Speed and a Doctrine for the Future

Throughout my career in the high tech industry I have often heard the business maxim, “First, develop a business strategy and then find the technology to support it.” My experience over the years, however, has led me to believe this maxim is misguided.   Let me explain by asking several questions.

What came first digital commerce or the Internet?  Mobile payments or wireless networks?  Commercial airline travel or the airplane, knights in shiny armour being used as shock troops, or stirrups?  Trivia answer: Stirrups!  Technology has a long history of appearing first, and then strategies are formed later.

What we are learning is if our outdated business strategies are dictating the speed of our technology adoptions, then we are in big trouble! The world is moving much too fast and we must align the tempo of our business strategy evolution with the pace of technology innovations and our customer adoptions of those technologies.  We need to invest in future oriented thinking and the exploration of how new technologies and trends will alter the manner in which we interact with customers and operate our businesses.

"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Must We be Good to Have a Good Future?

The renowned Futurist Gerd Leonhard, in this short and impactful video, says in order to create a good future - we must be good.  He suggests four focus areas for the future: people, prosperity, purpose and planet.  If you agree with Gerd, then the first question is "What is good?  Secondly, "How do we become good?"  And, thirdly, "How do we use that good to create the future we all want?"

A satisfying definition of "good" for me is something that promotes happiness, community well-being, is loving, pleasing, admirable, kind, desirable and virtuous.  Once we figure out how to become these things ourselves, we must embed them in our technology in the form of AI, to help us shape a "good" future.

As more of our daily activities and interactions involve artificial intelligence, we will want our interfaces and communications with AI (digital assistants, chatbots and robots) to feel and be "good."  We will want AI to make accurate, consistent and "good" decisions, and then to execute "good" actions.  Training AI to be good and act good is a real challenge.  These kinds of philosophical, moral and inspired traits and actions are not AI's strong suite.  Now that I am writing this I realize they aren't particularly the strong suite of humans either.

I can imagine a scenario where an algorithm processes data that suggests three equally logical actions.  The final choice, however, is determined by which option is most heavily weighted to the "good."  Which one of us is going to determine the "good" weight?

The obvious problem with this scenario is us humans can't agree on what is good, or to what degree it is good.  Feeding and sheltering homeless families and giving them medical assistance is considered good by some, and bad by others.  Saving millions of lives by vaccinating people is considered good by some and bad by others.

Our artificial intelligence powered digital assistants, chatbot and robots are all awaiting their instructions about how they can help create a "good" future.  What should I tell them?  

Watch the latest on Oracle's digital assistants, chatbots and artificial intelligence here in my interview with Oracle expert Suhas Uliyar.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Will You Trust a Robot?

Jeff Bezos and team launched 66.5 miles into suborbital space on a rocket ship with no pilot this week.  The rocket ship operated autonomously using sensors and artificial intelligence.  That takes trust. They had to believe in the science and that the AI system would get them safely there and back.  They had to have trust in the scientists, programmers, engineers, physicists and chemists.  They had to have trust in the math and physics.  They had to trust the coding and formulas used in the algorithms.  They had to trust in the data coming from the sensors.  Although there were likely many failures along the way, they trusted the process - the scientific method.

The Latest Developments in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Assistants at Oracle

My brilliant friend Suhas Uliyar is Oracle's VP of Digital Assistants, AI & Integration.  We connected on Zoom last week where he shared the latest developments in AI, and the progress his team is making in creating digital assistants that understand sentiment, swear words and soon have reasoning powers.  

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Speed and Transformational Leadership

It took Magellan’s crew three years sailing ships to circumnavigate the earth.  Today, at hypersonic speeds of 7,680 MPH, it takes just over three hours to circumnavigate the earth.  Data on the Internet, however, travels at 670 million mph, which means it only takes milliseconds to circumnavigate the earth.  In this age of digital businesses and digital interactions, companies must digitally transform to work effectively in a world where global business and information moves at these mind-blowing speeds.

It's not just IT systems that are impacted by the volume and speed of information.  The creators of business processes that were designed and developed in an analog area, simply never envisioned a business environment that would require these operational tempos.  Analog business processes were designed to have humans involved.  These dependencies were designed to slow down the process to ensure accuracy, compliance and accountability.  Today, however, operating at the slow speeds of an analog, human dependent business process, will doom your company.  Analog business processes must be quickly automated via robotic process automation using artificial intelligence and machine learning to effectively interact with impatient digital customers and B2B partners.

