Technonomics and Why My Profits Might Just Disappear with John Straw

OutsideVoices with Mark Bidwell

In this episode, we are joined by digital and marketing entrepreneur, John Straw, who describes himself as a “technonomist” – someone exploring the cutting edge of technology and looking to understand where it fits from both an economic and commercial perspective. John is a Senior Advisor at McKinsey, as well as an author, speaker and investor with over 30 years of experience in IT and digital transformation.

What Was Covered

• The journey John sees towards “programmatic enterprises” in which the availability of data and artificial intelligence allow for organizational control on a totally different level than possible today
• How this journey takes us from decision making via experience and intuition to experience augmented by data to data augmented by experience to simply by data. And how, as per previous major shifts (think of the introduction of the PC) this happens not as a “big bang” but as a more gradual or “stealthy” process
• The advice that John uses when personally investing in new technology businesses and his two-part rule which he advises business leaders to use in renovation and innovation implementation

Key Takeaways and Learnings

• How companies are using “layered” data to improve their renovation and innovation activities
• How new technologies, and the pace of their development, provide opportunities for scale for all companies’ renovation processes
• Why transformational innovation activities (“breaking” the existing business) need to go “in the garage”, away from the innovation “killers” of process and politics

Links and Resources Mentioned in this Podcast

• Get in touch with John Straw via Twitter, LinkedIn or email
• McKinsey & Company - Global Management Consulting
• iDisrupted - a book by Michael Baxter and John Straw
• John's posts at the Disruption Hub Blog