Technology and World Change (Session 4)

Technology and World Change

Session 4

Brief Overview

In this lesson it was on what drives the world, what influences the economy, the world. There were many factors that we concluded during the discussion like globalization, environmental factors, governance, demographic factors just to name a few. And for the other half of the lesson, the discussion was focused on change management and leadership. How leaders can implement change within their workforce and how they could go about doing it to optimize results without any backlash. And how change is a good thing, it is necessary.

Interesting Observations and Ideas

Article 1 gave a good but brief introduction to a series of drivers of change. For example, the author mentioned “Mobility”. He expounded on it and said that with the increased travel experiences, communication between people will improve tremendously. Transport and the associated vehicles and infrastructure and its systems will also be improved and stand to benefit a great deal. I believe that the overarching cause of this would be globalization. Globalization, as explained in article 2, is defined as “a process of economic integration of the entire world through the removal of barriers to free trade and capital mobility, as well as through the diffusion of knowledge and information.” With mobility, comes brain drain where a lot of countries such as India are facing. Brain drain occurs when a significant number of well-educated or talented people decide to migrate to other countries in search of higher ground and better future prospective. Brain drain is only but one of the many dire consequences of globalization. Other negative impacts of globalization could include growing inequality between countries and even within countries, environmental degradation, more difficult for some companies to enter international markets due to stiff competition. However, there are advantages to globalization as well. There is greater connectivity around the world such that it creates better understanding and cohesion, standardization of many products, prevents saturation in a specific market and much more.

In another article entitled “Human Change Management: Herding Cats” they talked about the implantation of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The system contained all the benefits that many companies sought after such as “seamless integration of critical information flows”, however it lacked one critical element that is the human element. It talked about how many companies, which have adopted this system ultimately, failed because their employees could not adapt well or were resistant to the changes that were in place. There were several reasons that explained this. For one, when a company implements a new system, their employees are not made known the reason for implementing the system and they choose to ignore it thinking that it may not be necessary. What they do not know is that other departments require the information that is closely linked to the system. This continues in a vicious cycle and eventually even a successful system may turn out to be a flop.

Key Takeaways

One key takeaway is that for companies to adjust well to changes, everyone should be made clear the goals and objectives of the company. Allowing their employees and everyone on their payroll to see from the management’s perspective would allow them to know why certain changes were made and how that could lead them along the same path and towards achieving their goals. They might also like to introduce some sort of incentives that could help their employees into achieving these new goals such that they can better and more quickly adapt to these changes. Certain on-the-job measures too can be implemented too to help employees along the way to track their progress. For example, it was stated in the article that 11 most successful companies gained an average of 143% of their expected returns just by understanding “corporate objectives and the ways in which their jobs contribute to achieving them”. This has very much to do with leadership and what the top personnel can do to lead their workers to go onboard with them to achieving corporate objectives.

Issues for Further Discussion (Presentation)

WikiCells will ask for different amounts of consumer adoption or change of behaviour, where changing the way we eat means challenging the throwaway culture. Most consumers are resistive to taking a step out and trying new things. What is your take on this? Would you dare to try it?

With regard to this, in my opinion I think many people are resistive to change because it is something new and WikiCells is something that is very novel. Furthermore, it is replacing something originally taken to be trash and transforming it to something edible. That thought could possible deter people from doing it even though it is innovative and probably has the potential to curv the problem of our throwaway culture; it is still something people have not heard much about. So it is perfectly understandable if someone is still not quite willing to give it a go. Perhaps, if one day this becomes more widespread, and more people are introduced to it, then maybe due to peer pressure or other social reasons, more people would start trying it. But for now, I for one am still not willing to eat my wrappers.

Personal Ratings

I would rate this lesson an 8 because it was really interesting to see the many facets of the world that could possible transform the way in which we do things. The drivers of world change really were thought provoking because it provided new insight for me, especially hearing the discussions. Furthermore, change management and leadership was the one I enjoyed most because you get to see how the human interaction and leadership could affect the way in which a corporation is run and how it could affect the success or failure of the company.