When we look at companies today, the reality of this is even clearer. You can lead a management team to water, but you cannot make them drink.
At the time, companies may not have realised it, but technology had become of fundamental importance. Specifically, he wrote about how technology is effectively an ordinary unit of general management, constituting specific knowledge, abilities, methods, and equipment. It’s apparent that this has become nothing if more crucial in the modern way of doing business. Back then, Tschirky wrote about the significance of establishing technological competencies at a top management level. In 2004, Prof Hugo Tschirky, academic at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), initiated and co-authored a book entitled “Bringing technology and innovation into the boardroom” about this very subject. Unfortunately, this assertion is wrong in fact, a critical gap has emerged between management theory and technological reality. Taking all of this into account, many would assume that technology – and its adoption – would be second nature to corporate boardrooms by now. Such a notion wouldn’t have been a workable theory a decade ago, which shows how far technological development has come in that time (as well as how unprecedented the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is). For such technology to work it relies upon widespread access to, and knowledge of, smartphone technology and its functionality. To put this further into perspective, in the fight against coronavirus, the British government is trialling a new smartphone app designed to record citizens’ symptoms, track their progress and alert anyone if they come into close proximity with an infected patient. Entire markets have been created, corporate monoliths have boomed, and some traditional sectors are simply no more. Companies have of course realised the endless opportunities effective technology adoption can afford, thus revolutionising the world of commerce. A world of possibilities, just a few taps away, has fundamentally changed how we interact with technology on both a cultural and economic level. As a society we’ve moved past the novel idea of there being a computer in every other home to nearly the entire population having a super-fast smartphone in their pocket, packed with immense functionality. This isn’t just a fact true for the generations that remember a time before the internet, but points towards the rapid developments seen in the past 20 years, with entire generations now born into this era of super-connectivity. In the interests of simplicity, it might be best to start with an irrefutable and obvious fact: Worryingly, a critical gap between theory and execution has opened up, so Prof Tschirky decided to look into the challenge still facing businesses in how they use technology. In 2004, he initiated and co-authored a book called “Bringing technology and innovation into the boardroom” but many of the findings in this book have still yet to be fully embraced by executive boards. Prof Hugo Tschirky is an academic at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and specialises in how companies innovate and embrace technology.