Technology the Disrupter and Enabler

The ever-increasing pace of change in technology and innovation is breathtaking. What we viewed with awe and wonder a few years ago is considered humdrum and ordinary today. Science fiction is becoming science fact every minute.

The ideas and technology that currently feel far-fetched or too expensive will become mainstream in a matter of years or even months.

You only have to recall the brick-sized mobile phones or remember family members asking, “why would I need a mobile phone?” to see how quickly we have learned to adapt and adopt technology.

New technology may require considerable investment to create the first-to-market solution, but it is lowering the barriers to entry for those who follow. Technology isn't just providing existing services in new ways, it's connecting what were disparate processes to provide an even more seamless and pleasant customer experience.

Airbnb connects those who travel and need a place to stay with people who have rooms or homes to rent out. It is disrupting the hotel and travel industry. Airbnb has more bedrooms available than the largest global hotel chains—and yet employs fewer than 1,000 staff members, without owning any property.

Technology has transformed the publishing industry. Want to write a book (and apparently there is a book inside each of us)? You can self-publish in a matter of hours.

Technology is not only disrupting what is created and delivered to consumers, it's also disrupting what is captured and understood about consumers and nonconsumers.

Data Is Big

Digitization of information is pervasive. Even if the data is currently not being utilized or fully mined, you can bet it is being captured and stored. This data is ready for historical analysis, trend analysis, and will be used to inform future decisions.

Big data can be described as vast, growing stores of information that can be analyzed by computers to reveal trends, patterns, and associations. The most impactful use of big data relates to our behavior and relationships.

Analyzing this information is a burgeoning industry in itself. Are you alarmed when ads pop up in your browser for the exact item you were shopping for a few minutes before? Just wait until some of your actions are not just followed but predicted!

Forget 1984 and Big Brother. This data machine is more like your brother, sister, second cousin, and the stranger sitting next to you on the train, who all know things about you. Personal and organizational information isn't just being pulled from the Internet as our actions are tracked, but from data that we push out to the world through social media and every other technology platform.

Every time we announce our presence, when we check into the restaurant or landmark, or when we swipe left or right, we're leaving digital breadcrumbs that will be consumed by the voracious appetite of big data analysts—both legal and illegal.

This abundance of valuable information is driving the emergence of new businesses. Products and services are developed in the field of cybersecurity in order to stay one step ahead of hackers and those who have ill intent when it comes to accessing our data. It's estimated that cybercrime costs the world's consumers an eye-watering $110 billion annually.

Big data allows us to make connections and see patterns that may not have been visible to us before, much like the flights over the Nazca Desert of southern Peru in 1940 revealed man-made patterns in the topography. These famous lines were known centuries earlier but not fully appreciated until seen from thousands of feet above.

Future bird's-eye views of data will allow for new perspectives and new ways of thinking as the Internet of Things continues to expand. We will be able to analyze and model situations at both a macro and micro level—and the data will be more and more available to you and me.

Google Maps highlights traffic flow so individuals can choose a different route to work, the app actually makes intelligent selections on a micro level—most of the time, anyway. On a macro level, this fast data allows city planners to identify where to augment public transportation solutions and infrastructure.

In the twentieth century, London taxi drivers studied for two years to pass “The Knowledge”—essentially memorizing the streets of London to become a black cab driver.

Uber and Lyft obliterate this model. Almost anyone can now be a taxi driver. With GPS and map apps, you not only get from point A to point B, you can receive real-time alerts about traffic issues. Memorizing the streets of London is no longer necessary. We are becoming both empowered by and dependent on data and automation; memorization is a dying art. How many phone numbers do you know from memory (other than your own)?

Before you get too complacent, the disruption created by Uber and the potential to be a taxi driver is already becoming obsolete. Millions of professional drivers could be replaced by driverless cars in the next few decades. And these new driverless cars will send and receive data every mile. What is new and transformational today can be old and obsolete tomorrow. At least you and I will be able to text and ride as our cars chauffeur us to our next destination.

