Leadership
During the last months, several companies connected with me to help them with their product development process. Typically, these are embedded-systems companies with strong stage gate processes dictated by the challenges associated with mechanics and electronics. Their challenges are typically associated with procurement and manufacturing. The reason that these companies
Leadership
Having worked on the digitalization topic for the last decade or more, with dozens of companies and in a variety of capacities, ranging from researcher to consultant, I keep being amazed at the multi-dimensional, highly interconnected nature of the challenge as well as the lack of understanding and the confusion
Ecosystems
There’s a beautiful saying in American English: build it and they will come. The idea is that simply building something and making it available will cause customers to beat a path to your door. To throw their money at you simply to get access to the amazing thing you
Ecosystems
Many of the companies I work with aspire to build an ecosystem around their product portfolio. The idea of having others complement your offering and increasing its stickiness while taking a cut of the revenue generated by these complementors is, of course, incredibly appealing. As with most things in life,
Ecosystems
Western civilization is built on the notion of the sovereign individual: each person is unique with his or her rights, responsibilities, dreams and fears standing separate from others. Buddhist dogma takes the exact opposite perspective: the notion of self is an illusion and the goal of meditation and other religious
Leadership
There’s little doubt in anyone’s mind, I hope, that automation lies at the heart of all the progress in human well-being and economic development. It started with outsourcing physical labor to machines, initially through watermills and windmills and later through the use of internal combustion engines and electric
Leadership
Automation is central for companies that are digitalizing, and new technologies, including natural language processing and image recognition as well as robotic process automation, allow us to automate processes that were impossible or prohibitively expensive to automate earlier. Although I’m a strong proponent of automating everything repetitive, there’s
Leadership
As I walk around in numerous companies, one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the number of people living out their lives in pretty poor jobs. Repetitive jobs, where they have lots of responsibility but little authority and where company processes, guidelines and rules dictate the
Leadership
As humans, we tend to avoid situations where we experience pain or discomfort. Consequently, many organizations tend to decrease the frequency at which ‘hard’ things are done. And rather than fixing the root causes of the pain and discomfort, often there’s a desire to increase the amount of formalized
Leadership
During the last weeks, I have gotten quite a few indications that companies are preparing for worse economic times. The combination of rising inflation due to, among others, logistics challenges, the war in Ukraine as well as the central banks finally deciding to increase interest rates seems to be the
Artificial Intelligence
Every few weeks, it seems, we are treated to another major breakthrough innovation in artificial intelligence. Whether it is Deep Mind's system beating the world champion Go player, GPT-3 dazzling us with Turing test breaking abilities or DALLE-2 generating images that are simply stunning, it seems like we
Data
Although it is uncertain who said this, a famous quote is “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This notion is at the heart of digitalization: much of what we think we