Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.
We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!
So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Gerald Kane talk about his book, The Technology Fallacy!
Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:34 - Origin Story
4:40 - Fax Machines
8:25 - Knowing Doing Gap
11:02 - Successful Digital Transformation
13:35 - Golden Age of Corporate Leadership
19:04 - How Paranoid Do We Need To Be?
22:11 - Contact Info & Wrap
Links:
Website: https://www.geraldckane.com/
- [Intro] Welcome to Skye team's "People First" with Morag Barrett.
- Welcome to this week's episode of People First and my guest this week is Dr. Gerald Kane, who is a professor of information systems and faculty director of the Edmund H. Shea Jr Center for entrepreneurship at Boston College's, Carroll School of Management. Wow, I can only imagine the width of that business card.
- Yes absolutely.
- Jerry researches and teaches about how companies can understand and respond to digital disruption to undergraduate, graduate and executive education students worldwide. He's published more than a hundred papers, articles and reports on these topics. And today we're going to be talking about his book, "The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation". And you might also be getting a sneak peek of his upcoming book, "The Transformation Myth: Leading Your Organization through Uncertain Times". So Jerry welcome to "People First."
- And it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
- All right. So as all of this, this is a podcast for leaders by leaders and it's exploring the journeys that we are all taking or have taken to get to where we are today. So I'm going to take you back. Flashback to elementary school. You're sitting there in class, your teacher has just asked you to draw a picture of what you want to be when you grow up? So when you were a wee lad, Jerry, what was your answer?
- Gosh, that's actually a hard question. Perhaps I will just answer it with what was I, when I grew up before I became a college professor. And for 10 years I was actually a United Methodist minister working at a large church in Atlanta. I really enjoyed my time there. It was a great experience but it was sort of like serving in the military. I did my tour of duty and I realized it was time to move on and went back to get my PhD. So I have two hats. One is the... I'm officially Reverend Dr. Kane, even though sort of my job is fully in academia now.
- Okay. Well, wow. I wonder so how has that informed the research and the work that you do now?
- In all sorts of different ways. So my early research was in social media. So the first day... My first day as a college professor was the day that Facebook launched this new feature called newsfeed. And all my students came into class mad because how dare they, this is an invasion of our privacy. We're going back to Myspace. And so my first day as a college professor I called an audible, and basically explained to them the business reasons why they wouldn't leave Facebook and lo and behold, 15 years later, that lesson proved right. As I got into social media there's a lot about working in a community-based organization where you don't have the traditional command and control structures of a traditional business that really aligns well with the sort of rough and tumble organic nature of the social media space. And I actually think informs very well many of the challenges that companies are facing as we move into a more digital world when you don't have all the bureaucracy and the level of control that you're used to because you need to empower people. You know, working with volunteers was a great way to learn those skills because if you can't fire people and you don't have a paycheck for them, you need to learn to motivate them and lead an organization in fundamentally different ways. And a lot of that experience actually informs sort of how I'm thinking about organizations transform in the 10 to 20, one year for the COVID and then five to 10 years beyond that.
- Essentially I'm looking forward to diving into your book and a reminder it's called "The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation." And two quick stories. Well, quickish, in terms of my own journey through that digital transformation. If I flashed back to my first career in banking, I remember the moment when a fax machine was delivered and installed in our branch. And we thought we had reached nirvana.
- The pinnacle of-
- The pinnacle-
- Of technological advancement.
- Now I realized this is not the main focus of your research but can you answer for me why is it that we still have fax numbers on business cards? I don't know the last time-
- I actually can answer that it's because we actually have this in the technology fallacy books that the real challenge is not that technology moves fast, it does. The challenge is there's differing rates of change between technologies, individuals, organizations and public policy. And there were some rules about fax machines, you could do things over fax that you still can't do over email. And so it's a lot of the regulatory stuff that hasn't caught up to the new environment.
- And we'll talk about that later. 'cause there's the ethical piece too-
- Ooh absolutely
- That is gradually eating sometimes different pace. All right, so fax machine arrived, six months later it's catching dust. The other digital transformation that I remember seeing again in the nineties was smart boards and I remember all the companies that invested in these phenomenal white board kind of computer things that would download everything that you write. And they sat there like the white elephant, nobody dared use them in case that you use the wrong pen which brings me back to the subtitle of your book that people are the real key to digital transformation. You can buy the bells and whistles, but if I'm too afraid to use it, or I use it in appropriately that investment is going to be wasted. What are your thoughts?
- Yeah, and so as we research companies, really what the technology fallacy, we actually came up with a title last. So we never actually describe what it means in the book. But since then, I've come up with the definition which is basically the technology fallacy is this mistaken belief that just because an organization's challenges or problems are caused by digital technology that the solutions involve digital technology as well. Many of the biggest challenges were not technological. They were organizational, they were talent-based, they were leadership style based strategy. And those were much more of the challenges to get them up to speed, to working in a digital world. And I actually think COVID has basically proven our hypothesis true because the tech that, it's really been remarkable at how quickly organizations have been able to flip switches and adapt to, you know remote work, to all sorts of different approaches. And the technology has been strong. You know, I was a little nervous as we were flipping schools and everything to Zoom and online, and by and large the technology has been rock solid. So the technology has always been there. It's the people side that we haven't been sort of able to change as quickly as the technology and nothing like an existential event for organizations like COVID to get peop...