Fast data will impact business in the next 10 years like fast-food has impacted waistlines.

Genuine Intelligence

Data gathering is one thing, but we haven't even scratched the surface for artificial intelligence (AI) and the strides being made in the field of robotics.

Algorithms are becoming more complex and engineering solutions are being shrunk to nanotechnology as these disciplines continue to converge. What will be the impact on the processes and services your company utilizes and provides?

As the Borg ominously declared in Star Trek: The Next Generation television series, “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.”

But no need to panic. Yet. While IBM's Deep Blue may play a mean game of chess, and its Watson supercomputer is beating contestants on Jeopardy writing pop music and movie trailers, they can't yet replace the whole human psyche. Humans had to apply the sound and music to the movie trailer. These devices can't respond, in the moment, to all the subtle nuances of language or intent. Right, Hal?

Yet AI is already here, driving our cars, providing real-time translation services, reducing language barriers, and providing new delivery mechanisms through drones and virtual assistant services like Google Home, Alexa, Cortana, and Siri.

Technology innovation isn't just about the future and creating the new. It's also having a jarring impact on traditional businesses and careers. We are seeing the seeds of change in accountancy with apps and software changing the role of CPA firms, insurance companies with online portals handling complex quotations in nanoseconds, and the legal profession with interactive online tools creating robust documents without human interaction.

For every market pressure technology provides, a new market opportunity emerges. Capitalizing on these business opportunities and making the difficult choices required for change are uniquely human capabilities.

Whether artificial intelligence and robotics will eventually replace jobs is an ongoing debate. The industrial revolution showed that some work and jobs as we currently know them will disappear, with new roles and work being created.

This was the concern of the Luddites. And history has proven that the Luddites were wrong—in the long term. One opportunity goes away and another replaces it.

It would seem to us that AI and robotics can only create long-term value if the new processes, systems, and apps augment the economic system as it currently operates.

Economies, whether local, national, or global, operate by allowing the transfer of value (money) from one person to another, connecting the producer with the consumer through the efforts of the employer and employee. Employees earn a paycheck that they can then spend (or invest) as consumers, transferring value back to the producer and employer. So the cycle continues.

Remove any of these players, for example, replace the employee with a robot, and the cycle is potentially broken, unless that employee is able to earn a paycheck in a new role. The time-saving and cost-savings that automation provides is a short-term benefit if the long-term impact of less employment (and, hence, less money to spend) is not considered.

There are invisible and unintended consequences of these decisions.

Ironically, the more technology and software impacts our world, the more important true soft skills become. It's not just the digital interface that businesses needs to focus on, or that rules the day. The human interface also matters. The careers, and companies, that stay focused on the human benefits of technology will live long and prosper.

Uploading into Society

Technology isn't just rewriting how business gets done, it's rewiring how society happens, what privacy means, and who owns the data being collected. Governments are scrambling to understand the impact of technology and rewrite laws and rules designed for past centuries. Those rules simply no longer apply.

This isn't a thesis on the dark side of digitization and technological advancements, nor is it a prediction about when we'll upload our consciousness into a robotic host. Personally, I wouldn't wish that on my temperamental vacuum cleaner, but times change.

But let's go into the future with our eyes wide open; there are always unintended consequences that result from change.

Morag recalled when the U.K. bank branch she worked at years ago had its first fax machine delivered. The staff thought they had finally reached the modern world. Yet within a few short years the fax machine, along with the pager, came to represent an obsolete technology.

We don't recall the last time we sent a fax, and it always amazes us how many people still have fax numbers on their business cards.

When e-mail was first introduced to workplaces, management's concern was that employees would send confidential data outside of their organization.

With a few notable (and some laudable) cases of whistleblowing, this did not occur. E-mail became the de facto communication method, threatening snail mail and traditional handwritten notes. Postal services around the world are still struggling to reinvent themselves, to remain relevant in an ever-declining paper-based world.

