In the past 17 years, over 50 percent of the largest industrial companies have been extinguished from the Fortune 500. Some were acquired, others bankrupt, many others merged to survive. Have you noticed the trend line on the stock price of General Electric this past year?The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. --Albert Einstein
Digital Transformation and potential extinction is the single unanswered factor on every CEO's mind today. As massive data sets become exponential in size, pervasive in geographic reach and utilize a wide spectrum of sensors from mobile phones to C4ISR, the Operational Risk parameters are even more complex.
Decision Advantage is the lofty goal and the speed to answers and insight is evermore the ultimate competition. The words "innovation" and "disruption" are being used to describe something that is far more scientific and evolutionary. The World Economic Forum has an initiative called the "The Fourth Industrial Revolution" and the 48th annual meeting this month is entitled: Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.
So what?
The CEO's of this world are on edge. They wonder if they will have enough intellectual and operational transformation in this digital and fractured world to survive. They worry about the new born threats of the digital age such as ransomware, block chain and artificial intelligence. Welcome to the conversation around the C-Suite and the new normal.
Yet who better to capture the essence of why this matters, than Jeffrey Ritter:
"When the information you need to make decisions is controlled, the quality of your decision is controlled and the possible outcomes from which you can choose slip from your control. Where there is less information, your decisions become vulnerable. As an executive, an IT architect, an investment manager, an educational director, or even a parent, your job is to lead with good decisions. You want your decisions to be ones that others will follow. But those ambitions erode when those fighting the war to control digital information are winning."
What is the cloud? Your information on another organizations computer. The race for faster decision advantage has now transformed to the race for the fastest TrustDecisions. Decisions executed on trusted information is why we have the wave of new technologies embedded with encryption, biometrics and even Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
Digital Transformation in your enterprise changes your reason for existence. The answers in many cases will be more about your people, not the technology. It will require bold action and sweeping personal imagination. The definition of imagination:
...the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.The trustworthiness of your future decisions are at stake. The imagination of the people around you is a limiting factor. As the CEO of your Fortune 500 company or the leader of your Series A startup, the time has come for your transformation...
