Taming Technology

Tata Literature Live-Business Shastras recently featured an interesting book titled ‘The Tech Whisperer-On Digital Transformation and The Technologies That Enable It’. Author of the book, Jaspreet Bindra, is a leading practitioner and thought leader in digital transformation and technology. This book demystifies and simplifies emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Block Chain, the Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality, and others, and illustrates how businesses may use them to accelerate their digital transformation. He was live in conversation with Arun Kumar, Chairman and CEO, KPMG India. Corporate Citizen brings you excerpts of the riveting conversation

The book “The Tech Whisperer-On Digital Transformation and the Technologies that Enable It”, gives an important and practical perspective that can assist business leaders, entrepreneurs & whoever else is interested in understanding and leveraging digital transformation and technology for their success. Starting the conversation Arun Kumar said that the ‘Tech Whisperer’ is a wonderful story; Jaspreet is indeed the whisperer, helping us tame the beast of technology so that we in business can learn how to harness its power. “Jaspreet links the story of technology to the mythology, we all grew up with, from the Ten Commandments to the Holy Trinity, creation stories from Brahma, Preservation from Vishnu and Culture and Disruption from Shiva,” said Arun Kumar.

Arun Kumar (AK): You are quite clear that the two words have distinctive importance-digital and transformation. Starting with transformation, tell us more about it.

Jaspreet Bindra (JB): It is indeed all about stories. Steve Jobs realised it many years back. In the huge amount of information bombarding us its tools that people are looking for. Much like in the older world when there were stories passing down from generation to generation. Amidst the cacophony of social media, sometimes best heard is a whisper.

Working in technology over so many years, I realised that people used the term in one breath-digital transformation. Everybody tends to focus on the digital part but I’ve realised there is no digital without transformation and vice versa. I have described the transformation part using the Ten Commandments of digital transformation. The pillars of digital transformation denoted by the Holy Trinity where business models which create businesses are the creator; you need a certain level of customer satisfaction or experience to preserve it and destruction is also necessary. Shiva did not destroy for the heck of it but to create new things. We have to get rid of our baggage to transform. Sometimes it is far more difficult for a successful company to embrace the new culture of digital transformation. To use another mythological/religious term, I also talk about the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which are listed in my book as the five big tech companies. To emulate their culture, you would need to destroy what you have.

AK: Looking at the two elements of transformation-the cultural aspect of going beyond your comfort zone and making changes, throwing out baggage and creating anew and the other is where the transformation is going, the imagination aspect which has a right-brain and a left-brain element.

JB: For many years now, technology has been a big force and something that has, along with environment, regulation or customer change, been coming as a fourth force that has meant changes in companies, businesses and business models, and in how to work and do things in business. As technology came in, most who were spearheading this change were technologists and software engineers. When Steve Jobs, who was essentially a designer, came in, it was a non-engineering vision, in that sense. People started realising that you needed to go beyond the typical predictable, left-brain, analytical thinking which engineering demanded, to take those leaps and make massive quantum changes in business using technology.

Now even in the Silicon Valley the need is felt for Humanities. Stanford started a design school. One of the two founders of Airbnb, one of the most successful startups, is a designer. I started realising this when I came into the Mahindra Group a few years back to use technology to make transformation happen. I was probably the first Digital Officer in corporate India. All of this is because the Chairman of the Mahindra Group, Anand Mahindra, has always espoused whole-brain thinking. At Mahindra, like with the Tata Group, you see a lot more of the humanities, creative thinking, arts, music festivals. Today, the border between technology and philosophy or art is blurring. Pretty much like mathematics, technology at its highest becomes philosophy. The most impactful work is being done in AI and the philosophy behind AI and Block Chain. Whenever I talk about technology it is most exciting for me when I describe the philosophy behind the technology.