However, despite the rapid rise of e-mail, the millennial generation does not use this as a primary communication tool; instead it is an identity tool, since every app and every site one joins requires an e-mail address as the primary identifier or user name.

The days of e-mail as a primary business communication tool are numbered as it is being replaced by instant messaging, Google Hangouts, Slack, and other project management tools.

The initial focus of mechanical technology seemed to be on cost-saving and productivity improvements. In stark terms, the goal was less human interaction. The immediate impact was on automation and the blue-collar workforce. Production times were slashed from months to days, along with error rates and rework.

New paradigms and tools such as Lean Six Sigma emerged. Roles changed as robots automated the assembly line and changed the need for, and nature of, physical work.

The current—and future—focus will be on augmenting or replacing humans in virtually all areas of our lives—at home, at work, and at play. Robots will impact not just the physical work required but the mental work required.

Remember that in the marketplace, scarcity drives value. If your career or business model can be replicated by a growing number of people and machines, your value goes down.

Every day, every minute, there's a new competitor entering your market, and new competitors eyeing your career. The impact of information technology will be felt across all areas of business, especially in white-collar roles. No one can escape.

Technology will redefine the expectations of workers and performance management. And, hopefully, it will free us up to do the things we're gifted in and enjoy!

What's Your Response Time?

Some 3,083 e-mails arrived in Morag's inbox last month.

No wonder she feels busy all day—especially with her manic read-action-delete approach. We doubt she is alone in this dilemma. We can almost see you shaking your head along with us.

This is an example of not adapting to technology. After all, we don't rush to open every snail-mail letter that arrives—except on our birthdays. The danger for us all, and our businesses, is operating in the twenty-first century with twentieth-century mind-sets, work habits, and rules that no longer apply.

We're not predicting exactly which technologies will emerge. By the time this book was released from the publisher, companies and technologies may have already been replaced. But we are predicting that if you and your teams don't stop resisting technology, you'll be left behind.

Like it or not, people work in small chunks of time, not huge blocks. Technology is driving byte-sized attention spans. Maybe we need to adjust our workdays from the 9-to-5 all-you-can-eat buffet at your desk to the in-the-moment rapid response that's integrated throughout the day.

As with any revolution, it's not just what's going away that will have the biggest impact on us, it's what will be created and utilized in its place. The bigger question is, how do we anticipate, adapt, and respond to what's new while recognizing which technologies are staying?

We still need health care, education, construction, and food production. How we meet these needs, and how we contribute our unique value to the systems used to deliver these services, will change.

The financing business has changed. With the emergence of crowdsourcing and microfunding, businesses that did not have access to capital are now able to flourish.

It's the Internet and access to digital data that empowers a freelance economy, allowing companies of all sizes access to resources and expertise they don't have and have no intention of bringing in-house. This allows freelance businesses to focus on their unique value and core competence.

In 2010, Procter & Gamble sourced more than 50 percent of innovation externally through an open innovation program called Connect+Develop. That compares to less than 10 percent in 2001.²

The new competition is not about internal knowledge and focus, but rather about an organization's ability to reach out, partner, and develop outside relationships and subsequent products based on these relationships.

—Chris Thoen, former head of Procter & Gamble's Open Innovation

The Industrial Revolution was the result of new power sources. The mechanical revolution brought about standardization in parts, in processes, and in skills, replacing many of the individual craftsmen and cottage industries such as weavers, blacksmiths, matchmakers, and home workers.

Digital transformation impacts what we know and how we analyze data. This allows for increased flexibility, not standardization.

For example, companies like Vistaprint and StickerGiant have printing equipment that can switch between designs as fast as the digital input changes. These real-time technological adjustments allow companies to adapt and respond faster and more efficiently to customer demands.

How fast can you and your company adapt?

In the pharmaceutical industry, the introduction of personalized pharmacy creates drug formulas adapted to reflect the unique DNA and needs of the patient. Medicine is no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition.

Legislators usually create sweeping laws and detailed regulations in reaction to problems. But they often overlegislate and complicate in the process. Corporations do the same thing, which we'll talk about in a future chapter.

