Mike Walker is an entrepreneur, futurist, speaker, and author with more than 25 years of experience in emerging technologies, innovation management, and business strategy. At Microsoft, he leads the cross-industry digital ecosystems, innovation team. Previously, he worked at Gartner, as a Vice President of Technology Innovation research where his thought leadership was reflected in more than 150 published research notes and 5,000 client engagements.
Mike is the host of the innovation podcast V-Next, has published articles in Forbes, and been interviewed in publications like Wired, CNN, FOX Business, Nekkei Systems Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
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Mike Walker is an entrepreneur, futurist, speaker, and author with more than 25 years of experience in emerging technologies, innovation management, and business strategy. At Microsoft, he leads the cross-industry digital ecosystems, innovation team. Previously, he worked at Gartner, as a Vice President of Technology Innovation research where his thought leadership was reflected in more than 150 published research notes and 5,000 client engagements.
Mike is the host of the innovation podcast V-Next, has published articles in Forbes, and been interviewed in publications like Wired, CNN, FOX Business, Nekkei Systems Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
Connect with Mike on Social Media
Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
Additional Resources
Okay, everybody, welcome to Phronesis. I hope you're having a great day. Thanks for checking in. Today we have a really fun conversation with Mike Walker. Mike is a Senior Director of Applied Innovation and Digital Transformation at Microsoft. And I can't wait to jump into this conversation for probably the last. I don't know, gosh, two years. I've spent a lot of time really exploring some of these technologies enabling disruption, that Mike and I were talking before the podcast even began, and I said, you know, the waters are rising. These shifts are happening. I think COVID-19 has probably accelerated many of these shifts. I can't wait to get his opinion on that. But we're going to talk today about digital disruption, and what leaders need to know what they need to have on their radar as they proceed into the future because there's a lot happening there's a lot shifting, so Mike, thank you for being here. Sir. Why don't you share a little bit about you? And we'll jump in!
Mike Walker :Yeah, you know, thanks for having me. And, yeah, you know, you're absolutely right. I mean, we're in an exciting world. And there's just so much going on. And I'm lucky enough and fortunate enough to be in a role at Microsoft for this applied Innovation Group, where I get to really start to explore what all this technology means, how it gets applied. And most importantly, at least what I feel is most important in this whole equation is less about those individual technologies themselves, but more of how it's applied. You know, how are we taking businesses and we're taking them to the next level, or even taking paradigms and completely shifting them to a whole new way of thinking about things. And so it's really A cool opportunity for me in my role to be able to work with business leaders all around the globe and talk about where should they take, you know, a 50-year-old mainframe system, you know, can we breathe more life out of this? Or do we really need to get the shovels out and bury this bad boy? And so, it's super cool to be able to do that. And I find that while on one side, my role is to be a futurist to be a strategist to be an innovator. But also, I find myself doing a lot of what I lovingly refer to as family counseling. You know this is, this isn't easy stuff; the technology straightforward and easy, but actually doing something with that technology can be hard. So it's been a long-winded answer to say, Mike, what, what the heck do you do? But essentially, it's a lot of family counseling, a lot of it ideation work, and helping Microsoft itself as a company, strategize and build products to really meet customers in the middle, help them with bridging this digital divide of, hey, I've got this technology called, I don't know, generative adversarial networks. And I want to be able to combat deep fakes. Well, what can we do as Microsoft to make that easier for you to embrace that technology? Because we do know that this stuff can be hard, and having the talent and the time to address this can be daunting and be a big, big, big barrier to entry. So So yeah, so I look forward to talking about this as a cool topic, and thanks for having me on.
Scott Allen :So before you were at Microsoft, you were with Gartner, right? Yep. Talk a little bit about that experience, what got you to Gartner, and would love to hear a little bit about that, and then we'll move into the meat of the conversation.
Mike Walker :Sure, sure. Yeah. Now, if I tell you, I'll have to have to kill you so.
Scott Allen :So this is the last episode of Phronesis?!
