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Book Excerpt: Why Every Company Needs To Be A Tech Company

The problem is that most of us tend to look at technology with the wrong lens, writes Jaspreet Bindra. 



Employees work at a technology company office in Gurugram. (Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg)
Employees work at a technology company office in Gurugram. (Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg)

Excerpted from ‘The Tech Whisperer’, By Jaspreet Bindra, with permission from Penguin Random House.

‘The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.’

- The Wall Street Journal onthe unveiling of Apple’s iPad

‘The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was the genius.’

- Sid Caesar

Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva need some very powerful weapons, or astras, to make high impact changes to the world as well as to fight many battles to enable and execute those changes. According to lore, Vishnu possesses the sudarshan chakra, the golden discus with 108 serrations, spinning constantly around his index finger. Once off the finger, it chases its target like a guided missile and does not return without annihilating them. Brahma has the brahmastra, which the texts describe as the ultimate weapon. Compared often to a very powerful thermonuclear bomb, it has the power to destroy everything—the earth, heavens and the netherworld. The brahmastra, thus, is akin to a new business model, which destroys the old one through immense concentration and meditation or can be given by a Guru who knows the correct incantations.

Fittingly, Shiva, the destroyer, has the most weapons. The pinaka dhanush was his powerful bow which an ordinary mortal could not even lift. Ekasha gadha, the mace, which could kill a million elephants in one blow. Rudra astra, the third eye of Shiva, which when open leads to untold destruction. Finally, the mighty trishul, the three-pronged staff of Shiva, holds the power to destroy everything in its way, and can be stopped only by Shiva himself. There are countless other weapons of Shiva which we gradually discover as we read more texts.

The Gods have their weapons, similarly you need powerful technologies when you try to digitally transform your business—AI, machine learning, deep learning, IoT, big data and analytics, 3D printing, drones, robotics, augmented reality and VR.

A few other names you will soon hear of are: quantum computing, DNA computing, bio-printing, smart dust and many others. Much like Shiva’s weapons, the more you look, the more of them you will find.

Quite exasperated, many CEOs often ask me a question: how does one keep track and understand this abundant influx of technologies arriving on an almost daily basis? No sooner have they understood and implemented IoT, 3D printing comes along as the hot new thing. They might have just understood the basics of AI and ML, and suddenly there is deep learning to figure out. They might have gotten their heads around drones and their CTOs start hyper-ventilating about blockchain. How do they keep up, how do they understand all this new stuff, how do they figure out whether this is relevant for their business, and then, if it is relevant how do they use them?

They seem to be plagued by the millennial concept of fear of missing out (FOMO). Will I miss out on a hot new technology while my competitor secretly adopts it, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, will my business be irrelevant?

The problem is that most of us tend to look at technology with the wrong lens.
(Image courtesy: BloombergQuint) 
(Image courtesy: BloombergQuint) 

Whenever we hear about a new technology, we tend to get excited and swept away by the hype generated around it, and start scrambling around how to use it in our business. What I advise CXOs is that they need to go about it the reverse way. We need to know the problems in our business—both commonplace and existential—and then look at which of these technologies we can leverage to our benefit in order to solve our problems.

A very interesting example comes from PizzaHut. Pizza delivery companies have usually delivered their wares at home or in office and made a good business out of it. Most people these days, especially millennials, have a very loose concept of office—a co-working space, a café, a sidewalk, anywhere. They are out and about most of the day and go home only to sleep! They need their pizza not only when they are at home or at their designated ‘office’, but anywhere they might be—jogging, in a park, at a mall, in a co-working space. So, PizzaHut got a shoe built with a chip and a GPS in it. If you are wearing a PizzaHut shoe, all you do is to bend down and press a button wherever you are, and your pre-configured pizza comes to you! This is about using technology (in this case, location based services, communication, GPS) to solve a problem, rather than looking at available technologies as a hammer and looking around for a nail! We must recognize how lucky we are to have this veritable buffet of digital technologies available to solve our big problems which were not available to us even a decade back.

A customer enters a Pizza Hut restaurant in Princeton, Illinois. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
A customer enters a Pizza Hut restaurant in Princeton, Illinois. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

Pretty much like the weapons of the Gods described earlier, each technology is good for a certain set of problems. There is no brahmastra technology—a silver bullet which can solve every problem the business has. One of my alltime favourite tweets says, ‘Blockchain is the answer, now tell me the question.’ Blockchain, in this case, is not the answer to every question and is not the technology to solve every problem. The only brahmastra we have is perhaps the business model, and as we saw, a new business model is not a technology, but it is enabled by many of the technologies named above.

One of the reasons CEOs scramble to understand, adopt, and sometimes even force-fit these technologies to their businesses, is the fear of imminent disruption. As we saw in Chapter 1, every seven to ten years, an entire industry disappears to be replaced by something completely new and unrecognizable. We saw how that happened with video, music, travel bookings, parts of banking, mobile telephony, and many others. We see how it is happening currently with auto, financial services, large parts of retail and many others.

This is what CEOs fear and want to remain on top of.

Usually, most CEOs believe that this cataclysmic disruption will come from the left field—a new start-up will emerge from a garage somewhere and pulverize their business. It has happened before. Google is an existential threat to the traditional media and advertising industry, and retail is getting ‘Amazoned’ by the other giant. Statista has a great classification of these new technology platform disruptors: Amazon, Google, Alibaba, etc., are the Digital White Sharks who have emerged as industry leaders; Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, Netflix, etc., are the digital swordfish busy reshaping industries; and then there are the digital piranhas like Warby Parker (which has redefined eyewear), Slack (which just had a $20-billion IPO and has graduated to swordfish category), Houzz (the last word in home decoration), etc., nibbling away and hungry for the big prey.

The Airbnb Inc. application and website are displayed on an Apple Inc. iPhone and iPad. (Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
The Airbnb Inc. application and website are displayed on an Apple Inc. iPhone and iPad. (Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

While it is true that a start-up can emerge out of nowhere and render your business irrelevant, the probability of this happening is not very high. Very few start-ups succeed; 90 percent of start-ups close down, and maybe one in every thousand becomes an Airbnb or an Uber—a swordfish that can take you down. One in a million, perhaps, will become a trillion-dollar digital leviathan like Google or Amazon.

Jaspreet Bindra is the founder of Digital Matters, an advisory firm In the areas of Digital Transformation, Blockchain and the Future of Work.

The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.