On October 9 2018, at London’s Kings Place, WIRED Smarter brought together a multi-track event with the slickest thinkers from across technology, energy and finance to share their insights into the changing world of work. A packed lineup of talks bookended a day which broke in the middle for individual streams dedicated to Energy, Money and Retail. A list of speakers which included Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, and the author and former vice chair of GE, Beth Comstock, shared their take on tomorrow’s world of work.
Kicking off with opening remarks from WIRED Editor-in-chief Greg Williams, Smarter moved straight into a talk from keynote speaker Beth Comstock. "Time and again people have failed to imagine a different world until the moment they realised they're living in one, and then they struggled to find their bearings," said Comstock. "You have to imagine a new future that others can’t see, then you have to make that change happen."
An expert in helping organisations and individuals to navigate change and harness creativity, Comstock believes we need more people in our institutions and organisations who can keep up with – and anticipate – the pace of change, and react accordingly. How best to anticipate the future? Get out of the office, Comstock says: she recommends dedicating a tenth of your time to finding and trying out new ideas before relating them back to your business.
But the future isn’t all about technological transformation. "Nurturing human talent is a choice that we can all make," says Federico Marchetti, the founder and CEO of the Yoox Net-A-Porter group. "It would be easier to let a machine do everything, but luxury cannot be exclusively AI-created or drone-delivered or 3D-printed." Today, Marchetti says, we use labels to signify a sense of luxury and quality.
As automation paces ahead, there is a new label making its way through to denote the fineness of items and garments: made by human beings, Marchetti predicts. His own site strikes a fine balance between automation and the human touch. While his factories are largely automated, final touches are done by human beings. "The customer loves to receive a package, it’s a kind of childlike process," he says.
All technology, says Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge, is ultimately social, and there is nothing inevitable about what gets invented and adopted and widely used. Coyle is also an economist and former advisor to the UK Treasury, specialising in the economics of new technologies, markets and competition policy – areas of expertise which provide good grounding for her view that the technologies we come to use and see as representing 'natural' progress are, in fact, the result of a much more contested process.
Take electricity, she says. A technology that was initially developed in the late nineteenth century only came into its own in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when electrification in Western countries catalysed a new kind of consumer behaviour. This was because the infrastructure able to support this technology at last came into force. We should be understanding seemingly transformational technologies like self-driving cats from the same perspective. “The important questions are all about the social context and the economic context,” Coyle says.
Will Shu founded food delivery company Deliveroo in 2013 and scaled it from a team of five to a global $2bn tech business in just under five years. Going from a team of two to a team of two thousand in five and half years has been great, but of courses this rate of growth poses its own challenges – especially operating across thirteen countries. You need, Shu says, to understand your customers, and to embrace new ideas. The key, he continues, is to “understand your consumer, understand what their pain points are and understand what they’ll want in a few years,” he says.
Across the world, an organisation is hit by a ransomware attack every forty seconds. BT deals with 4,000 attacks each day. There are over 1.4 million new phishing sites created each month. CEO of Security at BT Mark Hughes is accountable for all elements of BT’s security activity globally – with every business or organisation in a period of digital transformation, this is something, he says, that needs to change.
Back in 1997, e-commerce didn't exist – but Amazon did. Despite its long roots, Amazon has always been a technology company – and when Jeff Bezos started the company, he wasn't trying to build a bookshop; he was fascinated by the internet, and what it could transform. The secret to its success? Amazon believes that to stop innovating is to stop doing business in five minutes. “At Amazon we are strong believers that if we stop innovating we'll be out of business in 10-15 years,” says Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer. As CTO of one of the world's most powerful companies, Vogels is responsible for driving Amazon's customer-centric technology vision. For Vogels, innovating means having an eye on the long-term. “You have to align yourself with your customers, instead of your shareholders, if you really want to build a successful business.”
After a morning break to digest and discuss, along with a fireside chat with Colm O’Neill, managing director of BT’s major and public sector division, conference attendants broke into groups for some specialised knowledge in the areas of Money, Retail and Energy. Breaking for a networking lunch, participants were once again brought back together for a special partner panel with Invesco, asking how sustainable investing can make a difference in the world at large, with panellists including Georg Elsaesser, a senior portfolio manager at Invesco; Luca Tobagi, an investment strategist and product director at Invesco; Beth Comstock, formerly vice chair at GE, and Hayden Wood, co-founder and CEO of energy company Bulb.