Mike Walker :Yeah. So with Gartner it was an interesting road because, you know, my career trajectory, you know, I spent time as a chief architect working in, yes, typical corporate America, you know, helping, you know, organizations with big problems, you know, around security, regulatory compliance, implementing new systems in the world of e-commerce, all that great stuff. And then I shifted over into the high tech world, and a combination of high tech and consulting, and that's a whole separate set of career paths. Yeah, but being a Gartner analyst is very different. It's very unique. It's its own kind of specialized field. And to be very honest with you, I wasn't sure if I even wanted to do it. I was approached by Gartner, and I truly wasn't playing hard to get it was just, I had to do my own soul searching and figure out is this something that I really want to do? And what does it really mean for me? And I guess for me, the key drivers were centered around what level of impact will I have on customers? And specifically, you know, business and technical decision-makers, how can I help make their lives easier, I didn't want to be in a role that was, you know, writing a bunch of research papers about, a bunch of hyperbole about the way things could be or they should be, but I wanted it to be in a role that I actually had a connection with customers in a material way. And a common misconception about Gartner was that it's all kind of that research side. And actually, there were three major components. There was the research side, which really gets you in the door and helps establish you as a thought leader and all that great stuff and some a monetization model for Gartner. But to, you know, I spent, you know, half of every day for my entire time at Gartner, so every morning for four or five hours, I would be on 30-minute inquiry calls with customers all around the globe. Now, in 30-minutes, you can only get so deep on things, but that kind of gave you the mile wide inch deep version of kind of what's going on in the marketplace. What are some of the key questions and challenges faster, so I thought that was while sometimes it was incredibly daunting, but you know, it definitely helps you get a very rounded perspective on what are the challenges people are facing? So that part I was like, "Okay, I can have a really good barometer on what's going on in the marketplace."
Scott Allen :Yeah.
Mike Walker :And then two in that same category there with customers what I was able to go and do kind of deep kind of workshop engagements with customers. So I could go in and run an ideation workshop for customers spend, you know, a week with them in a variety of different capacities and be able to help them out with a real meaty issue. And that was incredibly gratifying. So the first pillar was all about research and kind of doing your homework, make sure you understand the space, etc. The second part was, you know, engaging with customers. And then third, was all around the thought leadership evangelism, events, and all that side and so, definitely spent a lot of time on stage at the Gartner symposiums and The summit events, waving my hands and blowing a lot of hot air at the crowd. But it was it was definitely a unique experience. I really, you know, truly loved my experience there. They treated me extremely well. But, you know, as you know, things move on. And you know, from a career perspective, you know, I decided to shift back to Microsoft, because I was at Microsoft before, because I wanted to get closer to the technology. I always felt that, you know, while at Gartner, you definitely get perspectives that you don't get anywhere else.
Scott Allen :Yeah.
Mike Walker :There was an aspect with all this change that's happening, all this mass digitization, you know, all these new technologies are coming. I felt like, man, I really need to get closer to these technologies. And I'm not going to be able to do it when if I come into Oracle or an IBM or Salesforce or Microsoft etc. If I go into these companies with a Gartner badge on, they're going to be kind of arm's length removed, because they're going to be afraid of what I'm going to say to those, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers that I talk to every year. And so, I was never really getting a complete story for you know, it was nothing malicious or nefarious. It was legitimate reasons why they would do that. But, you know, there, I wasn't getting everything that I needed to kind of fulfill that aspect of knowledge I want to get so, you know, coming to Microsoft allowed me to get very, very close to engineering teams to see what is legit, what isn't legit, where things actually going. And so things like, you know, quantum computing is there's a lot of mystery and mystique around that technology. But being able to actually talk to physicists, at Microsoft. "Okay guys, give me the straight scoop. Yeah, tell me about it. IBM is saying this, we're saying this, you know, D-wave is saying something else. Let's cut the noise. Give me the straight scoop. And so that's been incredibly gratifying."
Scott Allen :Since this is the last episode, we've already crossed the threshold. You know this, this is all about practical wisdom for leaders and in some cases, leadership educators. My experience in a college of business, my experience in some of the consulting work that I do, is that we are we are not preparing - my biases in college as a business. We do a great job of speaking about the past, sometimes into the 1920s. We do a little bit on the present, but we do very, very little in the future. And I don't know that we are preparing our men and women to walk into that future "eyes wide open" so that they can remain lifelong learners and navigate their career, right? Yeah. I have the same hunch when I'm working with middle managers in corporate America, I don't know that they have a solid grasp on where some of all of this is headed. So for listeners, and for some of the leadership educators that are that I fundamentally believe that if you are going to lead, part of leading is at least facilitating strategy. If you are facilitating strategy, you need to have some level of awareness of where all of this is headed. Or you're ripe for disruption, your right to go away pretty quickly. So let's dip our toes we aren't going to get really deep in this conversation, but if we dip our toes in what are four or five, just concepts that people should have on their radar. What do you think? What do you think?