The Future of Managers

Managers must explain a lot of things.  Early in my career I managed a team of six IT experts responsible for EDI and other forms of business-to-business data exchanges with suppliers.  Our data, from planning and manufacturing systems, was shared with our suppliers' to support the just-in-time manufacturing of electronics.  Our senior leadership would often ask us to defend our data, yet we often struggled to explain where it originated from or how the numbers were generated.  The data we were using came from a figurative "black box."  We received it without explanation.  That of course was an untenable position for a manager.

In the near future managers will increasingly depend on artificial intelligence for assistance, and hopefully it will be explainable AI to avoid the challenges I faced.  Explainable AI (XAI) is artificial intelligence in which the results, and the logic and data used, can be understood by humans.  Understanding how the system works is critical to establishing trust.  

As AI becomes integrated into more and more businesses and IT systems, the role it plays will become ever more critical.  Any questions about why an AI system made a particular decision or took an action must be able to be quickly deciphered, explained and adjusted if necessary.  Having trust in the AI system is a critical first step for managers to open up and use it for an expanding list of tasks.

AI systems, implemented correctly can be a manager's right hand.  Common benefits of AI are:

• Reduced human errors
• Is available 24x7x365
• Can complete mundane, repetitive and routine administrative work without distraction
• Can scale
• Can make faster decisions, and take faster actions based upon established business processes 
• Can find solutions and innovations faster by analyzing patterns within oceans of data

In a report by HBR, it was found that 54% of a manager's time is usually spent on administrative tasks - tasks well suited for AI assistance.  If AI can take over these tasks it could free up managers to spend more time on the things humans are best at including applying their knowledge of organizational history and culture, empathy, ethical reflection, judgement, creativity, experiments, innovation, strategy, discretion, experience and improvisation. 

In the HBR report there are five pieces of advice for managers of the future:

1. Leave administration to AI
2. Focus on judgement work
3. Treat intelligent machines/agents as colleagues
4. Work like a designer
5. Develop your social skills and networks

I can imagine a scenario in the near future where there will be an organizational chart of robots, robot workers, managers and robot executives.  Each using XAI to explain how they are managing the robots, tasks and operations under their responsibility.  I guess that means we humans will need to figure that out first.

Read more on AI here:

• Redemptive AI, Biases and the American Dream

• The Future of AI Starts Yesterday

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Redemptive AI, Biases and the American Dream

The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States - a set of ideals which includes the opportunity for prosperity, success and access to upward social mobility for individuals and their families.  The last thing any of us want is to invent and deploy technologies that are barriers to this dream.

Artificial intelligence (AI), configured wrongly, can become a barrier.  Many companies today are now using AI to interview candidates, interpret their potential, and rank them from best to worst.  How emotive a person's face muscles are, their use of the english language, and the sophistication of their vocabulary are now all being used to select or reject job candidates.

One can only imagine how difficult AI interviews are for immigrants and refugees looking for their first big opportunity.  Facial expressions are often influenced by culture.  English being a second, third or fourth language could present all kinds of barriers to getting past the AI gatekeepers and into the land of opportunity. 

The Future of AI Starts Yesterday

"The best time to start implementing artificial intelligence in the future was yesterday." 

                ~Kevin Benedict

Artificial intelligence (narrow AI) today is beyond its proof-of-concept phase - as it is already proven and delivering tactical value in many well documented areas: 

• Reduction in human error
• Available 24x7x365
• Improved quality
• Improved productivity
• Improved efficiencies
• Able to dependably complete mundane, repetitive and routine jobs
• Makes faster decisions and taking quicker actions

Artificial intelligence, although still in its infancy, is already delivering impressive results and competitive advantages for those prepared.  The preparation, however, is not insignificant and requires much work including:

Projecting Power and Influence

At the height of Rome's power they had more than 29 great military highways, 113 provinces were interconnected by 372 great road-links, and the whole road system comprised more than 400,000 km of roads, of which over 80,500 km were stone-paved.  This enabled the romans to flourish as a civilization for over 400 years and to project their power and influence to the ends of the known world.

The Roman roads offered value in many ways.  They enabled trade and supplies to move, cultural influences to expand, knowledge to be shared and the use of effective military strategies based on the predictable movements of Roman legionnaires who could march 24 miles in 5 summer hours when pressed for short amounts of time, and 20 miles a day indefinitely in all weather.  This was only possible because of the investment in and the quality of the roads.