To thrive in the midst of rapid technological change, we've got to make work simpler—not continue to add complexity. But as you may have noticed, it usually takes more energy to simplify.

Future Workforce

The workforce of the future is one that's iterative and agile. Rules and procedures become guidelines that inform today's process but not necessarily tomorrow's. Experience and data analytics allow for the real-time adaptation of the process.

We've seen it in IT with the move from waterfall methodologies to agile methodologies. Design and testing is inculcated throughout the development phase, not just at the beginning and end of the process. This requires informed risk taking and the courage to try and fail fast so one can learn fast and adapt.

This agile mind-set, skill set, and organizational structure with flash teams is not just the future, it's the mainstream of today. And it requires a personal and cultural embracing of new technologies.

Changing Identities

Technology is changing how we think, how we learn, how we behave, how we interact, and how we work.

Who doesn't love getting to the end of an Uber journey and not having to go through the cumbersome process of paying? Uber connects the driver, passenger, and the payment process. That's what's revolutionary, and valuable, about this transformation.

How we behave is affected by our ability to order our triple-espresso-no-foam-latte on our phones before we arrive at the coffee shop. We send birthday greetings because Facebook reminded us. For many of us, our smartphone is the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we look at before we fall asleep. It's glued to our hand, our eyes rarely straying from the glow of the screen and the constant bombardment of information.

Keeping up with the Joneses, across the street and across the world, shows us what success is. Advertisements follow us from screen to screen, reminding us not to forget to purchase the items we glanced at yesterday. The change is that we grow to expect these wonders at breakneck speed.

When Morag worked in banking, she spent time in the workforce planning department. It was driven by first-generation spreadsheets and manually compiled data. HR analytics are still key to future organizational success because we need to understand what attracts, retains, or causes employees to leave organizations.

Now apps fill the need. Workers are drawn from an ever-larger talent pool. The twenty-first-century company leverages technology to identify talent anywhere and gives workers the freedom to choose to work when, where, and how much they want.

Identifying factors that differentiate your high performers from your average performers allows informed intervention at a corporate level, reducing the impact of human bias. Anticipating skills gaps, changing demographics, or changing technologies is much better than dealing with unforeseen consequences of change.

Talent analytics will go beyond informing the employee life cycle and employee experience. They will directly link to, inform, and respond to the business strategy. This results in a greater chance of success for the company, for the team, and for the individual.

LinkedIn, the largest accessible database of talent and jobs, can now mine the skills that are available in a particular city and compare the skills to the jobs available. Potential job seekers can see where to best use their skills. Employers will be able to precisely target talent and schools to fill the skill gaps.

Consumers expect uninterrupted technological miracles from suppliers. But is that your expectation from your management or peers at work?

Look at the recent outcry at Apple for eliminating the headphone jack from its new iPhone 7. Without white cords connecting our ears to a device, how will we pretend to be busy when we sit next to someone we don't want to talk to?

This dynamic also speaks to the cultural implications of technology. Years ago cell phone companies were faced with legislation forcing them to plan a universal charger.³ Organizations are still trying to protect their “secret sauce.” The faster technology changes, the more proprietary technology will become a thing of the past, what was once unique becomes uniform when information becomes ubiquitous.

On-demand services like Uber and TaskRabbit require an on-demand workforce. The gig economy is our future.

For years, Upwork.com and Fiverr.com have allowed us to tap into the global talent market in seconds, adding competition and creating new opportunities at the same time.

This is the employment version of the sharing economy.

More and more, employers will tap into a flexible workforce, growing and shrinking teams at the click of a button. But the downside also looms. These freelancers can't come to meetings or social gatherings, and they can create legal complications surrounding traditional employee communications.

Future employees and freelancers will expect to fit work around life rather than life around work. The question of “who owns the work contract?” becomes a key question and demands clear answers.