Mike Walker :No, I mean, it's a big issue. It's a, I think a universal issue across whether you're a small company, a large company if you're in academia or not, a nonprofit, etc. And I, I think one of the key things that I would recommend people think about is really having what, you know, folks at Microsoft and other kinds of high tech companies call a growth mindset.
Scott Allen :Nice.
Mike Walker :And, you know, the essence of what that means is you're always learning. Yeah, and you're always challenging the status quo. And I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for people to get on that bandwagon. You know, it's something my career at least that I think that's why I'm where I'm at today is, you know, I started out as a developer, writing, writing code. And I was always asking this question, "why?" Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it that way? You know, are there better ways to do this? Have we looked at this or that? And I was always asking these questions. And they were like, "Look, I wrote down the specs, just go do them!' But you know, the growth mindset really is all about taking away a lot of the judgment that gets incorporated into these cultures around, "this is what we've been doing for the past 30 years. And who are you to question it?"
Scott Allen :Yeah.
Mike Walker :"If it's not broken, why fix it?" It's all these management parables that are essentially have been relegated to the endangered species list. And so, you know, when I think about growth mindset, it's a combination of not only always learning, but it's also our behaviors as well. And It's about the diversity of ideas. And not only being accepting of those and in taking them, but also being an ambassador for this diversity and inclusion, and proactively seeking it out. And, you know, in yesterday's world where the method of your job growth or security was to hoard information and keep it all to yourself, that's all gone away. And so, another part of this growth mindset is, "what have I done to help you?" How am I hoping to enable the person down the hall and another department, etc., because that's going to come back full circle. Yeah. And oh, by the way, while we're too busy kind of infighting amongst ourselves, we all work for the same company here. So How do we help this company? And so that is a foundational building block. You get to all the other stuff we want to talk about around all this change that's happening is, you know, really having that ability for us as human beings that are, you know, essentially powering these companies to be able to be agile and nimble, to be always learning and to be seeking out these new ideas and challenging the ones that don't. So I think that is kind of a foundational core layer that leads to all other things.
Scott Allen :Well, if you have that fixed mindset, you know, I love that work by Carol Dweck. I love her whole notion of "yet," right? I'm not there yet. I'm keeping the possibilities open that we can get there. It's possible. I love that notion. So I couldn't agree with you more that staying in that place of thinking and possibilities, thinking about opportunity thinking in the future, and looking with eyes wide open, versus kind of that fixed, this is what's always been. So you're saying we got to start with that way of thinking that's a critical element in all of this.
Mike Walker :Yeah. And you know, at the end of the day is unsexy as it may sound, you know, we got to start with people. You know, we got to make sure that we feel that people are engaged, they're passionate about driving value for the company, or you're not going to get that that growth mindset. Now, I had another conversation with a gentleman that is the Chief Innovation Officer for the University of Cincinnati. And, you know, he was telling me a little bit about these innovation districts and how, you know, they're building up an innovation district. Well, they already have built up again, Innovation district in Cincinnati, and the challenges that they face to, while they may groom talent and nurture that talent within the educational system and these incubators, etc. But then they go and move to the west coast, or they move to New York or wherever. And so, you know, we're talking a lot about how companies really have a responsibility if they want to have this growth mindset to be a first-class citizen within their organizations. Yeah, you make it attractive for people to actually want to work there. Yeah. And so in, in, you know, and housing terms, you know, it's more of a buyers market. You know, it's, you know, the companies don't have the leverage anymore. It's, the employees that actually have the leverage. And if there's a bit of a town where so if you do have that growth mindset, and you have come, you've got great skills, you can go anywhere you want and get competitive salaries - you don't have to settle. And, you know, that's kind of the future. And, you know, we were also talking about, which is kind of related to this is, the previous assumption was you had to be at a company for 10 to 15 years. It wasn't looked upon you favorably if you went to a different company after a couple of years. Well, now, you know, that's actually the norm. And so they're saying that you're gonna have, you know, 20 or 30 jobs in your lifetime, which is completely different than at least when I started my career, the which was the kind of a mantra so it's fairly interesting, but you're absolutely right. So I think that's one major key foundational pillar. The second pillar though, I think, you know, goes into a little bit of what you were saying about, you said, "Mike, we do a great job of looking at the past. We do And okay job at looking at the present. And we don't really do much on the future side."
