Mind the Gap

Our partners at GE Digital hosted their annual marquis event, ‘Minds + Machines’, in San Francisco last week, where they unveiled an important research study called “The Digital Gap.” It’s a great piece of work, and Bill Ruh's LinkedIn article summarizes it well here.

The “digital gap” that research exposed is very real and spans more companies than just industrial ones. But why is it that (according to the study), “80% of executives say that the Industrial Internet of Things will be transformational,” but only “8% say it is engrained in their business”? It boils down to the people. There just aren’t enough digital minds to keep up with the pace of change that our beloved machines can set.

Sounds obvious, but it’s a difficult and complicated challenge to overcome. Just look back at the last time the world was completely disrupted by technology: the consumer internet boom in the ‘90s. As Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera, brilliantly lays out in this YouTube video, successful internet companies weren’t born by just dropping shopping malls onto websites. Yes, the technology was important. But more important was the ability to dynamically shape the technology to fit quirky, poorly understood, ever-evolving consumer needs. Hence the importance of A/B testing, agile development, and, wait for it…an empowered field force. That’s right, the people in the field mattered most, especially when the new tech was ground breaking.

Fast forward to today’s massive market disruption driven by digital technology. If you ask ten people to define ‘digital transformation,’ you’ll likely get ten different answers. Sure, it has something to do with cloud technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). But what will make one company successful in digitally transforming verses another? Andrew Ng posits that successful digital companies will be the ones that put AI first, while also mastering strategic data acquisition and storage, driving pervasive automation, and – get this – rewriting employee job descriptions. According to Ng, it’s not just a matter of acquiring digital talent to bridge the gap. It’s going to require a complete human resources rewrite. 

As with any market disruption, the commercial function will ultimately be the vanguard for corporate success in the digital era. That’s why the focus on market facing talent is of paramount importance. Every day I ask my leadership team: Are we hiring the best? Are we getting truly diverse slates of digital candidates? Are we giving our people the tools they need to be successful? Do they know how to empathize with our customers—to truly understand their articulated and unarticulated needs? Do they know how to bring our full breadth of capabilities to market? Do we have the right feedback mechanisms in place to ensure our people can accurately represent the best interest of our customers? Are we agile enough to truly leverage the feedback? 

Ensuring that our commercial minds keep pace with those beloved machines will be one of the greatest challenges in driving digital transformation, with vast implications for the way we work, communicate, and grow our company.