees correlates strongly with successful adoption (r=0.74, ρ <0.01).Organisations that invest in comprehensive leadership development see 43% higher digital transformation success rates. Three leadership dimensions stand out: digital literacy paired with strategic vision, hands-on change management capability, and the ability to build collaborative cultures. Perhaps most importantly, we discovered that the most successful leaders reverse conventional thinking they devote 70% of transformation resources to developing people and organisational culture, 20% to processes and systems, and only 10% to pure technology.