Scott Allen :The textbook hasn't been written. So how could we?
Mike Walker :And so you know, how I like to think about this is part of that growth mindset is, you know, the second major thing is, is, you know, we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The historical perspective is still very important. You know, I'm a maybe it's just because I'm a history buff, and I, you know, love history. But I think that there are patterns that we see in the marketplace that can give us leading indicators on where things will go. Yeah. And so my hypothesis is that we're on the verge of the next big economic long wave. We're actually started that next big economic long wave. And so your kids, my kids may come to us, or our grandkids might come to us and say, "Dad, I can't believe you actually drove a car. You guys actually did that?"
Scott Allen :The phone the cord went into the wall? I don't get you know what I mean, right? It's, my daughter today pulled out a compact disc. And she said, "when was the last time you looked at one of these Dad, you know?" Yes! Right. Or I taught last weekend, and one of my colleagues struggled with technology. And I thought, well, gosh, when I'm 80, what am I going to be struggling with? It's going to be fascinating, the teleporter won't work!
Mike Walker :You know, there was a funny story. I was listening to a podcast, I think it was the lead singer of Metallica said that his kids have been starting to get into records because, you know, records are back into fashion. Yeah, and we can talk about that more that aspect later. But the for this story, you know, he was talking about Oh, yeah, you know, they went off, and they went in the room, and I popped in, and they're on the floor, they're got their, their can headphones on or they're jamming out, there's, you know, stuff all over, you know, the album art and all that stuff all over the floor and he was like, it was just like when I was a kid. Yeah. And then he's like, so then they pop out for dinner and they come to the table, and they're like, "Dad, I made this awesome discovery. Did you know if you flip over the record, there's more music on the other side of that record?" And, you know, it kind of highlight you know, highlight it for me, I was like, wow, you know, this is where we're at right now. But um, but yeah, you know, I think it's about putting these things in perspective, and I and the consideration I would have people think about is looking at the past as a reflection of what worked and hadn't worked. And leave it at that. Look for patterns, but don't spend a whole lot of time navel-gazing on the past. The current is going to give you a picture of a kind of current state of affairs, it's going to help you understand, kind of the near term challenges. But like you said, the textbook hasn't been written for the future. But that doesn't mean that we can't take what is currently happening today and some of those emerging tech fields and taking that and actually building out scenarios.
Scott Allen :Oh, yeah. And, I think what I think would be really phenomenal to see coming out of the higher ed world, and even shoot, I'll even stretch here and say, k 12, as well, is to actually teach our people to scenario plans. And create business scenarios and roadmaps and say, 'okay, for this type of scenario, there are ten different pathways that it can go now. And now let's play around with that. And let's change this factor, let's change that factor." And what that's going to do is it's going to carry forward in the business world, because now they're, they're going to be able to think through the impacts of their decisions in a much more material way. And while no one's got a crystal ball, and no one can predict, you know, everything. But you are going in, and you're doing the due diligence to say, "Okay, what are the key tipping points in the marketplace? What are the developments happening? Let's put some probability behind this. And let's run some scenarios." So if I'm an auto company, and I say, Okay, I'm Ford, and I run a scenario and say, okay, autonomous electric vehicles autonomous level, let's say, level five, the highest level of autonomy. Let's say the Department of Transportation, the US Department of Transportation, makes L5 autonomous vehicle street legal by 2025. What happens? Yeah. Now, Tesla is a much bigger threat than what they are now. Oh, yeah.