"Working in technology over so many years, I realised that people used the term in one breath-digital transformation. Everybody tends to focus on the digital part but I’ve realised there is no digital without transformation and vice versa"

- Jaspreet Bindra

AK: Microsoft, where you worked, is a very interesting story in terms of a cultural transformation that Satya Nadella has wrought. He has said that the CEO is the curator of the company’s culture. Cultural change is a significant part of any transformation. What are your observations on the same?

JB: Microsoft has the most astonishing transformation story in recent times. In the pre-Nadella days, while Microsoft was an extremely successful company, it was a very hard-driving, competitive place. What Nadella wrought in a very short time was a miracle. Microsoft’s transformation might look like one of technology but it was a real cultural transformation, which lent itself to partnering rather than competing, to embracing rather than fighting open source. The market has also rewarded the company, which saw a boom in stock prices. Microsoft is one of the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse which is going to take over the world in the years to come. Nadella also draws from his personal experiences, of having a differently-abled child and the sensitivity that comes in.

AK: Having lived in Silicon Valley for nearly four decades, I have seen the change in attitudes from the days of aggressive competition, to learning how to deal with people, empathy, understanding and humility, which is linked to one’s growth mindset. How does all this drive digital transformation?

JB: It is about distributed control as opposed to one person controlling, of being kinder and gentler, partnering and becoming an ecosystem play than a single company play. A large part of ‘digital transformation’ is about decentralisation. It’s about giving up control and using technology to distribute or decentralise. Going back to my Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva analogy, the newer business models that technology is enabling are actually distributed business models. By their very nature, they empower many more people than those at the centre. None of this would have been possible without technology, without data analytics, algorithms, 4G and so on. Sometimes, I like to think we are going back to when human civilisation started and all our ‘business models’ were peer to peer. As the population grew, leaders and institutions were born, which made the model more centralised. Eventually, we have landed up in a very centralised world but now technology is being used to decentralise. Moving to these decentralised business models, using technology, thinking of business and business models almost in a neo-capitalist kind of way, is where we are fairly rapidly transforming.

AK: Moving to the digital part of digital transformation, in your book you write very eloquently about Block Chain, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. In this whole area, what should we be excited about?

JB: There have been a lot of technologies that have risen in the last decade or so. I tend to be most excited by Artificial Intelligence and Block Chain, for very different reasons. AI is a very fundamentally different technology from anything we have seen before. For the first time, we have a technology that makes an inanimate object become like us, think like us. AI has not replaced but rapidly moved into what we thought were human strengths, whether art or games or debating or mathematics. The huge challenges we face whether climate change or health or education, if we use AI in the right way it is a hugely powerful tool that we have to try and solve these big problems, and also handle tasks at a mundane level. If we do it right, there is massive excitement about this path-breaking technology. Instead of Artificial Intelligence, I like to think of it as Augmented or even Alternative Intelligence.

Block Chain is my passion. If used well, it can be the ultimate decentraliser and equaliser. It is a very democratic technology as compared to AI. Whether it be in the areas of governance, how you vaccinate the whole world, solving huge problems in agriculture, energy or education, or even in fraud and corruption control, Block Chains can be used. We tend to think of Block Chains as a cryptocurrency but there is so much to it beyond crypto.

About the author

Jaspreet Bindra is the author of ‘The Tech Whisperer’, published by Penguin Random House, and ‘The Immune Organisation’, published by Amazon Westland. He is a leading expert and business advisor on Digital Transformation, Blockchain, Future of Work and AI. Jaspreet is a Global Moderator for Harvard Business School, Scholar-in-Residence at Indian School of Business, writes a fortnightly column for Mint, advises several companies and startups, and speaks professionally at companies and conferences. He has worked as the Chief Digital Officer of Mahindra Group, Regional Director at Microsoft, COO of Baazee.com and an Officer of the Tata Administrative Services. He is a Chemical Engineer and MBA, a keen quizzer, and a collector of gin. He divides his time between Cambridge, the UK where he runs his company Tech Whisperer Ltd., and Gurugram, India, where he runs Digital Matters.