By Richard Straub & Julia Kirby
How do we get more people involved in solving problems? Everybody is capable of creative thought and action.
And great managers know how to tap that superabundant resource. They recognize that pooling creative energy accelerates progress—many minds make lighter work.
But for this to happen, more organizations need to recognize that their innovation mandate is not only to design new products and services but also to redesign how work gets done. The digital age gives us a tremendous opportunity to do so.
How businesses develop and deploy information and communications technologies will profoundly affect whether prosperity is inclusive or exclusive. Today’s collaborative platforms allow people to combine their measurements and observations of large-scale phenomena (such as water quality), while advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence and computing power stretch the capacity of human intellect just as earlier technologies extended human strength.
At their worst, however, smart machines have the potential to marginalize human contributions, automating cognitive work. The situation creates huge responsibilities for politicians, educators, executives and other leaders to manage the technological transition.
We find ourselves at an important crossroads. The technologies we’re developing either hold the keys to unlocking human potential—or to locking it up. Indeed, they could even transform what we think of as human potential in the first place, given the startling new combinations of technological and human capabilities being devised. There’s no need to wait for Elon Musk’s Neuralink, with its implantable brain-computer interfaces. Humans and machines are already merging, as Arati Prabhakar, former head of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has pointed out.
American scholar Clay Christensen likes to remind innovators of the importance of remembering their offering’s essential “job to be done”—what is it that customers “hire” your product or service to do for them? In that spirit, what is the “job to be done” by the practice of management itself? What is the job that society needs to get done that it turns to competent managers to do?
Increasingly, that job is not only to produce better goods and services more efficiently, but also to organize individuals to collaborate and create in unprecedented ways. The business leaders who achieve that goal will be those who make the most of human potential and manage to make prosperity inclusive.
Richard Straub founded the nonprofit Peter Drucker Society Europe after a 32-year career at IBM. Julia Kirby is a senior editor at Harvard University Press.