Author: Igor Rivera, researcher at Center for Digital Evolution and professor at Business School of Tecnológico de Monterrey.
At the end of 2023, the EXATEC Meeting of the Tecnológico de Monterrey Business School was held in the Mexico City Region, in which I had the honor of moderating a discussion panel between three prominent EXATEC, managers from different industries and with whom I had the pleasure of talking about new strategies for the digital transformation of both organizations and the leadership of their managers.
From that conversation, I want to summarize a message that seems important to me, and that although it was not presented as an absolute truth, I believe that it should be taken into account as a topic to be considered in the current situation of Mexico and the world.
We live in a complex era, where technology has come to change the rules of the game in various ways: information flows almost without borders or controls (including quality controls) through the network, electronic commerce has imposed new challenges to Global logistics, computer and telephone networks with greater capacity and speed allow the generation of large volumes of data, and both electronics and the cloud allow its storage and processing on a large scale.
In business schools globally, we have been studying that in these environments with large doses of volatility and uncertainty, there are different strategies to address emerging problems.
On the one hand, we embrace multidisciplinarity as a principle that helps us see situations from different angles, and as an enhancer of critical thinking, which is the skill necessary in the search for efficiencies or how to better do things that are already done. good. This spirit has led us to develop as a society in an accelerated manner in recent decades.
However, there is an additional factor that comes into play at this juncture: although there will be more and more managers and directors of companies who were born as digital natives - in 2001, Prensky already defined them as people born in the digital era -, there is still Today many managers would correspond to the group that would instead be called digital immigrants.
The fundamental differences between both groups is that our brain was programmed to understand the world in different ways, so a proactive business leader who belongs to the group of digital immigrants must be willing to unlearn the analog world to relearn the digital world. : That's almost equivalent to rewiring your brain circuits. Why would this be necessary?
At least 2,600 years ago, humanity began to create evidence of its ability to make abstractions from the real world that did not require supernatural explanations, through geometry, arithmetic, or the emergence of currency as a medium of exchange.
In the digital world, there may be representations of reality: for example, these lines may be printed on paper and ink or they may be in an electronic document, but in the end, they perform the same function.
Likewise, our communication and our “presence” can take different forms. Even our capacity for logical reasoning has been emulated by artificial intelligence for a couple of decades.
This broad access to computing power in its various presentations is changing our ways of transacting. For example, physical sales floors will give way to virtual stores, physical books to digital readings, and face-to-face classes and consultations to their online counterparts. Even autonomous vehicle driving will take time and space behind the wheel.
This implies that the professions that facilitate our daily interaction will also be transformed: either because the nature of the product or service changes, or because we have more and better tools to form our criteria and thereby make better decisions.
In any case, current business managers and those in training, especially if they are digital immigrants, have the task and responsibility of bridging the gaps between the physical and the virtual, between the analog and the digital; so that they can reinterpret their experience in light of new needs.
To do this, there are many alternatives, but they all require a certain effort: you have to read, participate in forums, conferences and discussions, return to the classroom (in-person or virtual), that is, take advantage of any opportunity to learn from experts. , regardless of whether they are from a previous generation; In the end, they are the digital natives.
Originally published in El Financiero.