Reminder from FTChinese.com: If you are interested in the content of FTChinese.com, please search for “FTChinese.com” in the Apple App Store or Huawei App Store, download the official app of FTChinese.com, and pay for subscription. Happy using!
In 1989, there were less than 400 users exposed to Internet technology. By 2018, according to the 2018 global digital report disclosed by ‘We Are Social’ and ‘Hootsuite’, global Internet users had exceeded the 4 billion mark, confirming that the global Half of the population is “connected to the Internet”, and half of the people live in the real digital world. 2021 is defined as the first year of the “metaverse”, and mankind has begun to enter a new and unknown world, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) ), ByteDance’s Zhang Yiming, and Tencent’s Ma Huateng have shown great interest in Metaverse investments; 2022 is thought to be the year when “the number of people traveling to space as paying passengers will exceed that of government employees carried by rival space tourism companies” Year 1. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Google’s Lawrence Edward Page and Sergey Brin, made the exploration aircraft the new Option. Human’s journey of digital avatars, Mars space journey, virtual three-dimensional space, real space, people have started the exploration of the unknown world born out of the real world.
The new imagination brought by digital technology, intelligent technology and life science is subverting various industries and fields from different dimensions, such as digital currency, cloud-native platforms, autonomous systems, encrypted growth, super-intelligence, distributed enterprises, etc. Create scalability and growth with technological innovation.
2,500 years ago, Heraclitus said that “everything is in flux”, and this sentence is most appropriate to explain the world we live in today. “Rheology” is the most striking feature today. We are immersed in a social environment in which data and information are surging, and all things change in nature and representation because of this. Many things that are accustomed to have become abnormal now, and various cognitions and viewpoints are widely disseminated, evolving and colliding. Some changes bring benefits to our development, but also bring more confusion. Humans turn to the “metaverse” or the sea of stars; population mobility, aging, and the “siphon effect” of big cities; the rapid elimination of backwardness in the digital revolution, making people’s lives feel completely different pressures; demonization and stigma obscuring the truth confusion; the balance between short-term interests and long-term value; the boundary integration of commercial enterprises and social enterprises, commercial products and public goods; data governance, personal information and privacy protection bring new problems; with the scale and technology owned by enterprises energy, how companies can fulfill their mission. The chaos of these shocks, challenges, problems, pressures, etc., brings us into a complex world.
Technology is a key factor that brings challenges, it penetrates into all areas of people’s lives, and some even bring devastating impacts; the emergence of artificial intelligence is even more timid, and the fear of being replaced has exacerbated some people’s worries, Don’t know what the future will be like? How can we find the value and meaning of human beings in the future world? In such a changing time and space, we all need to make changes and find solutions.
I asked myself to find the answers, and I asked many academics, entrepreneurs, executives, and students for their opinions. In the continuous communication, I slowly discovered and understood that due to the extensive penetration and rapid iteration of digital technology, we can perceive some differences at the micro level, so as to understand the changes in the environment. The emergence of micro innovations forms a macro environment, which may be a completely different perspective from the past, which can help us get closer to the phenomenon and help us understand the essence. So, I summarize these changes from the microscopic perception, they are:
Things are constantly evolving
everything is being converted into data
Most innovations are reorganizations of existing things
Deep Interaction and Deep Learning
The core is not sharing but collaboration
Connecting is more important than owning
Disruption does not come from within
Quantifiable, measurable, and programmable jobs will all be replaced by machine intelligence
Things are constantly evolving
In the ever-changing technology and environment, the evolution and iteration of technology and continuous iterative upgrading have become one of the basic characteristics of the environment, and thus promote the iterative upgrading of the product itself, the redefinition of the industry, and the accelerated integration of products and services. From products to industries to services, it is iteratively upgraded. In the process of evolution, nothing can stay under the original framework and must be evolved and improved. This requirement of continuous evolution and iteration is the fundamental requirement for every enterprise.
everything is being converted into data
Today, data is a factor of production. With the help of data value mining, the new value direction of enterprises will be developed in two dimensions, one is model innovation, and the other is efficiency improvement. In management practice, some enterprise managers believe that model innovation is not an easy task, especially for traditional enterprises, which is also a difficulty in the digital transformation of traditional enterprises. From the perspective of managers of traditional enterprises, it is difficult to find opportunities in business model innovation, and digital transformation is almost an impossible task. But if you understand the value of data, efficiency improvement itself is also a new value direction. For traditional enterprises, efficiency improvement is a relatively easy choice, which is their area of expertise. If we start with efficiency improvement, the digital transformation of traditional enterprises will have a feasible starting point. Taking data as the center means that enterprises have value innovation opportunities in two directions, efficiency improvement and model innovation.
