Chris Dixon, who invested early in companies ranging from Warby Parker to Kickstarter, once wrote that the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy. That’s certainly true of artificial intelligence, which started out playing games like chess, go and playing humans on the game show Jeopardy!
Yet today, AI has become so pervasive we often don’t even recognize it anymore. Besides enabling us to speak to our phones and get answers back, intelligent algorithms are often working in the background, providing things like predictive maintenance for machinery and automating basic software tasks.
As the technology becomes more powerful, it’s also forcing us to ask some uncomfortable questions that were once more in the realm of science fiction or late-night dorm room discussions. When machines start doing things traditionally considered to be uniquely human, we need to reevaluate what it means to be human and what is to be a machine.
“Revolution” is a term that gets thrown around a lot. There was an Industrial Revolution powered by steam and then another one powered by oil and electricity. The Green Revolution transformed the way we fed ourselves. Many political revolutions have overthrown powerful regimes and the digital revolution changed the way we work with information.
My friend Srdja Popović, who helped lead the Bulldozer Revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milošević in Serbia, told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable.
The problem with most would-be revolutionaries is that they seek exactly the opposite. All too often, they seek attention, excitement and crowds of admiring fans. Yet all that noise is likely to create enemies just as fast as it makes friends. True revolutions aren’t won in the streets or on the airwaves, but through smart strategies that transform basic beliefs.
Silicon Valley is often known as a cut-throat, technocratic place where the efficiency of algorithms often define success. Competition is ferocious and the pace of disruption and change can be dizzying. It’s not the type of environment where soft skills are valued particularly highly or even at all.
So it’s somewhat ironic that Bill Campbell became a Silicon Valley legend by giving hugs and professing love to those he worked with. As coach to executives ranging from Steve Jobs to the entire Google executive team, Campbell preached and practiced a very personal style of business.
Yet while I was reading Trillion Dollar Coach in which former Google executives explain Campbell’s leadership principles, it became clear why he had such an impact. Even in Silicon Valley, technology will only take you so far. The success of a business, ultimately depends on the success of the people in it. To compete over the long haul, that’s where you need to focus.
The history of technological advancement is marked by milestones. Einstein published his theory of relativity. Fleming’s discovered penicillin. Watson and Crick uncovered the structure of DNA. While none of these had any practical significance at the time — and wouldn’t for decades — they all ushered in new eras of technology.
Google’s recent announcement that it had achieved quantum supremacy can be seen in a similar light. While the company proved that its quantum computer could solve a particular problem in minutes that would take a conventional supercomputer thousands of years, that problem itself is of little practical value.
However, the same could be said about the achievements of Einstein, Fleming and Watson and Crick. They were important not in and of themselves, but because of the possibilities they would unleash later on. The truth is that quantum supremacy is a harbinger for a future we can’t see yet. It marks a new era that will take us in completely new directions.
When I first arrived in Poland in 1997, it seemed like the entire country was being rebuilt out of the Marriott hotel. Multinational companies looking to set up shop in the formerly communist country would rent temporary offices at the Regus Center there to get operations rolling. Later, they would move into more conventional space.
It was a good model that provided a useful service, but I was surprised to see that 20 years later that same model, in the form of a company called WeWork was being given a $47 billion valuation for an upcoming IPO. I was somewhat less surprised to see that valuation crash and burn almost as soon as the prospectus came out.
This is becoming a common tale of woe. Theranos, once the darling of Silicon Valley, was exposed as a fraud. Uber, the poster child for the sharing economy, saw its stock price collapse after it once again posting massive losses. It’s time to face facts. These are not isolated incidents but indicative how Silicon Valley investors misjudge the physical economy.
When I was 27, I moved to Warsaw, Poland to work in the nascent media industry that was developing there. I had experience working in media in New York, so I was excited to share what I’d learned and was confident that my knowledge and expertise would be well received.
It wasn’t. Whenever I began to explain how a media business was supposed to work, people would ask me, “why?” That forced me to think about it and, when I did, I began to realize that many of the principles I had taken for granted were merely conventions. Things didn’t need to work that way and could be done differently.
That’s when I first learned the power of a question. As Warren Berger explains in A More Beautiful Question, while answers tend to close a discussion, questions help us open new doors and can lead to genuine breakthroughs. Yet not all questions are equal. Asking good questions is a skill that takes practice and effort to learn to do well. Here’s where to start.
When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first space satellite, into orbit in 1957, it was a wake up call for America. Over the next year, President Eisenhower would sign the National Defense Education Act to spur science education, increase funding for research and establish NASA and DARPA to spur innovation.
A new report by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) argues that we are at a similar point today, but with China. While we have been steadily decreasing federal investment in R&D over the past few decades, our Asian rival has been ramping up and now threatens our leadership in key technologies such as AI, genomics and quantum information technology.
Clearly, we need to increase our commitment to science and innovation and that means increasing financial investment. However, what the report makes clear is that money alone won’t solve the problem. We are, in several important ways, actually undermining our ability to innovate, now and in the future. We need to renew our culture of innovation in America.
The history of digital technology has largely been one of denial followed by disruption. First came the concept of the productivity paradox, which noted the limited economic impact of digital technology. When e-commerce appeared, many doubted that it could ever compete with physical retail. Similar doubts were voiced about digital media.
Today, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe in the power of digital technology. Whole industries have been disrupted. New applications driven by cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain promise even greater advancement to come. Every business needs to race to adopt them in order to compete for the future.
Ironically, amid all this transformation the digital revolution itself is ending. Over the next decade, new computing architectures will move to the fore and advancements in areas like synthetic biology and materials science will reshape entire fields, such as healthcare, energy and manufacturing. Simply waiting to adapt won’t be enough. The time to prepare is now.
In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal Human Resource Management that described an “adoption penalty” for firms that didn’t adapt to changes in the marketplace quickly enough. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients.
So it is notable, to say the least, that in 2015, more than 35 years later, McKinsey found that only 26% of organizational transformations succeed. It’s not hard to see why. While traditional change management models offer sensible frameworks for fairly obvious changes, truly transformational efforts almost always encounter fierce resistance.
That’s an important distinction that leads to a significant difference. As I found when researching my book, Cascades, successful transformations identify resistance from the start and effectively plan to overcome opposition. Clearly, today, when change is so often a matter of survival, traditional change management models are no longer enough.
By 2006 we knew we had a serious problem. Our company’s onetime flagship product, called Afisha, was in a steady decline and it was becoming all too clear that something had to be done. What had once been a market leader that generated huge profits, which fueled the growth of our company had slowly, but surely, lost its market position.
It was clear that the business was in crisis, but nobody was exactly sure what to do about it. Operationally, nothing had really changed. We still believed in our product and our people. Nevertheless, the marketplace had evolved and our business model, which once had seemed bulletproof, was no longer viable.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Afisha’s brightest days were still ahead. We were able to reimagine the business model, strengthen the brand and return to profitability. What we learned is that solving a crisis is not a straightforward linear process, but a journey of discovery. You never know what you’ll find so you need to be willing to experiment.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
