Breaking Digital Gridlock, + Website

Foreword

Brett King

International Bestselling Author of Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane and Bank 4.0

Whenever you have a book that rounds out with a chapter entitled “Big Data and the Zombie Apocalypse,” you know you're in for an unconventional ride, and yet I have to say the conclusions behind John Best's debut tome are undeniable and sound.

In a world where almost every industry on the planet is being transformed in some way by digital technologies, the question always seems to be can the incumbents do enough to survive? In the case of music, books, retail, transportation and video, we've seen enormous disruption through the emergence of pure-play digital competitors. Initially, this was through so-called e-commerce players during the dot com, and in 2007 it started all over again with the emergence of the iPhone and its App ecosystem. Today we're talking blockchain, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy transformation and gene therapy, but the pattern is the same. It's been the same since the luddites smashed up the steam machines, the first US transcontinental telegraph line killed off the pony express, and automobiles disrupted horses.

Faced with potential disruption many organizations delay a response, hoping upon hope that they'll be “different”, and when the inevitability of change is evident, the organization is simply unable to adapt fast enough. Best tackles this from a practitioner's point of view, of someone who has been in the trenches trying to enable such ...