Your brain/company has a locked perspective - that is your Achilles heel for your firm's future
The Story
Over the past four or five years, I have spoken to maybe 500+ board and C-level execs about the near-horizon tech future. This was anchored in questions about the 4th Industrial Revolution, AI, GenAI/LLLM 'stuff' and Quantum. This was from inside Verizon, or at Booth or Kellogg, or via the wonderful NACD, or on various stages.
The audience was generally separated into four buckets:
Okay, I heard the story, we are doing well, so I am back to work.
Heard it, typical esoteric weird techie hype stuff, so I am back to work
Heard it, my IT department isn't driving any real change, and this won't either
Got it, I'm worried, we should do something. This last bucket separates into three groups:
Group One: Strategy and culture refresh. We need to rethink our future and work diligently through the vision, mission, structure, task, and talent chain. Get hands-on with the new tech now.
Group Two: Go into full debate club mode and innovate around the edges because, after all, we are doing well.
Group Three: Tell the board we are working on it. Implement a ChatBot.
The Two Winners
The Group One folks are the winners. They are only 2% of the folks I have spoken with.
The other winners are people thinking in Group One terms, but who are new entrants to your sector, building something with a blank sheet of paper and this new tech. It happens a lot in part because companies are bad at cannibalizing their current model because their perspective and structure is opposed to it, even to understanding it.
Rockerfeller and Henry Ford are great examples. They came from agricultural trading and lighting to reinvent oil and autos. The cautionary message for you is that there were 400 vibrant auto firms in 1911. Twenty years later, there were 40, and three of them had 80% of the market.
Other examples are Zennstrom, Bezos, Jobs, and even at a slower pace, Corning and IBM. Those last two are moving into fiber optics, and at IBM, leaving just hardware and moving into software and services, which was a huge, smart step. They do have a similar crossroads now.
Today is Uniquely Different - The Scary Part
The cost structure, capability, and ease of use of foundational, Swiss Army knife-like technologies are all advancing at the same time faster than anything ever in history.
Let me say that again:
cost and capability of foundational, game-changing tech are improving faster than ever in history.
One of the start-ups I coach just delivered a brilliant V1.0 of their tech stack, and it took 10% of the time/resources that it would have just two years ago. It's a brilliant, deep context, two-sided network oncology biostatistics anchored play, so not some simple consumer viral easy thing. In consulting, customer service, and analysts in marketing, finance, logistics, law, comms, R&D, sales ops, training, HR, supply chain, and procurement will see the same sort of impact over time.
Go use your favorite GenAI helper and understand what vibe coding is and how much better/more efficient it is as another example. It is hard to calculate how much better/faster it is because it doesn't require skilled engineers, complex setup, or any hand coding, and iterates faster and allows for deeper context. Best guess is 20 - 200x faster/better, depending on the target.
Quite Scary.
Scary is Not Enough When Your Perspective is Broken
Many execs breathe a sigh of relief anytime they hear: impact over time. It means we don't have to do anything now.
Except this time is different. Before GenAI and everything we can build on LLMs showed up, it was an industrial revolution-sized set of changes (from Klaus S. at Davos).
Prior industrial revolutions severely damaged (sometimes lethally) companies, sectors, and nations. This one will do the same; that is the point of calling it the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Remember, we called it that before we heard of GenAI.
The perspective problem is not that we don't have clear references for the creative-destruction cycle, it is that we don't have any reference for the speed of change.
To make that harder, human institutions are full of humans, and they are generally not good at change or willing to embrace it gladly. I have a company that is doing well; all of my C-suite are top performers, so why would I ever want to change that?
The almost impossible question you need to embrace, and the better perspective, is, what if twenty years of change arrives in the next five?
Help From My Marvelous (Deceased) Father
I was just at my father's home cleaning it out and prepping it for sale, which was emotional. He had an amazing multi-continent, multifaceted journey of 98 years that ended last year.
I was a bit of a weird kid (hard to imagine, I know), and I was always interested in all things business, mathematical, and scientific. My Dad would come home from work, and most evenings I would sit on the end of his bed and we'd have mini lessons. One day, it would be early thinking on quality control, another Pythagoras, and one I remember was that amazing trigonometry calculator (above) and a slide rule ( I was 7). I still use the trigonometry learning frequently on the golf course, much to the annoyance of the other golfers, to calculate whose putt is further away, without actually pacing it off.
Anyway, in my lifetime, we have gone from a trig calculator to Vibe Coding, Claude 3.7, AlphaProteo, GNoME, Agentic AI, Med PaLM, Mixture of Experts (MoE), and TinyML. On several scales, that's as big as a bicycle to a jet plane.
The perspective you need, to grasp the strategic challenges here now, is that is the scale of change is coming in the next 10 years. Your Achilles heel is not being able to step outside your real, current, learned perspective parameters.
I may not excel at much, but I am really good at pattern matching. Everything that has happened over the past three years demonstrates the pattern of the beginning of something, just the beginning.
