Emerging Markets Business Summer 2017 | Page 30

30 DISRUPTION NETWORKS EMB 31 Some people have an instinct that is the ability to understand how connection changes the nature of everything. 5. Understanding the age we are living in; that financial volatility wasn’t just a feature of 2008, but will be part of our lives for a long time. In the financial system, the more peo- ple who are connected and the faster those connections, the more stuff goes on that no- body can predict. Being able to take in- formed risks is essential. Successful people do things that have not been done before, but are cognizant of the fact that the environ- ment they operate in is one of instability. the puzzle is figuring it out with constant test- ing, probing and feedback. There are also certain network features, such as speed, that can help a new firm get an edge on a network. The overall point, I think, is that as the world gets more con- nected, the firms in a position to accelerate and improve that connection – for data or products or ideas – should do very well. So, the secret is to decode what process will produce that for you. THE BUSINESS CONTEXT I have been asked why the Seventh Sense matters and my answer is this: we will soon be living in- escapably inside connected systems and people need to be prepared for that. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by our era; so much to master: modern warfare, complex politics, radically changing economics. We experience constant replacement of old technologies with new ones before we understand them. Future struggles are not about whether we are going to be enmeshed but, rather, the terms of that enmeshment. We live in an age of leaders, whether they be business CEOs, politicians or military, who don’t have the technical instincts that the Seventh Sense demands and who lack fluency in the digital flux. We need men and women who can confident- ly command networks in a fight against network dangers. For example, more computer coding academies are needed, as is better popular edu- cation about network choices. Also, it is important to beware of handing over control to a new breed of “technos” who may or may not have a vision of the importance of keeping a balance with human needs. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a big feature of this connectivity and raises significant ques- tions: how do we design the topologies on which AI operates? Can we protect ourselves? These issues are already being debated in boardrooms, with many people thinking that AI is humanity’s greatest existential threat. In a corporate setting, the Seventh Sense is that ability to sit in the boardroom and look at what- ever it is you sell and see the way in which con- nections affect your company. That’s hard to quantify, but you will be able to quantify what happens to your business; you’ll see retail sales flattening, or store traffic declining, or an in- crease in sales of certain products, and you might wonder why on earth this is happening. Those who have developed the Seventh Sense are able to understand these developments. So many of the puzzles in our world – why can’t we beat ISIS? Why is the middle class emp- tying out? What is going on with our politics? – all are rooted in the way that connected systems are redistributing power. I don’t just mean the Internet but connected systems of finance or DNA or data or people. They behave differently than older, top-down, industrial systems. The sooner businesses understand this, the faster they can adjust. Business leaders must keep in mind that we are what we’re connected to. In fact, the very growth of the start-up economy has been accel- erated because it is so much easier to draw on all kinds of resources. The trick for real growth is to get network effects running in your business: the idea that the more people who use it, the better it gets, so more people want to use it. So many big start-ups today succeed because they become platforms. The reality is, once you had five billion people connected, there was going to be something like Facebook – something was going to serve that role. I think that’s true for almost all the billion-plus user platforms on the planet today. If you have a multi-billion user company, then success might be near-inevitable. To use the example of Facebook again, it dis- covered that if people joined and found ten friends in seven