Is the Hyper-Digital Era Upon Us?

A Sneek Peek to Big Bet Leadership

Strategies and Techniques for Change Agents, Strategists, and Innovators

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark” — Michelangelo

Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, releases in less than a month. Here’s the context of the book and why we wrote it.

The Hyper-Digital Era

Some say we have entered the “age of AI”, but the forces at play are much bigger than AI, or even technology, and the impact is going to create a new era of business winners and losers.

There are countless books making the case for digital transformation, innovation, and business model reinvention; others that deal with Agile frameworks and innovation programs and styles; and bountiful stories about the companies and leaders of both the disruptors and the disrupted. Those works are important, but they are not sufficient.

Big Bet Leadership is oriented at a different altitude and for a complementary purpose. This playbook highlights the key failure points of transformations, innovation programs, major technology initiatives and other high-risk strategies, defines a guiding policy or approach to address the point of failure, and describes steps and tactics to gain the desired outcome. These approaches are at an actionable level for executive implementation.

The mission of Big Bet Leadership is to aid leaders in doing a central part of their job, which is in leading transformations.

That is why we wrote this book. But why now?

We are writing Big Bet Leadership now because the job of leading transformations is simultaneously getting harder while the need for them has never been greater. Our belief is that leading successful transformations and innovation must become a leadership core competency, which it is not today for most leaders and companies.

There are three mega forces shaping America’s need and opportunity to drive productivity and innovation.

Mega Force #1

The first mega force is disruptive technologies such as generative AI and quantum computing. There are many types of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and many other disruptive tech- nologies. Computer vision, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, augmented and virtual reality, and 5G technology are just some of the game-changing technologies. More are on the horizon, with fusion energy a potentially complete game changer.

Why are these disruptive technologies game-changing? Because customer value propositions as well as company organizational structures, operating models, and cost structures can be radically reinvented by using what is often a combination of these disruptive technologies.

Mega Force #2

The second mega force is the aging of America’s workforce. In 1995, approximately 88 percent of the US population was under the age of 65. Today, it is 82 percent. In 1995, the US birthrate was approximately 15 per 1,000 people. Today, it is approximately 11. In 1995, approximately 3 percent of the US labor force was over 65. Currently, it is approximately 6 percent. By 2050, it is projected to more than double to over 13 percent.

Our available workforce is aging, and that is a challenge confronting most of the world’s major economies. This mega force will drive substantial but hard-to-predict disruptions to companies’ organizational structures, operating models, and cost structures.

Mega Force #3

The third mega force is the growth of spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare as well as the cost of serving the US debt. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts US government spending on entitlement programs plus net interest on US debt to grow from 56% of total federal spending in 2023 to 74% by 2050. Growth in spending on entitlement programs and debt payments will create upward pressure on taxes and downward pressure on spending on infrastructure, education, defense, and other discretionary spending programs.

One effective way to reduce the burden of the debt and entitle- ments obligation is to improve productivity, increasing the size of the economy. The aging of the workforce will create macroeconomic conditions encouraging companies to realize dramatic versus incre- mental increases in productivity. Disruptive technologies provide the essential enabler for the innovation and retooling.

And The Fuse Connecting Them for Combustion

This tumultuous backdrop, formed by the combination of these three mega forces, will be further stoked by the monetary war chests that private equity, venture capital, and Big Tech companies are poised to invest in fueling an ever-accelerating rate of disruption.

Global private capital raises totaled $1.3 trillion in 2022, up from $448 billion in 2012. Over the same decade, US venture capital assets under management grew from $255 billion to $1.2 trillion.

The combined annual operating free cash flow of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft grew nearly fourfold, from approximately $100 billion in 2012 to nearly $400 billion per year in 2022.

Combined, these trillion-dollar war chests will fund the creation of dramatically more efficient operating models and cost structures and the technology to fuel this battle of innovation and efficiency.

These mega forces will feed into each other like a vortex, building an overriding theme for business and society—that of a chaotic environment of dramatic change with successful business operators realizing productivity and cost model advantages that separate them from their competition.

The Starting Point

Netscape went public on August 9, 1995, and that date is often used as a historical marker for the start of the current digital era. ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022.

We believe that in the coming years the release date of ChatGPT will be another historical marker for a new era of competition: the Hyper-Digital Era.

This will be an era with more dramatic business winners and losers. The winners will include categories and companies unknown to us today. The losers will include organizations and brands that today appear to be under no threat, perhaps even the big winners of the first digital era.

Those companies and leaders who lack daring, clarity, and velocity will typically find themselves on the wrong side of history. We write Big Bet Leadership to assist those who are the opposite—ready to act with daring, clarity, and velocity to compete for the future.

Ninety percent of the world knows they need to change. Only 10% are ready to change. Big Bet Leadership is for that 10%

—- Dr. Mark Goulston, author of Just Listen and Talking to Crazy; UCLA professor of psychiatry, former FBI and police hostage negotiator trainer

Why Upgrade to Paid?

Upgrade to a paid version of The Digital Leader Newsletter, and you get a lot more than a newsletter:

• A signed copy of Big Bet Leadership

• Access to proprietary frameworks and tools

• Ability to schedule one-on-one meetings with John Rossman and Kevin McCaffrey to discuss your situation.

• A Big Bet Leadership holographic sticker

Read more about Big Bet Leadership HERE

About The Digital Leader Newsletter

This is a newsletter for change agents, strategists, and innovators.  The Digital Leader Newsletter is a weekly coaching session focusing on customer-centricity, innovation, and strategy. We deliver practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help you build better strategies, better plans, and better solutions — but most of all, to think and communicate better.

John Rossman is a keynote speaker and advisor on leadership and innovation.

Learn more at 

https://johnrossman.com