Mike Walker :My engineering plans have significantly changed. So by being able to do that, now you can create readiness plans. And you can say, okay, there is a 25% probability of this scenario, there's a 30% or 50%. I can go into a board meeting, and I can say, "Look, guys, this is what we're looking at here. Do we What's our risk mitigation plan? Do we want to hedge our bets? Do we want to start to plant seeds for these scenarios and have ready-made solutions?" you might not have developed anything, you might not have pulled the trigger on, you know, resource allocation, etc. But you've got a contingency plan, ready to go in your back pocket to be able to execute upon it.
Scott Allen :Yep. Well, in the book that you have coming out with Forbes, that I had the honor of taking a preview, look at. You talk about the convergence of these technologies he talked about, I think it's the Golden Trifecta, which I'd love to get to. The convergence of these technologies. So So what happens when IoT sensors meet artificial intelligence, meet 5G, meets blockchain? Well, what are the possibilities now? What is our business look like? And then, all of a sudden, we add in some robotics and automation, and you have whole new business models. So share a little bit more about that. And I know that that can sound very, very daunting. To folks where this might be one of the first times, you've kind of thought about convergence or the Golden Trifecta, which you're going to learn about in a couple of moments. But this is how we have to spend some of our time thinking what you just said, Ford has to be thinking about that right now. Or they're done.
Mike Walker :Yeah. And yeah, the Golden Trifecta, is essentially a term that I coined because I started to notice this natural coalescing of these core technologies. And, you know, just as growth mindset is foundational to organizational success. The Golden Trifecta is foundational to the next world of digital platforms. Yeah. And so you know, what spins off of you know, AI is you know, you know, advanced robotics, deep learning, generative adversarial networks, reinforcement learning...all these more advanced things start to come out of that. But what's interesting is none of these are bred in isolation. There's, there are all sorts of technologies kind of coming at us. So the Golden Trifecta is really saying that there are these three technologies that have very, very synergistic qualities that we see many solutions in the future being developed on top of, so those technologies are the Internet of Things. And think of this, you know, when we think about the Internet of Things, you know, think about the human body, you know, the Internet of Things is really the eyes, the ears, the touch. It's your sensories, is allowing us to reach into the physical world and bridge that physical/digital divide. So that's, that's able to bring in; as a result, an enormous amount of data that we've never had before. And we've got a sort through what the heck it all means it actually adds something called "context" to that. And that's where the second technology comes in is, you know, what happens when we touch something? Well, it triggers an electronic signal to our brain to process, "what does that mean?" And so while we have, you know, classical computing, you know, algorithms today, that are more phrased as business rules. We have that today. But there's limitations there. You can do anything you can do an artificial intelligence written as business rules. It's just it's going to take you an extremely inordinate amount of time to actually develop this stuff. Artificial Intelligence helps us automate. The majority of that and provides us additional capability, gives us the predictability that we didn't have, and create these new models associated. And so if IoT is our skin and our touch and our ears and our nose and our mouth, then AI is really the brains that's processing this, all this information that is flooding in and putting meaning. And I think that's the biggest difference between yesterday and today is before, we were able to say, "okay, that's what that data is." I've answered the what part of this equation? Yeah, what AI brings to the table isn't answers, "Why, and how do I most effectively deal with this?" And so it's able to be that processing unit that we haven't had before, and take it to the next level. The third technology think of it as the transportation system. And so think of your veins, think about the identification components that we have that identifies you as an individual your DNA. And you know, think of a technology called blockchain that's going to help us there. And, you know, blockchain is very, very useful in classical problems where we've got, you know, let's say you've got middlemen, or the fancy term, an intermediary, in the middle of a set of transactions like a broker or what have you...breaking down those aspects. It helps in areas like currency. It helps in areas like reconciliation of information, which we see across every industry in business on the planet, that's highly ineffective, that's labor-intensive, etc. Yeah. But what blockchain providing is it providing trust, it's providing security, so it's able to know only give you a transportation system for your data through your blood, but also it's able to give you a unique identification. And say, "yes, authoritatively, this is you." And again, you could do all this stuff with manual code in a relational database today, but it's going to take you forever to do it. It's going to be error-prone. And frankly, the system wasn't built to do it. You can make it do it. It's just, it'll be difficult to do it. So the last aspect of blockchain, what is providing us, is it's providing us the antibodies as well. And so where the security comes in, and actually blockchain uses artificial intelligence for how it treats and manages data. And so what we're able to do with blockchains, we're able to have these antibodies that say, okay, foreign invaders that are trying to hack this system, we've got measures in place to prevent that. So if we look at the analogy of a human being, we've got all the major systems represented here in this Golden Trifecta, and this is going to form the foundational layer to put things like what we see from a business perspective, the next way of how business is going to be done this whole notion of having a platform business model.