The future requires critical thinking skills. Do I know the keywords to use in order to Google the information I need? Can I apply my critical thinking skills to sort fact from fiction and then apply the information successfully? Memorization, a key skill of the twentieth century, is now a less valuable skill.

Do I know which “phone-a-friend” colleague can help me resolve a problem? Just-in-time learning is going to be a critical requirement for a thriving career.

Everything Is Connected and Transparent

Glassdoor.com is driving transparency in salary and corporate culture. This thrills some and scares the daylights out of others. Welcome to the future.

If someone finds himself daydreaming about a career at some tech wonderland, he might find that every company has its own version of crazy. Getting rid of titles and organizational charts might sound great—until you have a question to ask.

Secret recipes, from fried chicken to employee retention, are a myth. There are no secrets. Thank, or curse, technology.

In your business or career, there are people using information and technology to improve on your offerings and skills. There are no boundaries. People in developing countries have access to the same information you do.

Initial expertise and first-to-market gets you a seat at the table. But keeping pace and growing keeps you there.

Years ago, NASA would have spent years cataloging photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope⁴ or any of its probes sent to the outer reaches of the galaxy. Now, much of this work is being completed by volunteers around the world who scrutinize and catalog data. The same method is being utilized for a recent translation project on the Dead Sea Scrolls and in medical studies.

Why the shift in approach? They faced reality. The challenge was too big for a traditional workforce in a traditional organization. As leaders, we have to admit that the problems we face are too big to tackle without collaboration.

And people are more than willing to participate under the right conditions. Whether it's a spare seat in the car, a spare room, or a spare hour of expertise, we have access to skilled talent around the globe.

The winners will have the best human interface.

Personal Impact

How we structure organizations and the way we collaborate and achieve results can no longer be based on the Industrial Revolution and traditional management theories. Instead the future of work will be informed by insights from neuroscience, game design, new expectations of work and life (not work or life), and what it means to be a happy, productive member of society. It's no longer about just hired hands or hired minds. The twenty-first century also requires hired hearts.

We remember watching television and being warned by our parents about getting “square eyes” if we watched too much. We didn't, but modern technology is bringing about a whole raft of health issues. Hunched over our screens, with heads tipped forward, it's been said that sitting is the new smoking.

With the never-ending flood of data and increased connection, the new risk is cognitive overload. The next shift will be to intelligent technology, which will sort through information and recommend informed decisions.

Morag has a fitness app on her phone, and it knows more about her than she cares to think about. She is not alone. On a global level, companies are collecting every bit of data they can. Someone is analyzing data from a million apps, creating conclusions about preferences and products we'll buy.

This model will soon transform every aspect of our lives, including our health care—actually predicting problems before they become life-threatening. Who hasn't looked at a medical website to try to self-diagnose an ache or pain. However, we've seen nothing yet! Companies as diverse as Apple, Google, and traditional health-care organizations are investing billions of dollars to develop biometric sensors and new technology solutions to support the patient, before we become ill! The modern day equivalent of the Star-Trek Tricorder is nearly upon us.

Apps already exist that remind patients to take their medications and allow doctors to see real-time measurements, whether blood pressure or heart rate.

The next generation of health-care technology, when combined with big data, could help prevent disease and extend lifespans. There is no doubt that we are on the cusp of a transformation in health care.

Transparency and speed of data bring to mind the metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings in Colorado and causing a typhoon in Japan. But now the flap and effect happen in seconds, not months.

Consider the economic crash of 2008. There are many opinions as to the cause, but everyone would agree there were several interconnected catalysts, each driven by technology and instant communications. A few rogue butterflies crippled an industry and impacted millions of people.

In other words, if lemmings had social media, they'd be extinct by now.

Your Reality

Every company, including yours, is now a technology company.

Many companies say they're in health care, publishing, or manufacturing, but they overlook the impact of technology in transforming their markets. These are the companies that risk being left behind. Publishers can cling to printed books as their business or embrace the reality that first and foremost they are a digital business. Even manufacturers must be digital marketers.

