Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

As we explore in this Executive Update, the most important contract isn’t the written one. Another contract — a more crucial one — comes into play. This is the psychological contract — the deal that you perceive has been agreed to or, if you will, the “spirit of the agreement” in your eyes.

Within a few years, much of what doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, and professors — among many other professionals — do will be extended and replaced by smart machines. There will be a fundamental change in the definition, development, and deployment of "expertise." After an initial period of resistance (and some hysteria), we will welcome the capability and accessibility of our smart digital friends with open arms. In fact, we already desperately need them.

The ability to recognize different levels of complexity and to distinguish perceived increased complexity versus actual increased complexity is helpful for enterprise planners and strategists. There are different approaches to handling complexity across a whole spectrum of attitudes, from ignoring it entirely (after all, things tend to sort themselves out by themselves) to either overengineering (theoreticians who do not have many real-world constraints can be particularly good at making complex things look even more so) or the opposite, oversimplification.

Understanding and addressing complexity and its impact on the enterprise is now a necessity across all business sectors. This Executive Report provides an introduction to complex systems and to the field of systemics and identifies a gap between traditional and sociotechnical systems engineering. The report also explains the importance of joint optimization and proposes a metamodel to achieve it: the Joint Optimization Metamodel.

This Update is for people who want to know how, and if, wearables will affect the broad range of businesses not directly in the wearable business. If you have a wearable product in the marketplace or close to it, that’s great. But if you don’t (and perhaps even think that you don’t need to think about wearables at all), keep reading.

Even without the new wave of wearable technologies, the wearable market is sizeable today -- US $24.2 billion in 2015, according to research done by our company, IDTechEx.1 The vast majority of this -- 74% -- is for already mature wearables: the humble electronic wristwatch, earphones, blood glucose test strips, and the like. Now let's assess each of the key applications for wearable technology.

This article details the challenges and opportunities for the corporate sector created by these developmentswith wearables, and discusses the most likely scenarios and their implications for business and society.

Man's quest for an enhanced human experience using wearables, be it for productivity or for leisure, is age-old. Attempts such as arm-worn wings to enable flight or even an abacus on a ring date back several hundred years.1 However, the proliferation of contemporary wearables ranging from smartwatches to smart glasses, cameras, headsets, and clothing is a 21st-century phenomenon, and it has the potential to significantly alter the way people live, work, and play. But as with other technology development endeavors, the question of how wearables should be built so that they provide the optimal user experience remains. Further, how do we evaluate the performance of such wearables? We address these key questions in this article.