Future-focused leaders and the duty towards technological fluidity

All businesses today to a more or lesser extent depend on technology. Often, technology comprises the core offering for businesses, with supporting services covering the rest of the value chain. These businesses are seen as technology-intensive. Typical examples of this would be businesses in industries such as telecommunications, food, mining, furniture, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and, of course, energy. The opposite category comprises businesses which are not technology-intensive, where technology serves in a functional supporting role only. In their turn, these businesses offer services such as finances, education, health and entertainment, and they typically rely on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as powerful enablers. Technology, therefore, is omnipresent, and comprises increasingly more of the typical asset base of businesses.

Due to the intrinsically formative forces associated with digitization, the Internet platform, Artificial Intelligence (hereafter “AI”), Big Data and information assets, technology is often invincible from its powerful workings. This is proven by the most valuable companies in the world today, such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, with Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and Alphabet (Google’s holding company) also under the top ten on the NASDAQ. ??Hovering in the fourth position on the NASDAQ as of the date of writing this, Tesla offers an instructive example countering the aforementioned trend of digital leaders, but the question begs whether its position is due to intrinsic value centred in technological superiority, or whether it is a hype generated through shrewd marketing by its enigmatic and South African born co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk.?Of course, this serves as an invitation to more thoroughly explore the key performance metrics of, for example, Tesla’s energy storage technologies, but this for another day.?As an aside, I would not speculate about the future of Twitter as yet! Compare for now, though, Tesla’s position with that of the holder of the 5th position on the NASDAQ, which is Nvidia.?As creator of the Graphic Processing Unit that renders possible interactive graphics on computing devices, whether laptops, workstations, mobile devices, notebooks or PCs, we should ask ourselves who the CEO of Nvidia is.?I don’t know out of hand, but I do know that technology also becomes smaller and increasingly manifest at nanoscale, and that Nvidia among others leverages this trend combined with AI to manufacture supercomputers ready for Big Data, and that in all probability its value is driven by the central role its technologies fulfil in digitization as the overall techno-economic trend we have seen evolving over the last fifty years.?As yet another major trend, the size, height and footprint of technologies continue to increase beyond imagination, proven by bigger container ships and aeroplanes, higher buildings and dam walls, and space-age scientific experiments like the International Space Station, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the slightly older Large Hadron Collider.

Thanks to these macro changes, technology becomes more complex if not more accurate in its workings and outcomes, they become more expensive, and they often work differently than a previous generation of technologies. Examples of this trend can be found in the transition from semi-mechanical labour to mechatronics in agriculture picking up momentum right now, or from digitally-enabled processes to AI and robotics in respectively knowledge work and on the plant floor.

Technology in its various manifestations must also be adjudicated for its environmental impact, and the tangible footprint of technologies must be assessed from origin, (through) processing or manufacturing, to supply, use and disassembly thereof. ?Together with the aforementioned considerations this requires of company boards a certain level of technological literacy in order to effectively steer governance and oversight of technology strategies, technology investments and business operations relying on technology. The intangible implications of technology, furthermore, require insights into the workings thereof, they require ethical considerations, financial acumen, and healthy relations, whether for labour considerations or international relations, given that the digital economy functions seamlessly across borders and legal jurisdictions.

Future-focused leaders, therefore, beyond business acumen also strife to become technology-fluid. They realize that technology is all-pervasive and powerful, and that the current transition to robotics, AI and quantum computing require of them to render technology a top priority on their governance and oversight agendas. They actively pursue strategies and operations to ensure that their technology assets have been sourced responsibly, that the workings thereof respect the privacy and dignity of all living things inasmuch as environmental health, and that once retired these technologies are fed back into the recycling streams representative of their industries. They wholeheartedly pursue Integrated Reporting in order to inform all stakeholders of their attention to detail, inclusive of technology impacts. Future-focused leaders also remain conscious of immediate technology priorities, such as the need for digital governance, among others involving considerate social media strategies, thorough data and privacy protection principles and practices, and exploration of data monetization strategies. Furthermore, in particular at this time, future-focused leaders pursue protection of Intellectual Property (IP) as the valuable intangible asset base it really is, and steer their organizations and their human capital carefully yet purposefully through the fog of the technological horizon towards a liveable future for all.