MIT principal investigator Andrew McAfee will speak at Collision 2022 in Toronto, Canada. Lucas Schulz – Sports Files on Collision (via Getty Images)
good morning.
Andrew McAfee, a leading digital innovation expert at MIT Sloan School, published a new book this week.he participated luck Senior reporter Cheryl Estrada, myself, and 40 CFOs attended a dinner in Boston last week in collaboration with Workday and this newsletter’s sponsor, Deloitte. Before getting into a preview of his book, we talked about the unprecedented inroads of generative AI in the workplace.
“This is unusually powerful and unusually fast. Something like this will spread throughout the economy. That will separate the winners from the losers. And we’ll be truly turbocharging the winners sooner than you or I expected. ”
I told him that many business executives I speak to are wary of adopting new technologies due to concerns about data protection, intellectual property misappropriation, and the confusing but continuing problem of “illusion.” I told them there was. Why not become a “fast follower” instead of an “early adopter”?
“That’s a recipe for long-term decline…all the risks you just mentioned are real. But if you’re behind in learning about them, you’re also behind in your experience and learning curve, and you’re missing out on productivity benefits. The risks are real, but manageable. And I realized that too many companies are looking for a reason to say “no” when something new comes along. I think that’s a bad strategy. ”
Here’s McAfee’s new book How to be an otaku, He explained:
“The Geek Way is a way of running a company that originated throughout the 20th century and was concentrated in Silicon Valley. Because after a lot of nerds started running companies, they found themselves in this very turbulent, uncertain, and competitive environment. Strange environment. And I think many of them have realized that industrial-era strategies don’t help them run their companies in this environment. So they did what geeks do and dug deep into the problem, experimented, iterated, and came up with a set of practices. As I skim through them, they’re oddly consistent. And they are better. And when you look at the direct battles between startups and industrial-era incumbents, how many of those battles have the incumbents won or continued to fight stably?”
I challenged him on that last point. In my view, many incumbents are doing much better against digital startups than anyone expected 10 years ago. I used the example of Marriott, which successfully took back control of its customers through the Bonvoy app.
“Is your shining success story booking through an app? ”
“What about Daimler?” asked one of the CFOs.
“Have you ever compared the market values of existing car manufacturers? [Tesla]? ”
Walmart?
“The bar for continuing to exist is very low. ”
JPMorgan Chase?
“It’s a regulated industry.”
At that point, I stopped. But I’m appealing to other CEO Daily readers to send me their best examples of incumbents triumphing over technology disruptors. Other news is below.
alan murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
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THis edition of CEO Daily is curated by Nicholas Gordon.