Even at SkyeTeam, our service may be training and leadership development, but we must embrace technology to design those materials, reach our clients, and remain current. (Hence the need for shared ownership of technology processes and policies.)

To future-proof your company, you must first future-proof your mind-set.

In a recent conversation with an executive at a geographically dispersed health care provider, we discussed the need to lead by using new technology.

“We have Skype, but nobody is using it.” Think about this in your workplace. How often do we unconsciously rely on old ways of working and collaborating?

In our experience as presenters in boardrooms around the world, nobody ever uses those electronic whiteboards. Have you? Few know how to use them, and many fear losing important information. (Yes, we still find ourselves snapping photos of these whiteboards.)

We get the smartphone but end up playing with the box it came in. We forget to videoconference (using the excuse that we don't like to see ourselves on camera), and we're missing opportunities to create more meaningful relationships through technology.

We have all the shiny objects at our disposal. Instead of restricting access, encourage a culture of playing with all the toys to connect and do great work. In the process, time will be wasted, but you'll also unlock new creativity and productivity.

Until recently, the employee experience, from hiring to firing and from onboarding to retirement, has been the primary responsibility of the personnel/HR department. And technology was owned by IT.

Or to put it bluntly, HR handles the people, and IT handles the machines. In many organizations, never the twain shall meet.

The opposite of this obsolete mind-set is the formation of flash teams,⁵ skilled professionals who have probably never met before and may even work on different continents, who can come together to turn a napkin sketch into a viable product within days or weeks.

Results like this don't happen in technology silos.

HR is typically not a data-intense part of an organization, but that's all changing. Today, data can come from a variety of sources, ranging from performance numbers and attendance, to surveys and tracking employee life events. Smart HR leaders can tap data and determine exactly who will thrive in their companies and who will not.

The retirement of many baby boomers was delayed as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. Now that economies seem to be stabilizing, this group will be rapidly stepping away from the workforce. Many organizations are not prepared.

Catching the Wave

Resistance is futile…because whether you realize it or not, you've already been assimilated.

Moore's Law states the rate of computing power doubles every 18 months.

Srini Koushik, the CTO of Magellan Health, recently shared with us in an interview that some people argue that Moore's Law is coming to an end in a year or two. It describes linear growth; today it's all about exponential growth.

Years ago, when someone started their career at IBM, everyone was very proud of the fact that the company had 400,000 people across the globe. And that scale gave the company an advantage in the marketplace. That's not true today. When you look at Apple, they have 30,000 employees. So that linear relationship—every time a company grows, they've got to grow the infrastructure—has been broken, and this leads to a completely new paradigm.

This is key to the digital revolution we are experiencing. Are you and your organization keeping pace?

We want your company and career to thrive. Stop worrying about technology and start enjoying the benefits. Stop fixating on one piece of software or ignoring IT innovation, and explore all the emerging possibilities.

Who knows, you might just create a new technology.

Future-Proof Your Company

• What will we be taking for granted in five years?
• What are you taking for granted today?
• How can you leverage technology to augment your work and your company?
• All the data in the world won't help solve problems if employees don't know how to access, analyze, and apply the information. Use technology to fail faster and reward experimentation.
• Connect HR and IT—personally and technologically. Make sure you use technology to actually build trust and relationships. If the sense of community is declining, the speed and quality will suffer. That's one reason why most disruptive companies are brand-new, not the old guard. Eliminate the work dynamic of “I submit my piece of code, throw it over fence, and never know how my contribution was used.”

Future-Proof Your Career

• Take a hard look at your entrenched work habits. Are you e-mailing when you could be videoconferencing? Are you getting work done or inspiring new levels of creativity by leveraging technology? Try new stuff with new tools. Today.
• Don't be the leader who is too old to understand or doesn't like technology. That's a lame excuse, and your colleagues know it. Find a technology mentor today.
• Pay attention to your social media and digital footprint. It matters and will be researched by potential recruiters and bosses. Ensure your online brand matches your real-world brand.