Today the internet is the modern equivalent of the Roman road.  Products can be sold, tracked and delivered just about anywhere in the world because of the internet.  The internet, however, also enables those with nefarious intent to project power and influence on people around the world, and it is the place where information warfare is now fought.

Future of Warfare and Its Gamification

Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before - or to self destruct. ~ Future of Life Institute 

In the future, warfare will be fought increasingly by engineers, software developers, scientists, accountants and politicians, which is a historical anomaly and worth some consideration.

Historically war was conducted to compel a positive political outcome for the victor.  This was accomplished by diminishing an adversaries will, or resolve to fight by making them suffer.  Once an adversary suffered enough and they lost their will to continue - peace was achieved on the terms of the victor.  Here is where the entire twisted logic of war and violence breaks down.  In the future, warfare is likely to be increasingly fought between machines that don't suffer.  They just do it - as Nike advocated.

Reimagining Higher Education: The New-Age CFO with Expert Mike Gower of Rutgers University

In this backstage interview with Rutger University's Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer Mike Gower, we explore the importance of student retention, reducing student debt loads and using artificial intelligence to help alert staff that a particular student is struggling.  We also talk about making education more efficient by using a combination of in-person and digital classrooms and much more.  Enjoy!

 

To view the entire Reimagining Higher Education, The New Age CFO 60 minute virtual event click here.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Does Uncle Sam Really Want You?

Uncle Sam doesn’t really want a gangly 18-year-old soldier to stand guard outside the gate of a military base, rather he wants a wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) system that provides surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence-gathering using specialized software and camera systems to detect and track hundreds of people and vehicles all at the same time over a city-sized area.  

Uncle Sam doesn’t really want a blurry eyed, half asleep and distracted human pilot flying in circles trying to find camouflaged bad guys on the ground, rather he wants a multispectral system, that can see things invisible to human eyes, consisting of four high-definition cameras covering five spectral bands; a three-color diode pump laser designator and rangefinder; laser spot search and track capability; automated sensor and laser bore sight alignment; three-mode target tracker., and MTS sensors that offers multiple fields of view, electronic zoom, and multimode video tracking.

The Future of University Recruitment, Retention and Reimagining

If universities know what makes a good university student, then shouldn't they be sharing those details and helping to prepare more students in advance?  Why are universities mostly hands-off until application deadlines approach - when it's already too late to have an impact?  

I propose that limited spaces for on-campus students, plus a surplus in demand has kept universities from innovating and improving their recruitment processes.  It's time for a change.  Forbes reports, "For spring 2021, undergraduate enrollment dropped by 4.5% compared with 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Community colleges experienced the steepest decline: Enrollment was down 9.5% this spring compared to the prior year, and it was down 9.5% in fall 2020, too.  Even before the pandemic the trends were pointing to lower enrollments.  These trends will have significant impacts on universities' priorities and future business models.

Universities have long complained about the poor quality of students coming out of high school, yet they have done little if anything to improve the quality.  As global competition increases from more online options and non-traditional players, universities must think differently about recruitment and outcomes.

Fewer enrollments now and in the future mean increased competition for new students.  Isn't it about time colleges started to seek competitive advantages by reaching out to potential student/customers earlier in order to assist them in getting better prepared for higher education? 

Now that we have survived and learned from our pandemic experiences, we understand how to provide digital education.  Once the digital transformation work and infrastructures are in place, extending online classes, programs and personalized educational experiences to potential future students doesn't cost that much.  These can be extended as a way to increase the number of students who want to enroll, plus it helps the university identify the best potential students early and enhances a university's brand value.  

What is certain, is that the way universities have operated for centuries is no longer adequate for surviving the future.  In the future, the ecosystems of higher education must reach out and embrace potential students much earlier, focus on improving student retention through personalized and automated help, and include all graduates and former students in lifelong learning relationships.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Future, Complexity and Human Thinking

Don't let me drive a motorized vehicle after writing a long article.  In fact, don't let me drive any vehicle motorized or not.  My brain is often deep down a rabbit hole pondering data, crafting logical arguments, analyzing research findings, storytelling, wordsmithing etc, and any remaining brain cycles are not enough to drive safely. If my brain capacity can be nearly consumed while just sitting at a desk, think about the brain cycles consumed by pilots flying modern fighter jets in combat!

