Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age

Smart technology will completely change both your way of life and your way of working. We will live in the most disruptive time for the workforce since the Great Depression. What does this mean for millions of lives, for the public school system and for society at large? And what is to be done about it?

We are in a new era — the Era of Smart Technology — that is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we educate people. Our current education system was built upon principles necessary for the industrial age, and that age is over. This is an existential societal issue, and this new era will require a different type of public education.

A tsunami of technology is about to change the way people live and work. In this introduction of the article collection Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age, Professor Ed Hess explains what skills humans need to hone in order to meet the challenges of the near future.

Ed Hess discusses how an organization transforms: By helping its people mitigate fear of change. It starts with the right people asking the right questions.

The realities of the digital age will produce high cognitive and emotional demands on humans for the highest and fastest levels of critical and innovative thinking,  hyper-learning and decision-making.

To remain viable, most organizations will have to achieve not only higher-level technological capabilities, but also higher-level human cognitive and emotional performance.

Technology is advancing at a speed that far exceeds the rate at which many organizations are transforming.

Leading a public company since the late 1980s has been pretty easy in terms of understanding the “rules of the game.” That’s because the purpose of business has been so clear: just create shareholder value. But the "why" of business is changing in new and old ways.

How are digital technologies changing the business landscape? Are new business models disrupting our industry? How can we innovate faster and better? These are questions with which business leaders have wrestled since the world has gone digital. And rightly so.

The convergence of artificial intelligence, increased global mobile connectivity, the Internet of Things, heightened computing power, virtual and augmented reality, and nanotechnology will produce a data tsunami that will require most organizations to transform how they do business.