Stature: A good friend and colleague asked me if I would be willing to guest lecture at his local university fully employed MBA class. The topic of the talk was to be leadership. I agreed, and we set the date. I signed into the virtual meeting early to make sure we had the technology issues under control. While we were …
Equal Opportunity Destroyer: Rani Molla, a Visual Journalist at The Wall Street Journal, recently published an article in Vox that caught my eye. In that article, she made the statement that “‘Knowledge workers’ could be the most impacted by future automation.” Conventional wisdom has been suggesting that only the “blue-collar workers” were going to be affected in any significant way …
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Based on what I observe in the business world, AI is going to continue being in our collective consciousness for some time to come. Many thought this was going to be a fad—and with reason. The promise of AI drastically changing our world has been around for several decades. However, we in the technology world have not …
On a More Even Keel: A recent report, Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How Machines are Affecting People and Places, puts things in a better perspective than we might have held starting several years ago. Gone is the panic over “all jobs going away.” Moreover, gone is the blasé attitude that no loss of jobs will occur. From the report: “Now, …
HBR on Retail: An article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR — Jan/Feb 2019, pg 72) suggested that the brick and mortar retail industry is “squandering their most potent weapons” against their e-commerce competition. The author suggests that thehidden advantage is in the store is salespeople. I’m afraid I have to disagree. The rest of the article is fine. I …
Stereotype: “We need fresh ideas.” “We need a Millennial to address our social media marketing.” “I don’t think Frank is up to the demands of the new software.” “If our salespeople won’t use the automation system, then we’ll get some younger folks in here who will!” I’ve heard these comments or comments very close to them on more than one …
An Educator: One of the topics I tend to worry about is education. I worry about it because our country is being very slow to change the way we educate our young people. We are not preparing them for the future. I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for this concern. Moreover, to educate myself on the topic, I’ve read …
People with different world views will unite when they have a common enemy. I believe we have major “enemies” that have the potential to unite people across the globe: Climate Change – Part I, Technological Disruption — Part II, Cybersecurity — Part III, and Economic Bifurcation — Part IV (significant and growing economic inequality). Technological Disruption: Few people in my …
Past Worry — Jobs: Long before it was an everyday discussion topic, I and my colleague, David Salahi, were speaking and writing about how technology had the potential to displace many (all?) jobs. Primarily, the purpose of speaking and writing was to generate discussion! What were humans going to do to make a living? How were they going to find …
Social Media: I was listening to a podcast on technology and the speaker was complaining about how difficult it was for him to “quit Facebook.” He felt as though he has spent so much of his time building up a great Facebook network of friends and family, that it would be “wrong” to quit. He was in a trap of …