Futurist Roy Amara stated that people tend to overestimate the effects of technology in the
short run and underestimate them in the long run, and artificial intelligence embodies the
truth of his observation. Babson’s Thomas Davenport reports on what AI has accomplished
so far, where it has failed, and where it might soon spectacularly succeed. While AI clearly
offers value already, “much of that value isn’t terribly sexy or visible,” he says. He explains the
different types of tech that commonly fall under the AI umbrella, explores the ways businesses
are incorporating AI into their processes, and examines the ethical considerations of this powerful
new technology. For instance, he says, “A new social credit system in China, which will be
mandatory by 2020, is likely to punish consumers for political dissent.” Still, most predictions
for the future are still guesswork, he admits. “All we know for sure is that people won’t do all
the work in the future, and machines won’t either.” (MIT Press, US$29.95)
Changes in the way education is delivered,
particularly online, have produced extraordinary
amounts of data, but there is still
much to discover about how analytics can
improve the learning experience. Those issues
are explored in this collection of essays
edited by David Niemi of Kaplan Inc., Roy
Pea of Stanford, Bror Saxberg of the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative, and Richard Clark of
the University of Southern California. So far, there’s little proof
that access to data significantly improves education, write
Niemi, Pea, and Philip Piety of the University of Maryland.
“Simply because analytics can predict that certain groups of
students are more likely than others to drop out of school, for
example, doesn’t mean that teachers or anyone else will know
what to do about that.” They believe that learning analytics
must become a unified field that draws on insights from computer
scientists, cognitive scientists, educational experts, and
other groups. Contributors address topics that range from how
learning analytics differs from other kinds of education data
and how it can be used to improve academic persistence. A
timely look at a topic of growing importance to higher education.
(Information Age Publishing, US$45.99)
“Transformation may be one of the hardest things leaders are
called on to do,” note Nathan Furr of INSEAD, Kyle Nel of Uncommon
Partners and formerly of Lowe’s, and Thomas Zoëga
Ramsøy of Copenhagen Business School. They describe how
they transformed Lowe’s from a second-place hardware retailer to a futuristic home renovation company
that lets customers use 3-D and augmented
reality tools to envision remodeling projects.
While the authors relied on radical
approaches—such as asking science fiction
writers to imagine the company’s future and
presenting the information to executives in
comic-book form—they offer three steps all
business leaders can take to achieve transformation.
They must develop a strategic narrative that tells
a story about a reimagined future; they must break the bottlenecks,
such as fear and resistance, that derail change; and they
must design key performance indicators that let them know
they are on the right track. “The future, as a fixed destination
to be reached at some impending date, does not actually exist,”
they write. “The future only happens when someone takes action
and creates it.” (Harvard Business Press Review, US$32)
Linda Ginzel of the University of Chicago
has created a practical workbook
built around a core tenet: Leadership
is a choice. “You make choices that will
change the future, create better outcomes,
generate more meaning, and help shape
your future self.” Her goal is to help people
“unfreeze” from current limited views
to more expansive and useful approaches
that will allow them to continue to grow. She takes readers
through a variety of thought-provoking exercises in which, for
instance, they write their personal definitions of leadership, describe their earliest experiences as leaders, or compose a
commencement speech full of their own earned wisdom. In
one exercise, she asks readers to articulate their foundational
beliefs in a brief essay. “Understanding and communicating are
key leadership skills,” she explains. “When leading, you need
to be able to recognize the gist of something and then be able to
communicate that gist to your peers.” The book is slim but full
of powerful ideas. (B2Books, US$24.95)
Despite the fact that Tim Calkins does, in
fact, open with an account of how to spruce
up a chicken, his book is less about poultry
and more about presentation. His goal is to
help everyone, from student to business executive,
become better at standing in front of
people and delivering information. Calkins,
a clinical professor at Northwestern, briskly
lists the critical elements every presentation
must have—such as a cover page, a purpose, an agenda,
an executive summary, and a conclusion—but he also offers
insights on the external factors that will affect a presentation’s
success. For instance, who is the intended audience—the CEO
or the marketing staff? What do those people care about?
When he worked for a manager who valued fresh thinking, he
framed every suggestion as an innovation. “I was innovating
on promotions, advertising, packaging design, and customer
service. I had the most innovative team in the company.” With
both brevity and humor, Calkins shows anyone how to present
in public. (Page Two Books, US$19.95)
Because technology is critical for almost all
innovation, write Heather Smith and James
McKeen of Queen’s University, “IT must
reorient itself into a forward-thinking, business-
oriented unit capable of marshaling
forces to produce innovative business models.”
Smith and McKeen interviewed a focus
group of senior IT executives and managers
in the U.S. and Canada to discover how these
CIOs believe IT can drive innovation in organizations. They
identified three stages of IT innovation: opportunity, defined
as developing an understanding of the specific technologies
that could be disruptive; discovery, the process of determining
how these technologies can be integrated into a strategy; and
delivery, or the development of management practices to govern
the new IT. Along the way, they consider everything from
the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence to the
challenges faced by IT leaders when their organizations resist
new technologies. “IT is moving into a brave new world where creativity, innovation, and new ways to deliver value are the
norm,” they write. Therefore, they say, just like businesses, IT
itself must continually adapt. (Prospect Press, US$24.50)
“Disruption has become a permanent condition
of modern markets,” writes Harvard’s
Thales Teixeira. Most executives believe they
must counter disruption with digital innovations,
but Teixeira has a different theory: He
thinks they need to innovate their business
models, particularly by decoupling one part of
the customer experience from another. This
requires them to turn their attention away
from their own products and services to focus on what Teixeira
calls the customer value chain, or “the series of activities that
customers perform in order to fulfill their needs and wants.
These activities include searching for, evaluating, purchasing,
using, and disposing of products.” For instance, Amazon’s price
checking app allowed customers to visit Best Buy to perform
one task (evaluating merchandise), while they performed another
task (purchasing) online. After trying many unsuccessful
tactics to discourage this practice, Best Buy decided to benefit
from the decoupling behavior by renting showroom kiosks to
Samsung, LG, and other retailers, a business model innovation
that has been highly profitable. Teixeira advises other company
leaders to figure out where decoupling is happening in their
industries—and innovate around it. (Currency, US$28)
“The most important breakthroughs rarely
follow blaring trumpets and a red carpet,
with central authorities offering overflowing
pots of tools and money,” writes biotech
entrepreneur Safi Bahcall. “They are
surprisingly fragile. They pass through long
dark tunnels of skepticism and uncertainty,
crushed or neglected, their champions often
dismissed as crazy.” Moreover, inventions
such as radar, cancer-fighting drugs, and smartphones can’t
be developed without the financial backing and personnel resources
of large corporations or governmental agencies, which
rarely want to underwrite wild ideas. How can big organizations
become open to radical innovation? Bahcall turns to physics
and the concept of phase transition—the moment when,
for instance, water turns to ice. In that transitional phase, the
molecules are malleable enough to be fluid but rigid enough to
hold a shape. Bahcall thinks that, with a few small changes in
structure, even mature and conservative organizations can find
the sweet spot of transition where innovation is both permitted
and supported. (St. Martin’s Press, US$28.99)