Most innovations are reorganizations of existing things
The innovation logic of the digital age is the connection and combination of digital technology and application scenarios, that is, the value symbiosis of technology itself, application scenarios, and action-related subjects. The process of digital technology evolution is disordered, emergent and discontinuous, and many new possibilities will emerge. It can expand different value spaces through different uses and combinations, such as iPhone, Tesla, Tencent WeChat, Alibaba Alipay, Didi Chuxing, etc. These companies connect and combine digital technologies with application scenarios on the basis of existing things to form new things and bring new value to customers. In the context of digital technology, most new things are the reorganization of existing things. If enterprises understand the innovation logic in the digital age, the possibility of realizing innovation will become more.
Deep Interaction and Deep Learning
Virtual reality VR, artificial intelligence AI, drones, telemedicine and cloud, all of which already exist in reality. With the in-depth development of technology, deep interaction and deep learning have become an inevitable choice. Through interaction and learning, people and technology are more creative and more value-creating. In fact, we are not worried about machines thinking like people, but about people thinking like machines. We need the ability of deep learning and deep interaction to push people to release greater value.
The core is not sharing but collaboration
Digital technology makes sharing more convenient and efficient, and the more sharing, the more value. However, what we need to know is that the core is not sharing, but more importantly, collaboration. Sharing can provide more exchanges, but to achieve value creation, sharing is not enough, and value can only be generated through continuous interaction, collaboration and cooperation. For example, the blockchain helps transactions appear in a distributed manner and realizes transactions across the entire network. Its decentralization, security and trust help achieve large-scale cooperation and collaboration, thereby creating greater system value.
Connecting is more important than owning
This is a challenge for many people. Managers who grew up with the industrial age are more concerned about what they have, but in the digital age, this may be the biggest problem. In a digital world where dynamism is the fundamental feature, continuous iteration and optimization requires individuals and enterprises to open up their boundaries and connect extensively with the outside world. It is not what you have, but what you can connect. Leading digital transformation manufacturing companies, such as Haier, Midea, etc., are because they have achieved the connection between the manufacturing end and the consumer end. Intelligent manufacturing means that they no longer have production lines and manufacturing scales, but are able to communicate with the supply side and the consumer side. Extensive connections. Therefore, the ability to cooperate and connect with more people is the key to gathering wisdom.
Disruption does not come from within
In most cases, people are still afraid of being subverted, but they have to face the fact of being subverted. Most disturbingly, disruption often doesn’t come from within, but from the outside when you’re inadvertently, or even self-confident. Just as the subversion of the telecommunications industry comes from wireless networks, the subversion of the camera industry comes from smartphones, and the subversion of the banking industry comes from electronic payments, when you are still complacent in your familiar field, you don’t know the entrants from outside the field. The brand-new value has been created for customers and has been recognized by customers. However, we can also understand from another aspect that “disruption does not appear from the inside”, it also brings people new hope, and the disruption comes from the outside, which means that every enterprise has the opportunity to seek a new starting point.
Quantifiable, measurable, programmable jobs will all be replaced by machine intelligence
When I visited the smart factory, I had a lot of different understandings about manufacturing itself, such as robots on the production line, black light factories, large-scale manufacturing to achieve personalized customization, etc. Many organizations predict that by 2035, more than 60% of existing jobs will be partially or completely replaced by machines. Digital technology is, in a sense, weeding out inefficient people, which is a fundamental trend and is accelerating. For today’s managers, in addition to understanding this trend and keeping up with the changes in the trend, they also need to have a deeper understanding that the relationship between organizations and people will be completely changed in the future, and the organizational form of human-machine symbiosis will be completely changed. , how to realize human value.
The above are the eight characteristics of understanding the environment at the micro level. These characteristics are accumulating to form a new industry definition, new business value and new organizational form. In a word, it is the environmental foundation that is gathering to form the new definition of enterprise value. That is, “the emergence of micro innovations forms a macro environment”. In order to adapt to this new environment, enterprises have to undergo fundamental changes, that is, they need to completely change their business activities, add new elements and capabilities, and at the same time, they need to purposefully abandon their original core competitiveness. All of these have put forward new requirements for organizations, which is also the fundamental reason why I will discuss with you the “digital transformation of organizations”. Organizations need to keep up with the pace of environmental changes and find the answer to survive in a world changed by technology.
Note: This article only represents the author’s personal opinion, and is the beginning of the author’s new book “Organization Digital Transformation” (Machinery Industry Press).
Editor of this article Xu [email protected]