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As we move from an Industrial era with linear supply chains and long shelf-life to a Digital era with interconnected ecosystems and ephemeral shelf-lives of ideas and products, the rules of the game are shifting. This requires leaders to rewire themselves and start behaving very differently. And this change can be hard. Perspectives around how we should deal with the Digital Tsunami.
Intro to Digital Tsunami
In his book Digital Tsunami, Abhijit contrasts the erstwhile analog world with today’s digital world. How has this shift to the digital realm impacted companies and their cultures? What is the main difference between these two and how has that influenced leadership. Confused about why a company like Google is competing with Ford and GM? Hear more about all this and more in this nugget.
Hiring for the Digital World
Unlike the analog world, employees and customers in the digital world are at the centre and the organization and processes are built around them. This makes the hiring of employees a very significant task. How does a leader go about hiring someone and what are their markers for potential? Don’t miss the insightful anecdote about The Knowledge test that the London cab drivers have to take and how that is relevant to this nugget.
Digital Mindset
In order to be relevant in this digital age, leaders need to adapt to a digital mindset. What does this mindset look like? Abhijit discusses the digital mindset in this nugget and gives anecdotes of how extremely competent leaders of the analog era are struggling to adapt to this. He also shares two important core values which can help in acquiring skills to navigate this digital world. Look out for his views on the future being an ‘&’ world rather than an ‘Or’ world.
Building Digital habits
So we know there is a digital world out there, vastly different from the analog one we have been used to. This digital world demands new kinds of leadership, culture and relationships. We need to have a digital mindset to navigate this new world but how do we go about it. In this nugget, Abhijit gives you simple tips to start the journey and formulate digital habits.
Role of Chief Digital Officer
According to Abhijit, the CDO is the mapmaker of the new digital world of the organization. He is the one who takes up the real opportunity in looking at the digital landscape in a holistic sense for the entire organization and not just using it as an easy marketing or feedback tool. Hear more about this popular position that is seeing many hiring ads!
Marketing 2.0
Suresh talks about how Marketing has a function has evolved given the Digital age we are living in. He says that instead of Digital Marketing, he believes in marketing to the Digitally Enabled that is often the entire consumer base. He also speaks about how he leveraged Digital to resurrect the brand Maggi when Nestle re-introduced the brand.
Staying relevant and leveraging technology
Jay talks about what how successful politicians have managed to stay relevant over time and have reinvented themselves. He also talks about how technology is begin to level the playing field in favour of people who do not necessarily come from a family of politicians with an established brand and mobilisation infrastructure.
Attention and Meta-Attention
We normally think of attention in broad terms but Rich breaks down the various types of attention. He speaks about Attention being the ability to focus our mind on something specific and Meta-Attention being the ability to pay attention to our attention and have the ability to bring it back when it wanders.
Positivity and Psychological Safety
Rich speaks about why we have a negativity bias as a default setting. He traces it back to human evolution and talks about the fact that for us to survive, it was critical to attach a higher weightage to negative signals in the environment than the positive ones. He links it to the criticality of ensuring psychological safety in a team (results of Project Aristotle in Google) to drive business performance.
Staying relevant as machines get smarter
Kartik speaks about the extent to which machines and algorithms have pervaded our lives. To give an example, 80% of view on Netflix is based on algorithmic recommendations and 70% of Youtube consumption is based on what it suggests. He talks about what this means for human beings to stay relevant in the future where the machines are getting exponentially smarter by the day.
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Convenience versus Privacy
Kartik speaks about how different FAANG Companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) are trying to inject hosepipes into our lives and capture data for their respective algorithms to get smarter over time. He speaks about how, as consumers we need to walk the tight rope between leveraging the benefits of these platforms while protecting our privacy while doing it.
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Jobs at risk and new avenues
Kartik speaks about the impact of AI on jobs of the future. He cautions that it is not just the menial blue collar type of jobs that are at risk but a wider array of jobs where machines could replace man. He goes on to talk about the implication for us and how we should think about staying relevant in the future.
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Re-skilling ourselves to stay relevant
Kartik speaks about how we all could be thoughtful about equipping ourselves with some basic level of literacy around AI. Even if you are not in a technology-led company, it is likely that you will be impacted by AI in some shape or form as a leader, as a consumer or some other form.
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