Modern fighter pilots have a plethora of onboard sensors that collect and stream massive volumes of data every second. The object of so many sensors is to give our pilots more information at a faster rate in order to achieve competitive advantages over adversaries. Too much information, however, is debilitating.  That is the reason the task of flying will increasingly be handed over to robotic, AI-powered pilots, so humans can use their limited brain capacity to focus on assignments with a slower tempo - like accomplishing the overall mission.

In order for jet fighter pilots to understand all the data pouring in, special helmets and UXs were designed to dumb down and slow down the need for human analysis.  Even with simplified user interfaces, pilots reported they struggled with information overload.   That is why the role of future military pilots is quickly evolving away from flying aircraft to operating flying command and control centers.

The massive rivers of data that keeps an aircraft flying has reached the level where humans are incapable of processing it fast enough to be successful.  In fact the F-35 is said to be unflyable without AI.  We now have reached the human thinking version of the sound barrier.  To push through and beyond it we will need AI augmentation to expand and extend our mental processing power. 

The Future of Human Experiences (HX)

I have a confession.  Although my family would have been considered working poor (my dad worked odd jobs in construction, sawmills and factories), I was able to attend a university, pay my tuition by working on a dairy farm and graduate.  This ultimately opened doors to membership among the "elite" by way of a college degree and a job with a living wage.  

It is easy to forget the struggles of one's past when life has moved on.  It's easy to assume our personal experiences are representative of most.  My recent research, however, has revealed this to be untrue.  In many parts of America, there are macro and micro-economic forces and trends that are negatively impacting life opportunities, careers, hope and the quality of the human experience.

When a customer complains of bad customer service, how should the business respond?  Apologize, empathize and ensure it doesn't happen again.  If businesses ignore these complaints they will quickly suffer the results.  It's not too dissimilar when it comes to leading and/or governing constituents.  Citizens also have experiences on a spectrum of good to bad.  These human experiences make up a person's quality of life and are critically important to them.  

Businesses cannot thrive, if their customers aren't thriving.  Countries can't thrive, if their citizens are not thriving.  What follows is a look at the human experience from the perspective of the less educated and underemployed workers in America.

First, we cannot begin to understand the minds and actions of large numbers of American workers without first understanding there are two different Americas, one made up of a less educated or under-employed workforce suffering through deindustrialization, economic pain, reduced opportunities and community decay, while the other consists of highly educated, advantaged and elite individuals experiencing rapid wage increases and fortuitous and abundant career opportunities. 

For many Americans, deindustrialization has reduced the quality of their human experience.  Many experience delayed and strained marriages, broken and delayed families, poor physical and mental health, addictions, diminished local economies, and even a reduced sense of worth, status, purpose and hope.  What is causing these declines in fortune?  Let’s take a look at deindustrialization, technological innovations and some additional variables that have worked symbiotically to create these unfortunate human experiences.

Purpose Led Future

The future is not unexpected.  Yesterday’s future arrived today.  It’s an inevitable pattern.  I have been reading a lot about inevitability lately.  Last week I listened to Bill Gates and Rashida Jones on the Ask Big Questions podcast.  In this podcast Bill Gates shared that we have already damaged the earth and the negative consequences are inevitable.  

In my work over the past few months, I have written a series of articles under the title of The Future of Information, Truth and Influence.  Many of the articles address the negative and unanticipated consequences of social media on our society.  Many authors of the research I have been studying seem to have a fatalistic view.  We have let the genie out of the bottle and there is no going back.  It’s inevitable. 

Echo Chambers Involving Old and New Media

Twitter has been widely credited with influencing the 2016 US presidential election.  Not because lot's of voters read tweets, but because lot's of journalists do.  Many of these journalists work for traditional media, which includes TV, radio, newspapers, newsletters, etc.  The sheer volume of controversial tweets generated ensured that journalists looked no further than Twitter for topics to cover.  This kept the spotlight on those who understood how both traditional and social media works, and were skilled at exploiting it.

Journalists and their editors understand that controversy and outrage are good for business. CBS's executive Les Moonves was quoted in 2016 as saying, "the Trump phenomenon may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." And by now we all know that social media algorithms thrive on engagement, and there is no better tool for engagement than tweeting outrageous things.  The cacophony of controversy fueled both traditional media's and new medias' business models.  A win for all media - if not necessarily for democracy.

