Three Big Points

With potential disruption coming from all sides, the future might seem pretty complicated for your company. Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, has identified 11 ways disruption can sneak up on organizations. In this episode of Three Big Points, Webb explains how business leaders can use these factors as a framework to help them see where the next potential disruption might come from.

Clayton Christensen introduced his Theory of Disruptive Innovation over 25 years ago. So why do leaders still fall prey to disruption’s dangers? Our guest on this episode of Three Big Points, Innosight’s Scott Anthony, asserts that disruption remains a dangerous force because leaders fall prey to same faulty thinking time and again — but they can overcome it.

Each major wave of technological advancement has proved to be a boon to society — at least eventually. But in the meantime, many people’s lives and jobs have faced unwelcome disruption. This week’s Three Big Points guest, Oxford economist Carl Frey, says it’s time to learn to move from resisting change to mitigating its most painful short-term impacts.

Pipeline Equity CEO Katica Roy says there’s been a false narrative that women don’t know how to operate in the workplace, when in fact the workplace was not designed to value them. She warns that we will perpetuate that narrative unless we change how we make decisions about talent. Her solution: Use AI and natural language processing to remove bias from performance evaluations.

Company leaders need to take a 360-degree approach to digital transformation — by reinventing both outward-facing strategy and inward-facing operations, says IBM’s Mark Foster. In this episode of the Three Big Points podcast, he explains how the combined impact of quality data, technology, and a sense of humanity enable a digital reinvention to succeed.

For all the giant leaps promised by artificial intelligence, when it comes to business, what we’ve seen so far amounts to just tiny steps. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; many smart people advise companies to start small with AI. But as Boston College professor Sam Ransbotham notes in this week’s Three Big Points podcast, when you think small, you get small results.

We do plenty of strategic thinking about our careers but surprisingly little when it comes to our relationships. Strategy might sound like a cold word to use to describe managing our personal lives, but as you’ll hear in this week’s Three Big Points podcast, the ideas driving Jennifer Petriglieri’s research into why some dual-career relationships work better than others are quintessentially human.

Digital transformation often starts with leaders identifying a fundamental change in the competitive environment and moving quickly to counter a potential disruption. But as Jeanne Ross explains, even the most forward-looking strategies are bound to fall flat unless leaders themselves evolve — and in some pretty dramatic ways.

You stand in front of a roomful of decision makers and present an iron-clad case for a compelling, data-backed proposal. The group’s reaction? Tepid, at best. So, what happened? Nancy Duarte would likely tell you that you were missing the story behind the data. In this episode of Three Big Points, Duarte shows us how to bring data to life in a way that will win people over to your idea.

Just as Jacob Marley was bound to drag the weight of his sins for an eternity, so too are organizations burdened by the weight of their debts. And we’re not just talking about the monetary kind. There are other forms of debt that companies take on, and they carry a weight that can be as heavy as the greatest financial liabilities. Two of the most nefarious forms are technical and cultural debt, which accrue as a by-product of the decisions and investments companies make along their growth journeys. In this week’s episode, Stanford’s Bob Sutton takes us inside ride-sharing giant Uber, which offers an ideal case study.