Later on in the afternoon, after further talks in each of Smarter’s three tracks, guests came back together in Hall One for more Smarter bread and butter. Plunging into the final chunk, we kicked of with some lessons in cyber-helplessness from the CEO of Tenable, Amit Yoran.
Like circus elephants, tied to a stake they could, in fact, yank right out of the ground, businesses are paralysed by a misplaced sense of cyber helplessness. This conditioning, in the realm of cybersecurity, needs to be unlearned: protecting your company digitally may take work, but it is possible, Yoran, who oversees the digital security firm's vision of empowering organisations to understand and reduce their cybersecurity risk.
“What does it take to succeed in cybersecurity?” asked Yoran. “It takes the things it takes to succeed in any other field… If you maintain your systems – if you put in the work – you’re actually pretty secure,” says Yoran, and luckily under twelve per cent of attacks are of the more malicious, persistent kind – most are more run-of-the-mill. But most companies still have one major achilles heel: passwords. “There's absolutely no reason to use passwords today,” says Yoran – and companies should be moving towards biometric systems like fingerprint and facial recognition.
Beyond huge and under-recognised challenges in the realm of cybersecurity, something that has been holding us back in the world of work is the failure to nurture team productivity. While there have been major steps forward in personal and individual productivity, thanks to technology, what has been far slower to change, says Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO of Slack, the world’s fastest growing business app, has been collective and team-based productivity.
Slack aims to change that, by helping the small teams that comprise even the biggest businesses. “There are all of these places where individual bits of work happen,” says Henderson, and Slack is a tool that can help to aid this work along smoothly and in a world of increasing remote work. Does Slack spell the death of email? Henderson is not hopeful. “Email is the cockroach of the internet,” he says.
Herminia Ibarra, the Charles Handy professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, then delved into what talent looks like in the age of artificial intelligence. Leaders are people who move a company, organisation, or institution from its current state to something better. In the age of artificial intelligence and smart technologies, this means being able to actually make use of the vast technological capability that is out there, but is wildly under-used. “Innovation invariably comes from the outside, new ideas come from the outside, they come from disparate places,” says Ibarra, and leaders therefore need to be uniquely susceptible to assimilating new ways of doing things.
When it comes to meaningful diversity and inclusion, there is no one-size-fits-all solution – diversity is contextual, and the process for each organisation should be one of holistic change. With a focus on the tech industry, labour lawyer Y-Vonne Hutchinson specialises in advising companies that are serious about enacting diversity – and here she lays out the top ten things every company can and should be doing to transform its workforce. “In this we’re butting up against years, decades, centuries even, of labour markets designed to exclude people,” says Hutchinson, founder and CEO of diversity solutions firm ReadySet.
Even in the wake of #MeToo, we're in the middle of an under-reporting crisis when it comes to workplace harassment. What can be done about it? Psychological scientist and memory expert Julia Shaw co-founded Spot, which helps employees report workplace harassment and discrimination. Talk to Spot is a free AI-based app that creates a time-stamped PDF that can be used, in future, as evidence. Genius.
More than 70 per cent of people who are harassed never report, and for some groups this figures rises to 98 per cent. This is why you can’t base judgments about the extent of harassment in your workplace purely on your own perception. “The first step for any organisation is to tackle this is to hear about it in the first place… One of the first reasons that people don’t come forward is that they don’t know how to report,” Shaw says. Spot, by helping those facing harassment to build up a body of evidence, creates a culture in which they feel able to speak up.
Little by little, robots are gaining new kinds of capability and intelligence. But why is it all taking so long? We are, says Peter Barrett, our final speaker, being held back by wanting to make them just like us. Barrett is a founder and CTO of Playground Global, a new type of venture capital firm, built by and for entrepreneurs, engineers and technologists. Barrett urged skepticism when it comes to the hype around autonomous cars – we’re about halfway there he says, but to actually realise their full capability, we’re going to need to really rethink our approach to robotics and to recognise them for their true value: being different from us. “If we could see through each other's eyes, see each other's experience and knowledge, we'd organise things differently.”
The day ended with a drinks reception sponsored by distillery Ailsa Bay and an opportunity to meet the WIRED team, WIRED Smarter speakers and attendees.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
