Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Can Achieve the Impossible.

AuthorSullivan, Josh
PositionViewpoint - Excerpt

This is an adapted excerpt from The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible Copyright [c]2017. It is available from Public Affairs, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group Inc.

Imagine flying over a major city at night--say, Chicago or Paris or Beijing--and it is completely dark below. It is just a void of light akin to nighttime in the middle of the ocean.

Then imagine someone flips on the power grid, and you see today's web of human activity light up. Imagine further that someone flips the switch again, and you glimpse a future image of the city. Where you once thought there was nothing, there is a universe of action--both present and future. Enormous detail radiates from the darkness, and you perceive and envision features you never knew existed.

This ability to "flip the switch" to see formerly hidden details and vital insights about the future expresses the potential of the mathematical corporation. Thanks to leaps in technology, we can get a new fine-grained, high-resolution picture of aspects we could never distinguish before. With machine intelligence, built on the bundle of technologies known as data science, we can see patterns, anomalies and associations that were previously cloaked in obscurity.

But this ability stems not just from technology. It also results from a new form of leadership--the type of leadership that illuminates the darkness by shattering constraints on thinking.

There was the rigid belief that the best decisions always result from intuition and experience. As these constraints--those recognized and those unrecognized--fall, every system and business process in an organization will reverberate with change. Every strategy in every industry will fundamentally shift.

Five years ago, we set out to discover how technology combined with new forms of leadership and faster innovation would affect business, government and nonprofit organizations. After researching hundreds of organizations, we have distilled the elements that comprise the model of the winning organization of the future--organizations we call "mathematical corporations."

We dub this new kind of organization the mathematical corporation because it is driven by data. The data feed ingenious algorithms. And when you lead this kind of organization, you practice a new kind of scientific management infused with inspirational leadership and purpose.

The mathematical corporation does not just look back at what successful companies have done. A backward look cannot hold the secrets to future results, because...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT