The 'Third Age' of Technology Is Coming

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Rishad Tobaccowala shares his weekly newsletter—this installment focuses on the potential of tech and talent to unlock new levels of success. A river of change is carrying everybody and every company into the future; significant forces are sculpting the frontiers of tomorrow. While there is great complexity we must all grapple with as we seek a profitable and successful tomorrow, there are only two key drivers that matter. These are the ones we should focus on, without getting distracted by the cacophony of distracting headlines or consultants offering complex choices. Get these two more or less right, and you and your firm should thrive: Tech alignment: Understand how technology is a) changing people and their behavior and b) reconfiguring your products, services and experiences by enabling new competitors, redefining value, eroding or creating competitive advantage and radically transforming economics.Talent upgrade: Given the right resources (i.e., tech alignment), the firm with a disproportionate share of talent passionately aligned with a common outcome is likely to win. It is true in sports, and it is true in business. These are the two key drivers, and both are required at the same time. Fantastic silicon (tech) with OK carbon (human talent), or vice versa, is unlikely to succeed. Every board of directors or leadership confab should not begin meetings with financial updates, product updates and M&A updates, but rather with a "tech terrain"—detailing a threat and opportunity matrix and how the company is preparing and making progress in ensuring competitiveness—and a "talent capital x-ray," which would include not just attrition and retention measures, but also employee joy, educational investments, culture health checks and much more. Talented people in a good culture with enabling technology is what creates happy customers, innovation, differentiation and profits. Your company is a tech company Today, every company is a tech company. If, a decade ago, one had invested in Domino’s pizza, Apple, Facebook or Google, one would have done better with Domino's! Yes, Domino’s makes pizza and delivers it to a person’s home, but the company leveraged technology to reimagine and transform every single aspect of its business—from how one could order the pizza, monitor its journey to customers, let customers decide where to receive it (at the football field as you tailgate?) and how it was delivered to them. They reimagined stores and understood how delivery services could become parasites eating into their margin. Domino’s controls every aspect of the customer relationship and delivery. Domino’s understood technology was its business and could redefine its future. The company understood that the challenges and changes it brings about cannot be stopped and need to be embraced. Creativity is where art and technology intersect—so if you are in a creative business, you are in a technology business. Communication changes as technology changes, and if you do not adapt, your media business may not thrive in the future. Most newspapers, for instance, were done in by the failure of their management to recognize the impact of technology and not technology itself. Marketing is about understanding and meeting customer requirements, and as customers’ requirements, expectations and behaviors—as well as communication channels—change, every aspect of marketing becomes a technology-infused business. Smart companies and leaders understand the critical nature of technology and realize that the understanding of its potential should be throbbing in the beating heart of every key employee. Technology implementation may be done by the CTO and CIO, but impact and vision about technology must reside in every leader and should be central to every aspect of product, service and experience design. Prepare for the Third Connected Age of tech While technology and online media have been around for a long while, there was a steep change in how businesses were impacted beginning in 1993 with the launch of the First Connected Age—marked by the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. During this period, people connected to discover and people connected to shop; the companies that created the best products and services in these areas, like Google and Amazon, became the most valuable companies in the world. Search and ecommerce transformed many aspects of business. In 2007, we entered the Second Connected Age, which built on the First Age as technology now allowed people to connect with each other (social networks) and connect all the time (smartphones). Not surprisingly, Facebook and Apple were also big winners and among the most valuable companies. Mobile and social continued this transformation of business, but also transformed many aspects of society. The challenge society faces is that many of the modern communication channels were optimized for consumers with an advertising operating system, but now they are a society operating system, and we need to optimize for citizens. We have now entered the Third Connected Age of technology, and it will make all the seismic changes of the last three decades pale in significance. This is because not only does this Third Age build on the foundations of what has come before due to advances in technology, but it also comes after three decades of people’s changed behavior and expectations. (Also recognize that almost every millennial was born after the dawn of the First Connected Age and the modern graphical internet.) The Third Connected Age will see four new connections: AI: Data connecting to data, which is a simplistic way of describing machine learning.5G: Much faster and more resilient connections.Voice/AR/VR: New ways of connecting—in many countries, voice search is greater than text search.Quantum computing: Connections to the "New God in the Sky," as cloud-based computing takes a quantum jump. Today, a toddler version of these capabilities bundled together are available via Amazon Echo and Google Home. Anticipate, in less than 1,000 days, the transformative potential of these technologies to create a plethora of new winners and losers across every industry. Upgrade talent Do you have the best talent in your company working to ensure Third Connected Age readiness? Talent is all. People are key. A company only transforms if the people in the company transform. A company gets better when the people in the company get better. If one reads Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History, it becomes clear that every advance in technology places a premium on superior talent. Basically, technology is like a lever. It allows talent leverage and scale. It is never technology or talent; it is technology and talent. Great people with great tools will dominate all. Today, we are living in a truly transformed terrain for talent—one where every aspect of what talent wants from companies and bosses, the nature of work and much more are being twisted into new shapes. Smart companies are realizing that the next few years will be driven by how they can upgrade their team through recruiting new talent and training and inspiring existing talent. Smart leaders everywhere recognize we are at a unique moment in time due to the combined impact of three big shifts: a) the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), b) the role of ESG, purpose and values in a company culture and c) the unbundled workplace and new life mindsets post-Covid. This is the ideal time for leaders to truly rethink their talent strategy, company culture and training plans to attract and upgrade their people. Talent = growth Companies want to grow—but so does talent. And if talent grows, the company grows. There are six types of growth people want, and every company must offer some combination of all six, though they will be varied for every individual, role and career journey: Compensation: To be paid fairly, and to see one’s total compensation increase as one’s impact, skill sets and contributions grow.Recognition: Every individual wants to be recognized for their work. They want to work for bosses who allow them to shine.Autonomy: One cannot learn and grow if every step is micromanaged. If one is rooted in process and routine, how can one spread one’s wings and navigate the winds of change?Skills: Today, the half-life of many technical skills (and some soft skills) erode and need to continuously be rebuilt. Companies must invest deeply in continuous education.Purpose: A critical factor in joining and staying with a company is a growing belief in its purpose and value.Relationships/connections: Growing a network of mentors and colleagues over time is key to career success and happiness. Few jobs and companies allow for every one of these six growth factors at the same time, but companies cannot attract and retain talent if they do not offer enough of these growth enablers. Today, we are at a particular junction, where a fusion between a new era of technology (the Third Connected Age) and a new talent mindset is underway. To succeed, we will need to grow our understanding of the implications of technology on our business while enabling our people to thrive by unleashing their potential.

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The 'Third Connected Age' of Tech Is Here—Is Your Company Prepared?

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Rishad Tobaccowala

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Rishad Tobaccowala