Disrupt or Be Disrupted: Today’s New Normal

AI can help management weigh strategic decisions. Kenny predicted a day when almost every large company will have a robot director on its board. “If you are considering making an acquisition, selling the business or making a big capital expenditure, there are implicit models that go into that decision-making process that an AI system can use,” he explained. “Then your other directors will add judgment on top of that. The decisions are better when it is the man and the machine working together. From the boardroom right up to every major decision, AI will become a tool in our lives.”

4. Collaboration is essential to innovation and effective teamwork. Tapping the potential of digital technology often requires assembling multidisciplinary teams—from external as well as internal businesses—who share data and insights. For example, advances in medicine are far more likely to come from collaboration between colleagues or companies than from a lone scientist toiling in a lab, asserted Judith Dunn, global head of clinical development at Roche Innovation.

“It’s changed how we hire and how we do business,” she said. “I have a theoretical physicist—a math whiz—whose job is to model disease. I pair him with a biologist. Their work helps us understand safety and efficacy more thoroughly.… We’re also finding that more and more therapies are combination drugs where we need to find out how our drug and another company’s drug work together.”

The need for access to both top talent, academia and potential business partners factored heavily in Roche Innovation’s decision to open a research facility in Manhattan, where the company would be able to engage with medical professionals from the city’s teaching hospitals and medical schools, as well as attract and retain top talent. The new research center is located near the city’s East Side medical corridor in the state-of-the-art Alexandria Center for Life Science building, joining tenants like Eli Lilly and Pfizer.

“decisions are better when man and machine work together.”

5. Companies must look for ways to bridge the digital talent gap. One of the biggest challenges to digital transformation is finding the employees with the skills to work with the tools and technologies being adopted by companies, agreed many CEOs attending the summit. “It is no longer blue collar or white collar, it’s ‘new collar,’” quipped Dow’s Liveris, discussing the need to reskill or replace today’s workers. “We have a 19th-century education system turning out a workforce attuned to two ends of the spectrum: higher education and people who don’t make it through high school [educated] for assembly lines. There’s a big piece in the middle—at places like our infrastructure and materials companies—that our education system doesn’t support.”

Addressing the dearth of technically skilled workers will require changes in the nation’s educational system. However, companies can’t afford to wait for that shift to happen organically, argued Liveris, who leads President Trump’s manufacturing council. “The big opportunity is how to collaborate [and] rebuild the public education system around that new workforce,” he said. In the meantime, Dow is working with community colleges to design curriculums tailored to its needs. “Our ecosystem—we have 50,000 Dow employees but my ecosystem also includes all the high-tech firms in our supply chain—will require more jobs, but of a different skill set,” he said.

AT&T is also taking a proactive approach to bringing its workforce up to speed. Recognizing that its digital talent gap will only continue to widen, the company worked with educational institutions to design relevant coursework and then focused on incenting its employees to voluntarily re-educate themselves for the jobs of the future.

“We tried not to inhibit ourselves by looking at what we already had; we said, ‘Five years from now, what will we need?’” explained John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president. “Then we gave every employee a view not only of where they are today but where we expected them to be on the internal path five years from now. We also took a very important step: We allowed them to look at any future [career] they wanted and build a curriculum that would get them there, whether that be 80 hours to meet expectations or 800 hours to go out and become a new person.”

6. In the digital age, face time is just as critical as ever. Even as technology enables us to connect with geographically dispersed colleagues on team endeavors, there’s no substitute for the energy and enthusiasm that a face-to-face, real-time gathering can offer.

At 1-800-Flowers, McCann fosters an atmosphere of innovation by dining with team members regularly. “I run monthly dinners with 10 to 15 people,” he explained. “I ask core talent folks to invite younger newer people and we ask them to bring ideas, anything they do that is new and creative. We have wonderful dialogues. In fact, being early to Facebook was because of a lady sitting next to me who told me how she used Facebook. The next morning I was there with two cups of tea, saying, “Show me what you do on Facebook.”

In fact, face time with a CEO time is becoming currency, noted Liveris, who has adopted an “inclusive model” of leadership that involves traveling the globe to engage personally with constituents, customers, owners, employees and partners. “It’s very demanding,” he said, adding that how CEOs allocate their time can be a competitive differentiator. “Your time is the only thing left that is discretionary. Everyone else has everything else you have. I’m away from headquarters 250 days a year; I slept on an airplane 90 nights last year. That’s what modern technology has done.”

This article is excerpted from CEOs: Disrupt or Be Disrupted (March/April 2017 issue of Chief Executive magazine).