Collaboration Forum Series 5: Building a brighter future (Week-6)

There are four areas and the first is called delayed participation. Often, companies start a small project, don’t really get it and it gets put to the side. Those first projects are usually quite crude and simple, but it’s important to be part of the tech ecosystem, and to not wait and see.

It’s also really easy to stick with the familiar. It’s a psychological fact that humans are risk averse. And that creates a challenge when companies are trying to find new ways of doing things. They need to venture into the unknown and that can be scary.

The third thing is that companies have to commit fully. That is difficult, especially if they risk cannibalising their existing products, for example, and if they are working in areas where they don’t see results early on.

The last one is persistence. When businesses start working on a new product line or innovation it has to be fully supported by the management team. They also need to have patience. There will be deadlines missed, budgets missed, more money needed, and it will take longer than expected.

Recently, I got a question from a software engineer in his late 20s. He was thinking of going back to school and getting a master’s degree in software engineering. He asked me for advice, and I said: ‘well do something different’. Because you could go deeper into software engineering, but you could also study philosophy or business. Whatever it is, it will broaden your perspective. I think that’s really important, on a personal and corporate level.

Today, a large corporation does need an understanding of automation, artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing, for example. But they can’t expect all employees to have a deep understanding of these areas. In any field, companies need the experts to come in and make sense of it.

But I do see companies being more engaged in education. There’s a lot of push in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths, for example. But even though I live with technology, visiting an art gallery, going into the movies or reading a book is also very, very useful.

I think we have crossed that line from time to time. Companies like Facebook, for example, are definitely pushing the boundaries. We can discuss if it has crossed the line or not, but I opt out of being tracked as much as possible. That’s a power struggle. Companies like Facebook, Google, or even Amazon, make a lot of money selling targeted ads.

We do want people to use technology, we just want them to use it in an ethical, thoughtful way. I could list 100 technologies, and there would be good reasons for not using any of them, and good reasons for why we use them. We need to have that discussion, people need to be informed, because technology in itself is useless unless we use it in the right way.