The Digital Mindset and Radically Human

THE DIGITAL MINDSET by Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley is a basic, but comprehensive guide to “What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI.”  This was one of the clearest and most informative texts that I have read on the subject. And I truly appreciated the authors’ approach to making this information accessible to their readers. Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School so their experience as educators was evident in the way they constructed this text. I agreed with other reviewers like Adam Grant and Jeff Henley, Executive Vice Chairman at Oracle, who commented positively on the practical and actionable insights it contains. Leonardi and Neeley are writing for executives, but our students are also definitely interested in automation and algorithms. This text will provide them with valuable background.   

RADICALLY HUMAN by Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson is subtitled “How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future,” yet, they focus on developing human potential alongside the technological changes. As business consultants at Accenture and authors of 2018’s Human + Machine, they have likely seen numerous cases of smooth and somewhat rocky tech adoption and they refer to many of these (ranging from Epic Games to Wayfair or Etsy to Royal Dutch Shell and so on) in their new collaboration. Daugherty and Wilson observe that humans and intelligent technology are entering a third stage of interaction which is more human focused than the previous two which at first involved applying automatic or repetitive actions and for the second had a more collaborative emphasis. They offer a new innovation framework called IDEAS (for Intelligence, Data, Expertise, Architecture and Strategy) and devote a chapter to each area.  Subsequently, they argue that “radically human technology is transforming differentiators like talent, trust, experiences, and sustainability, challenging companies to take them to a new level of distinctiveness.” The authors include extensive notes and are donating net royalties from this book to help fund education and training programs.