Is your business model fit for purpose to take full advantage of emerging technologies?

How I realized early-on about the Race of Technology, Education, and Equality

How curious are you about the future? Many people wonder what shopping will look like in the future. Or, how we’ll entertain ourselves. Or travel.

Me? I am particularly interested in the future of work!

My interest comes from my teenage years in the nineteen-eighties when I worked in my father’s engineering office. He was a structural engineer who provided the mathematical calculations that ensure bridges and buildings didn’t fall down. At such time, he didn’t let me get anywhere near the actual calculations, but I did help him as a draftsman, copying architectural drawings onto vellum paper. And I did get up close to his draftsmen.

I remember it like it was yesterday –men and women bent over their desks, pencils in hand and tongues clenched between their teeth, lost in the deep concentration, transferring the calculus from their heads onto paper in neat, tightly packed equations. The only tool they had was a slide rule!

One day, my father bought his first computing system to augment this toolset — a rudimentary machine commanded by punch cards. Next came personal computers and he progressively unlocked huge productivity. I still recall my parents discussing how much money to spend on the latest PC and who it would be assigned to. I suddenly realized that technology was in its own race for progress.

To begin with, my father designed his own computer programs for calculus which freed up a lot of his time from doing the actual calculations. That increase in efficiency allowed him to take on more work while keeping the same amount of engineers and hiring more draftsmen.

Later, the coming of computer-aided design (CAD) software and wide format printers required the draftsmen to upgrade their skills. The draftsmen using CAD hugely multiplied their output compared to what they had been doing by hand. I even got in on the act and learned CAD drawing as I desperately wanted to keep on helping my dad, to continue to feel his hand on my shoulder and hear him say, quietly, ‘Thanks, son’. I did not realize then that it was me who had to be thankful for the experience that I was living in that office.

So, what did I learn from that early work experience?

Firstly, how productivity growth generates wealth in society — doing more with less.

But, I also saw how many people struggled to keep pace with the technological advances that unlock this productivity.

It struck me that we truly are in a race between technological change, education, and equality. And that education was the best way to make as many people as possible able to work in increasingly sophisticated workplaces, boosting not only productivity but their own incomes, thus spreading the wealth generated more widely in society.

Secondly, that while technology is essential, it’s the business model that makes the true difference to how much value you can extract from it.

My father provided his calculus code for free to other colleagues in exchange for feedback — somehow a pioneer in open-source software!

However, he made the conscious choice to keep with a service business model in which he basically monetized his work based on square-meter of calculus performed. The same technology could have been monetized significantly more as a software product sold to other engineering offices.

I’ve come to realize the relevance of choices and managerial acumen to take full advantage of innovation as new technologies impact differently depending on fundamental business-model choices.

So, it’s a challenge I make to you — is your business model fit for purpose to take full advantage of emerging technologies? Are you generating maximum value not only for yourselves but for wider society?

Why don’t you take a few minutes, right now, to note down one or two actions that you can do today to check this out!

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