The Convergence is Here
Years ago, when I was working as the CEO of Toffler Associates, the eponymous consulting firm launched and led by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, I had a discussion with a senior leader of one of the world’s largest aerospace companies. We were considering why her line of business was struggling to grow within international markets. She was frustrated with the existing workforce and observed, “We just don’t hire innovative people anymore. We used to. I just cannot find anyone with new ideas or a willingness to take risks anymore. It is an issue throughout our company.”
I had spent almost a decade supporting her company. I knew the organization and its people. I saw that the issue was with convergence of old ideas, new requirements, and unclear roles. I challenged her by countering, “I think you do have innovative people, they just can’t bring their energy and ideas forward because you and the organization stifle them. Your review process for new ideas is onerous.”
Like so many others, her organization had lost sight of the importance of people. Across my long career working with leaders from government agencies and Fortune 100 companies in virtually every continent, I’ve seen a few fundamental realities. One is this: if you don’t embrace human-centric behavior, people will not be able to bring the best of themselves to helping an organization sustain a successful future.
Process is a powerful current that often creates riptides you can’t swim against. Leaders must learn to swim diagonally to get to the destination of being human-centric.
Introducing the Convergence book
My book, Convergence: Technology, Business, and the Human-Centric Future, unearths the causes of some of these processes and thinks about how we can identify and mitigate obsolete knowledge that restrains our progress. As the title suggests, the book takes a careful look at the deepening intersections of people, business, and technology.
While the discussion I recounted took place years ago, we’ve reached a historic inflection point that demands leaders rebalance the energy and focus we place on technology and humans within our organizations. Convergence alerts readers to signals of accelerating disruption and orients us to new mental models, decision priorities, and the human-centric perspective we need to achieve a resilient global future. Throughout the book, I share personal stories and historical examples to highlight convergences that span the globe, impacting everything from global supply chains to climate change, and reshaping the future of business, technology, and humanity everywhere.
The book officially hits shelves on May 11. Over the next month, I’ll be engaging in rich podcast discussions with individuals like professor Ed Freeman and Andrew Gottlieb, as well as organizations including Conscious Capitalism. We’ll host open virtual launch events with incredible partners including Beth Comstock, who wrote the Foreword for Convergence. And every week, I’m posting Convergence Conversations to the blog with leading thinkers from government, business, medical, education, and civic spaces.
I hope you’ll join me for some or all of these discussions. You can keep up with all this human-centric, future-focused content by subscribing to the email at the bottom of this page, and joining me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. And I hope you’ll secure your pre-release copy of the book so you can join us in these vital conversations about the convergences that are reshaping our world.