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The world of work is changing, fast. At WIRED Smarter, our one-day conference about the future of business, some of smartest minds in the technology world gathered to help sort out the transformational from the transitory.
Here's the best of what we learned from a packed speaker lineup that included Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, and the author and former vice chair of GE, Beth Comstock.
Find that balance between human and machine
“It would be easier to let a machine do everything, but luxury cannot be exclusively AI-created or drone-delivered or 3d printed,” says Federico Marchetti, CEO of Yoox Net-A-Porter group. “Nurturing human talent is a choice that we can all make.”
In his own luxury fashion business, Marchetti strikes a fine balance between automation and the human touch. His factories are largely automated, but the final packaging touch is always delivered by a human. “The customer loves to receive a package, it’s a kind of childlike process,” he says.
And as the manufacturing becomes even more automated, a human touch will become the ultimate hallmark of a luxury brand, Marchetti says. “I believe that in the future there will be one label to convey quality – and that will be 'made by humans'.”
All technology is political
Technology isn’t invented, or implemented, in a vacuum. “There’s nothing inevitable about what gets updated and adopted and why it gets used,” says Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Take electricity as an example. Technology initially developed in the late nineteenth century didn’t really come into its own in until the late 1950s and 60s, when widespread electrification in the developed world fuelled entirely new consumer behaviours.
So why didn’t the new technology immediately transform our homes? Because the infrastructure to bring electricity into the home just wasn’t there. And the same will probably be true of autonomous vehicles, Coyle says. Building autonomous cars is one thing, but where is the infrastructure to connect them all together going to come from? What are the business models that get people to pay for autonomous vehicles? How do we decide on the legal framework around autonomous car crashes?
“The important questions are all about the social context and the economic context,” Coyle says.
Understand your customer
Deliveroo has three different kinds of customer, says Will Shu, the co-founder and CEO of the food delivery company. People ordering food, Delivery drivers, and restaurants. Keeping all of them happy is the key to running his business. “Understand your consumer, understand what their pain points are and understand what they’ll want in a few years,” he says.
For people ordering food, it’s all about price and convenience, says Shu. For riders, it’s about flexibility and pay. And for the restaurants keeping food quality high and reaching new customers is key. And the crucial part to nailing these customer relations? Hiring. Shu estimates he spends 40 per cent of his time on hiring new recruits to his 2,000-strong workforce. “It’s really critical to get that right.”
Innovate at all costs
“At Amazon we are strong believers that if we stop innovating we'll be out of business in 10-15 years,” says Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer. For Vogels, innovating means chasing long term big goals, not easy wins for the short term. “You have to align yourself with your customers, instead of your shareholders, if you really want to build a successful business.”
But if companies want to reap the benefits of innovation, they just have to accept the risks too. And one way of encouraging innovation is lowering the cost of failure. After all, Vogels says, decisions are almost always two-way doors so sometimes it makes more sense to take the plunge rather than wait until you’ve gathered all the information, and run the risk of losing your first-mover advantage.
Cybersecurity isn’t rocket science
“What does it take to succeed in cybersecurity?” says Tenable CEO Amit Yoran. “It takes the things it takes to succeed in any other field.” Only between one and 12 per cent of hacks are the nastiest kind – advanced persistent threats – the vast majority of attacks most companies are facing are far more run-of-the-mill.
“If you maintain your systems – if you put in the work – you’re actually pretty secure,” says Yoran. But most companies have one major problem: passwords. “There's absolutely no reason to use passwords today,” says Yoran. Instead, he recommends companies think about using biometric logins such as fingerprints or face recognition.
Email isn’t going anywhere
Scan the business section of any bookshop and you’ll see dozen of books on personal productivity, leadership, every kind of self-improvement you can imagine. What we haven’t really seen over the last 20 years is a focus on team productivity, says Slack chief technology officer Cal Henderson.
But even huge organisations break down into small teams. “There are all of these places where individual bits of work happen,” says Henderson, and now messaging tools like Slack are popping up that help teams streamline their processes. But does that mean an end to emails? Sadly not, says Henderson. “Email is the cockroach of the internet.”
Start being an ‘learn it all’
“Innovation invariably comes from the outside, new ideas come from the outside, they come from disparate places,” says Herminia Ibarra, the Charles Handy professor of organisation behaviour at London Business School.
But to accept those ideas, leaders need to switch from being know it alls to ‘learn it alls’, says Ibarra. This means experimenting, learning to iterate and learning to be more open.
Change is part of your job
“Time and again people have failed to imagine a different world until the moment they realised they're living in one, and then they struggled to find their bearings,” says Beth Comstock, an author and former vice chair of GE. “You have to imagine a new future that others can’t see, then you have to make that change happen.”
But how do you go about imagining this new future? Getting out of the office is a good start, Comstock says. She recommends dedicating at least a tenth of your time to seeking out new ideas, identifying emerging trends and thinking about how they might apply to your business.
There’s no shortcut toward diversity
Most companies say they’re trying to make their workplace more diverse and inclusive, but actually walking the walk is another matter altogether. “In this we’re butting up against years, decades, centuries even, of labour markets designed to exclude people,” says Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder and CEO of ReadySet.
Changing a workforce takes time, money and dedication, says Hutchinson. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s got a call from a company that made a half-hearted effort at increasing diversity that was later abandoned. “That's because there was no strategy behind it, and people who were pushing it got tired.” Instead, she says that companies need to commit time and resources to increasing diversity across their entire organisation.
If you’re not hearing about harassment, that could be a problem
More than 70 per cent of people who are harassed never report it directly. For some groups of people, that rises to 98 per cent. That’s why even if you’re not hearing about harassment it doesn’t mean that your workplace doesn’t have an harassment problem. “The first step for any organisation is to tackle this is to hear about it in the first place,” says Julia Shaw, co-founder of Spot, a AI tool that helps people report workplace harassment.
“One of the first reasons that people don’t come forward is that they don’t know how to report,” Shaw says. But Spot walks people through a memory interview of what happened, turns the details into a pdf and allows them to present that evidence anonymously if they want. “You need to build a culture where people can speak up,” Shaw says.
Full-scale autonomous vehicles are still a long way off
Peter Barrett thinks we’re only about half way towards a widespread rollout of fully autonomous cars. To get there, we need start rethinking our approach to robotics and really tap into what makes robots different to us. “It’s unreasonable to expect robots to [achieve full autonomy] when their superhuman power of mind-reading isn’t being taken advantage,” says the co-founder of Playground Global. “If we could see through each other's eyes, see each other's experience and knowledge, we'd organise things differently.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