The Vulnerable Targets of Social Engineering and Mind Manipulation

It is disturbing to learn that if social engineers identify you as older, prone to conspiracy theories, low-informed and/or less educated, working poor or black, they will target and bombard you with nonstop disinformation on social media at a level much higher than others.  Why?  To answer that question let's review the rules and strategies social engineers follow to bend the minds of the most vulnerable:

1. Research has shown that less-informed and less-educated voters are more likely to believe falsehoods.
2. Social engineers have found it is easy to mislead older people and those prone to conspiracy theories.  
3. Those that already have a bent toward conspiracy theories are most inclined to spread unverified rumors.
4. Social engineers understand that the most vulnerable to mind manipulation are the lower-middle class, working poor, elderly and blacks. These groups are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy. They’re easiest to influence by sharing stories that others are out to trick them and the world is out to get them. 

How Social Engineering Works on Our Brains

Social engineering has proven it is possible to know the societal or 'systematic' determinants of human 'behavior' in a way that permits them to be manipulated and controlled from afar. 

Our minds are vulnerable.  The weaknesses in our thinking and decision-making processes are well documented.  When these vulnerabilities and weaknesses are exposed to professionals with nefarious intent who are trained in social engineering techniques bad things happen.  Social media and messaging platforms both enable scaled access to and profit from these vulnerabilities.  They expose the brains of billions (Facebook has over 2.7 billion users) to these techniques by selling and promoting access to our innermost feelings and emotions. 

It is critical that we as humans, neighbors and communities understand how social engineering techniques work on our brains and our societies.  We must recognize these methodologies so we can defend against them.  We need to identify them and call them out.  We must warn others. We must legislate against these techniques and hold social media and messaging platforms accountable.

Social media apps and platforms are used by our children, the elderly and everyone in between.  These platforms give direct access to our brains.  They support mind manipulation at scale.  What follows is an extensive, although incomplete list of the strategies, tools and techniques of social engineering I have gleaned from literally hundreds or articles, academic papers and reports.  I have organized them into six categories: Amplify and Promote, Constraining, Emotions and Motivations, Mind Manipulation, Personal Information and Strategies and Tactics.

Disinformation is Both Expensive and Deadly

The Covid-19 pandemic ambushed businesses and global economies.  Since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020, job loss has been one of the most significant consequences. The U.S. has recently reached a total of 60 million unemployment claims, while loss to the US GDP is estimated to be around $7.6 trillion.  

In addition, a recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank revealed that 9 million small firms in the US are at risk of closing for good in 2021 as a result of the pandemic.  The International Monetary Fund estimated the total cost to the global economy from Covid-19 will ultimately top $28 trillion in lost output (the time frame was years 2020-2025).  

Social Engineering Escapes the War Zone

The phrase social engineering splashed into the public's view as a result of actions from a cluster of companies whose services focused on influencing and manipulating people's thinking.  The history of these companies is complex, but seems to have all started with Strategic Communication Laboratories, which became SCL Ltd, then it became SCL Group, which then created a subsidiary called Behavioral Dynamics Institute (BDI) and another subsidiary infamously known as Cambridge Analytica, a company that was intimately involved in influencing US voters during the 2016 elections.  Cambridge Analytica stated at the time that their expertise was in "behavior change," "military influence campaigns," "psychographic segmentation" and other types of mind-manipulation.

SCL Group's services focused on psychological operations (psyops), which is a strategy to alter people's minds through the use of rumours, disinformation, bots, fictitious accounts and fake news.  The BDI subsidiary claimed they had several leading psychologists and strategists on staff that developed tools to better understand audiences and to shape their behaviors.  They claimed they had invested over $25 million USD in developing scientific approaches for "influencing target audiences." They provided services such as delivering training in counter-Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe funded by the Government of Canada, as well as conducting research on target audience analysis which has influenced counter-insurgency doctrine. 

Fooled by Psychographic Profiles and Social Engineering

In the 1960s psychographic researchers began studying how to understand consumers and their behaviors at a deeper level based on personality traits, emotional triggers, interests, needs, values and attitudes, etc.  A few decades later these findings were dusted off and combined with neuromarketing (the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers' motivations, preferences, and decision) to study how various advertisements and political messages impacted people with different psychological or psychographic profiles.  

