The epicenter of the digital world - the Bay Area.
This time I was leading the BMI senior management team through our recently crafted Blue Mission learning experience. It was definitely a memorable week for all of us enrolled in those meaningful interactions with Google, HP, IBM, Netflix, SAP, School 42 and Stanford University, as well as with keynote speakers from Facebook and Singularity University.
In fact, BMI has been researching mega trends for almost 10 years now, combining sociological, technological, economical and industrial aspects. Amazingly, over time, these multiple perspectives have converged to become our digital, competitive arena framework, which is mostly used to provide strategic consulting to Fortune500 companies. Within this context, Blue Mission has reinforced and expanded many important components of our framework.
As a matter of summarizing this key point, I have outlined below my five key takeaways:
1 Leapfrogging beyond Ethical Boundaries
Incremental innovation is always critical to any business context and definitely leads to increases in productivity, profitability and quality. Disruptive innovation, on the other hand, aims to destroy the status quo, creating a new world that turns the old into something irrelevant. Exponential innovation, beyond being a buzz term in today's news, is merely a more intense disruptive innovation process, certainly with deeper and broader consequences for any business context. So, leapfrogging is a metaphor describing this disruptive shift into the unknown, going further than linear steps would be able to predict as a normal innovation pathway. However, leapfrogs do not necessarily commit to ethical standards that are already in place and, therefore, are usually controversial for both liberals and conservatives. Leapfrogs believe that boundaries are made to be surpassed over the course of the evolution of technology and humankind. This poses huge ethical challenges for any new technology not compliant with the current establishment. Artificial intelligence and CRISPR are just new kinds of the block, both giving rise to a number of different ethical questions related to what makes us humans and to what could happen when machines become smarter than humans.
2 Smart Voxels
Atoms and Bits are converging in the most amazing way! In less than half a century, transistors became microchips and pixels became voxels. Now we are seeing how atoms can also become smarter through their merger with bits. The potential for value creation is immense. We should be aware that we are now entering the era of centaurs, in which humans and artificial intelligence will be integrated to achieve new performance standards and explore new possibilities for all humankind. Naturally, we should also acknowledge dystopian perspectives about what could happen with unintended consequences in technological improvements, working collaboratively to establish rules that should provide for the proper enforcement of technical applications.
3 Social Robots
Robots are no longer introverted code lines. They are improving their social skills, building empathy as they are learning how to understand natural language and to map non-verbal communication hints. As they become better at connecting with humans, they are also increasing the emotional bonding between people and machines. Social robots are moving further than operational robots designed solely to perform operational tasks. They have been improved to actually interact with humans in all sorts of contexts that would require much more than the simple performance of operational tasks. Of course, ideally, social robots would be altruistic, with no cognitive biases that interfere in human judgments, although real life would be more challenging for crafting perfect robots. Some social robots are already in place in mental hospitals to support elderly care, while others are being tested with children at schools or being deployed to process simple legal disputes. Last year we received information about the first social robot working as a priest in Europe. Maybe, in a short period of time, we will find social robots working at different management levels at companies, eventually taking a seat on the board of directors. Before that, to the detriment of dogs and cats, our next pet could be made of silicon, steel and plastic, connected to your thoughts and feelings based on their capability to process your information that is stored in a cloud – something which may seem awkward right now, but the human ability to attach anthropomorphic characteristics to objects and animals has already shown us that this is entirely possible.
4 Halting innovation
In this world of complexity and ambiguity, everyone is trying to discover what the next big thing could be. There is a caveat in this simplistic reasoning, according to which there is only one path to the future or there is a silver bullet in the pistol waiting to be shot. Failing fast through continuous interactive experimentation processes seems to be cleverer than the all-in approach to something specific. Increasing versatility can improve the odds of success for any venture. Once the route is clear, then the name of the game is speed, speed, speed. And to achieve such excellence in the deployment of innovation, we have to wisely choose what we should stop doing. This halt in innovation means that we should approach our resources with a growth mindset, unlearning the old stuff that is no longer useful, breaking attachments to the set ways of thinking and doing, challenging common practices and reskilling people. There are no infinite resources at any company. Focus and discipline are critical to success.
5 Elop's Rule
This is the rule about what one should never do in the corporate world. Stephen Elop was the CEO of Nokia in 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone and, just a few years later, destroyed Nokia’s leading position in mobile devices worldwide. Stephen eventually said that “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost...” It was certainly brave to publicly admit that, but it was also philosophical. Stephen simply described how boards and C-Suite executive rooms operate on a daily basis, managing the dashboard of OKRs designed to evaluate actual business perfomance but with almost no foresight about the future. I wonder how often board members, C-Suite executives and senior managers leave a meeting room feeling that they have not done anything wrong. Given quarterly dictatorship, it is not surprising that top leaders are usually focused on.
Blue Mission was an outstanding learning experience for all of us. We challenged ourselves to maintain our growth mindsets instead of fixed ones, to consider ethical issues before embracing all the tech hype, to realize that common sense is not necessarily common practice, to always consider the merger between soft and hard aspects of organizations, and to always keep unlearning. That is how BMI can continue to participate in the cutting-edge frontier of knowledge applied to organizational culture, design, and leadership.
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Daniel Augusto Motta, PhD, MSc
Founder & CEO BMI Blue Management Institute
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