Scott Allen :Yeah. And, you know, do we do describe that quickly, Mike and give a couple of examples of some platform businesses.
Mike Walker :Yeah, so a platform business model is essentially where, you know, I'm breaking down the two-sided relationship of a buyer/seller. Where it's not just a transactional relationship, but I'm actually saying, look, "I've got an ecosystem that you can join, and the data that you generate, you can use that as well." Everything is multi-purpose in these platforms. A great way of explaining this is through example, and so, you know, take, for example, Amazon. Yeah, Amazon is a phenomenal example of this. Now, they're using a, you know, actually, they're, they're using blockchain for some things, but it's not as pervasive yet, but they're using IoT quite a bit are using AI significantly. But what they've done is they've said you're not only a customer, but also you're a business partner as well. So as a customer, you could also join their affiliate program. And you could you know, resell goods and services, you can do referrals, etc. I can monetize that data that's generated and sell that data. And so it allows you to do things in a much more multifaceted way. And so if you look at Amazon, you look at Apple with the App Store. You look at Airbnb, look at Uber; essentially, what things are shifting towards is, if you essentially an assetless model. So if I'm Hilton and I'm going head to head with Airbnb, and I want to go into another market space, well, that's great, but I've got to build a building. If I am Hilton, there's a lot of upfront costs associated with this. It's very labor-intensive. If I'm Airbnb, I'm recruiting, and I'm doing business development, I'm saying, Who here wants to take their house and rent it out in the Bahamas, or wherever? So there's significant advantages. And, you know, I think the most important thing to think about with a platform business model that I think business leaders will really understand here is that, "what is success?" The KPIs, they fundamentally shift in that platform business model. And so if you look at a company like Facebook, which again, is another platform business model. They weren't profitable for seven years. If a bank wasn't profitable for a year, you wouldn't see them in the second year. They're changing the economics of the game. Yeah. Likewise, with Airbnb, why is it that Airbnb a year or so ago. Was valuated at $35 billion when Hilton and Marriott were respectively around the 25 billion mark? Airbnb doesn't own a single asset. Yeah, and the same is true for Uber and, you know, other models in a very similar capacity. So what they do is they fundamentally changed the game...industry itself. And that's the real bogey that these business leaders need to focus on is, how are these new business models going to upend the business model that I've created and have gotten maybe very comfortable within the past few decades?
Scott Allen :Yeah. So if you were gonna do that in higher ed, how would you do it?
Mike Walker :That's a great question. So if I were to do that in higher ed, I think the greatest thing to happen to higher ed has actually been the pandemic. And the reason why I say that is, when I talk to leaders in similar industries, what I find is there is a reluctance to embrace digital. And essentially, they can afford to ignore it or not be as aggressive with it. With a pandemic, you have to go all in your chips are in the middle of the table, my friend,
Scott Allen :the business model, and many of these institutions no longer work. Right?
Mike Walker :Right. And so I think that that has been the best thing to happen to many organizations and is going to rapidly accelerate digital transformation. And thus, this, you know, this notion of building these digital ecosystems. And so, you know, what I think it means for higher ed, and while I'm not an expert in higher ed, full disclosure, sure, but I think what it allows To do and in an interesting way that allows us to address things that the low hanging fruit. So let's take, for example, verification of your education credentials. Right now, what do you do? You got there's a lot of manual effort. There's emails, I've heard fax machines involved, you know, very painful.