The data for a large number of psychographic profiles was infamously collected from personality quizzes, surveys and games on Facebook and other social media platforms without the knowledge of the user, or as claimed - the platforms themselves.  All of this data was eventually combined with social engineering strategies and methods, and a military tactic called “information operations” by political strategists for the purpose of  influencing large populations.

SAP's Vaccine Collaboration Hub - An Interview with Michael Byczkowski, GVP and Head of Healthcare for SAP

Our guest this week is SAP's GVP and Head of Healthcare Industry, Michael Byczkowski. We take a deep dive into healthcare trends pre-pandemic, and then explore how the pandemic has changed priorities globally. We explore SAP's Vaccine Collaboration Hub and other technologies and solution they have introduced to help support the global fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. We end by looking into the future and how our experiences this last year may change the face of healthcare forever.  Enjoy!

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Social Engineering - Mind Manipulation at Scale

Social engineering poses potential threats to human rights, markets and democracies. These concerns are based on the notion that humans are a product of their environment and the information they consume.

The average person in the US spends approximately 3 hours each day consuming data from their device screens.  That totals about a month and a half of screen time each year.  We are influenced by that time, and it changes our thinking and behaviors.  Is our time investment making us better or worse as humans, parents, employees, leaders, mentors, friends, etc?  Are we being influenced to become the kind of person we want to be?

Our addictive dependence upon the internet and the information therein is the revolutionary development of our time. Today, we have approximately 26 to 50 billion devices connected to the internet. For every PC or handset connected to the internet, 5 to 10 other devices will be sold with their own internet connection. These devices are both collecting data on us, and pushing information/disinformation to us. The applications, platforms and the messages we receive from them are not random. They are purposeful and managed by organizations intent on influencing us. Often these influencing efforts are invisible or overlooked by us. The influence strategies and campaigns being directed at us are called social engineering - the focus of this article.

Esperanto's Missing Ecosystem - Bringing Order to Sustainability Chaos

Esperanto is not worth learning to many because there aren't many speakers. Without an influx of speakers, it's just a toy language for nerds. 

In 1887 the Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof developed a language he called Esperanto.  He first described the language in the book The International Language, which he published in five different languages.  Why? No one could read Esperanto.  In 2021 it is still mostly the case.

When a person ponders learning a second language they often consider the number of speakers it has.  They associate value with numbers.  In the case of Esperanto it still has less than 2,000 native speakers.  With such a small group of speakers it is mostly an interesting academic topic today, but not very practical as a language for everyday use or business.  It needs an ecosystem of participants all actively using it to make it grow and thrive.

5G and the Future Impact with Ericsson's Expert Rob Tiffany

This is Part 2 of my interview with Rob Tiffany, VP & Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson.  He walks us through his views on the future impact of 5G on consumers and industries.  

Watch Part 1 of this interview here.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Ecosystem Strategies Dominate the Future - Cowboys or Not

In the rural west of the United States, it is common to meet people with libertarian political views - leave me alone and I will leave you alone.  It’s a cowboy type ethos of being independent and self-sufficient.  That’s one reason it’s so hard to get them to be compliant with social distancing and mask wearing.  They seem to struggle with sacrificing some independence for a common community good. 

Although these perspectives may serve rural cowboys well, working alone is not helpful when a business is trying to operate in an environment with emerging and competing ecosystems, which are organizations working together for their mutual benefit.  Ecosystem business strategies change the operating conditions and rules of business.  In order to survive and thrive in business today, a basic understanding of ecosystem business strategies is required.  In addition, the ability to cooperate and play nice with others in order to develop a shared and mutually beneficial value chain is critical.

When I was the CEO of an start-up mobile technology company 19 years ago, it was before Apple had mobile devices, iTunes and the Apple App Store.  It was before Google had developed Android and Google Play.  Our mobile software solutions had to be downloaded directly from our servers and individually loaded on every mobile device.  We had to spend massive amounts of time developing standardized ways of supporting and servicing our own customers.  Today all of these processes are standardized within giant ecosystems and all the ecosystem participants share in the value that was created.

5G and the New World with Ericsson Expert Rob Tiffany

5G expert Rob Tiffany joins me for a deep dive discussion on the impact of 5G on businesses.  If you don't already know Rob, he is an author, innovator, inventor, submariner, philanthropist, programmer, foodie, grunge music fan and VP and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.