Technology represents the largest uncertainty for which most companies do not have a strategy—yet the right strategy turns uncertainty into opportunity. For example, with technology, Walmart turned the uncertainties of retail procurement and logistics into an empire, Amazon turned customer order uncertainty into the basis of its mission – “Earth’s Most Customer Centric Company.” Google famously turned the mass of internet chaos into actionable information for other companies.
These companies reflect the earliest transition from the Third Industrial Revolution that focuses on digital inter-connectivity to the Fourth Industrial Revolution that focuses on combining technologies across all arenas: digital, physical and biological. Many companies are still stuck in the Third Industrial Revolution, with prognostications of digitizing and integrating supply chains. The problem is that digitization has become the price of entry—nearly every one of the long list of retailers that has recently gone bankrupt was digitized and “connected.”