What the Digital Future Holds: 20 Groundbreaking Essays on How Technology Is Reshaping the Practice of Management

by MIT Sloan Management Review

The relationship between management and digital technology: experts present a new agenda for the practice of management. Digital technology has profoundly affected the ways that businesses design and produce goods, manage internal communication, and connect with customers. But the next phase of the digital revolution raises a new set of questions about the relationship between technology and the practice of management. Managers in the digital era must consider how big data can inform hiring decisions, whether new communication technologies are empowering workers or unleashing organizational chaos, what role algorithms will play in corporate strategy, and even how to give performance feedback to a robot. This collection of short, pithy essays from MIT Sloan Management Review, written by both practitioners and academic experts, explores technology's foundational impact on management.

Much of the conversation around these topics centers on the evolving relationship between humans and cognitive technologies, and the essays reflect this--considering, for example, not only how to manage a bot but how cognitive systems will enhance business decision making, how AI delivers value, and the ethics of algorithms.

Contributors
Ajay Agrawal, Robert D. Austin, David H. Autor, Andrew Burgert, Paul R. Daugherty, Thomas H. Davenport, R. Edward Freeman, Joshua S. Gans, Avi Goldfarb, Lynda Gratton, Reid Hoffman, Bala Iyer, Gerald C. Kane, Frieda Klotz, Rita Gunther McGrath, Paul Michelman, Andrew W. Moore, Nicola Morini-Bianzino, Tim O'Reilly, Bidhan L. Parmar, Ginni Rometty, Bernd Schmitt, Alex Tapscott, Don Tapscott, Monideepa Tarafdar, Catherine J. Turco, George Westerman, H. James Wilson, Andrew S. Winston

136 pages, Paperback

Published January 26, 2018

Reviews

[WiseB]

The contributors to the articles in this book provide various perspective of how the different digital technologies will impact business and management in coming years. This is interesting to those who are more focus on the technology side to read the concerns and potential ... both positive and negative to the practice of management.

[Esther]

I finished this book a while ago, wrote quick summary on few pages of paper:

• AI: Artificial Intelligence is an enhancement, extended intelligence, augmenting human intelligence
• ethics: we need to figure out how to have better conversations about the role of purpose, ethics, and values in this tech world, rather than assuming that these issues have been solved or that they don’t exist because “it’s just an algorithm”
• understanding how ethics affect the algorithms and how these algorithms affect our ethics is one of the biggest challenge of our times.
• machine-learning algorithm gets better at determining the best response with compassion/empathy
• technology can be deployed to augment the creative abilities of people and organizations and make new and valuable innovations possible
• Many workplace in the future, people need to ask questions such as: “how can I structure my career and job so that I can differentiate myself from a machine?”
“How can I best use my skills to work with the AI system?
• Humans may supplement the skills of machines, not the other way. (Machines won’t supplement the skills of humans).