Scott Allen :No Mike...there's ditto machines. There's just the person running the demo machine and over the overhead projector, and they kind of get on it. Right? As soon as you call in with your rotary phone to make the request for your transcript that that's the machinery that moves in action. Yeah. Lots of dot matrix printers going off in the background, I imagine? Yeah. So you know, what you can do straight away is take aspects like that. And you can say, "what would it look like if we actually connected these universities in a meaningful way?" And what if we did have A, an ecosystem that, you know, we started off with the establishing, and essentially the digital attestations that, yes, this person did graduate here, here are their records, you know, and tie all that very seamlessly. That's low hanging fruit. That's, you know, straightforward. And that could be a very quick and very impactful win for higher ed. But what that does is it builds a foundation for other things, where now when we talk about this growth mindset, and we applied to education. Now, what does it look like with all these universities connected together? Where we can load balance resources across different geographies? You know, why am I physically bound even though even if I go to a physical location? Why am Why is my education bound to that location? Right? So how do I open that up and introduce technologies like MR (mixed reality) where I can take the IoT sensors in the room, let's say cameras and microphones and some other sensory devices, and map that to a professor that's in Stockholm, let's say just a random city that came to mind.
Mike Walker :And now you have an augmented reality lesson. You have a guest speaker that comes into your lecture from this, this other university that has deep expertise in this particular area, or if I'm in a medical college, and there is a very specific cancer researcher that I want to be able to conference in a material way and be able to show a human cell, you know, a drug treatment plan and be able to show this all, in kind of real-time. You know, with the Microsoft Hololens stuff, we've worked with universities where you take, essentially, you remove the human cadaver out of the picture. Yeah, replace it.
Scott Allen :Yeah, with the Hololens, right?
Mike Walker :with the Hololens.
Scott Allen :That's happening at Case Western Reserve, right was the first place that I believe that was one of the first places where that was implemented. But you're right, I mean, right?
Mike Walker :And that applies to everything, right? And so and when you now open this up from, hey, I've downloaded the human body spec, to my local server here at one university, now imagine if you expand that and you say, "now we're all sharing this knowledge." What does that mean on keeping our textbooks up to date with the latest and greatest information saying, "Okay, this is the real-time view of this particular aspect" because we know technology is changing, even core foundational elements, even things like Business School with an MBA program. I'm having conversations, you know, with Ohio State University as an example about, you know, their Digital Leadership Academy and how digital is now being ingrained into their MBA program. And so, I think, you know, that's an important aspect that allows us to say not only what is the latest information, but you can also tag that information, say, Hey, this is speculative, but you need to be aware of it. And this is how you deal with speculative information. And so I think that there's things on the back end side, that from an operations back-office perspective, that would greatly enrich this, too. I think, for the traditional in-person model. There are ways to make that much, much more interactive. And I'm a huge fan of using facial and gesture recognition technologies in the most ethical way. But, you know, I had a conversation actually I was at Gartner at the time. So this is about three years ago, where they were prototyping facial and gesture recognition technologies, where they have the camera behind the professor, he's speaking in the lecture hall. And what they're doing is they're looking at everyone's faces to see how are they internalizing this based on their facial expression. And, you know, some might say, well, "is that the chase people down and, you know, say you're not paying attention or whatever?" Not necessarily, essentially, how they are using that data is they're saying, "How can we create custom learning plans for our learners?" Because we know not everyone learns the same in a very basic way, you know, some people are, you know, quote, unquote, book smart, so all they need is just give me a book. And I can crunch through it. Not a problem. Easy peasy. Other people, you know, admittedly like myself. I'm much more tactile. I need to have a conversation, I need to talk to somebody. So I need to be able to apply that. And so what this is able to do is it'll allow you similar to like a personality test. And they actually marry the personality tests to this as well to translate that, that facial expression that you're making, but essentially create profiles and say, "Okay, this is where you're at, or this is how you're evolving based on this topic. Now, let's give you the best quality of education we can give you."
Scott Allen :Yeah, yeah.
Mike Walker :That was just a few examples.
Scott Allen :so many possibilities, so many possibilities. So new business models Anything else? Anything else that kind of a leader should have on their radar and then and then we're probably going to land the plane here Mike. What?
Mike Walker :I'm how much time you got, you know, this is your last episode. So why don't we got to make a count?
Scott Allen :I have to go have dinner with my family if this is..time is short. I like you, but you know, you...
Mike Walker :...You know, our priorities? Yes. So another aspect here that I think folks need to think about it, it's it's a corollary. So I've got two additional things. I'm going to go through these fairly quickly. So the two additional things are one at Microsoft, I'd like this term, and it may be used in other places, but it is a term that we use called tech intensity. And it's a philosophy that we've implemented across the company, where you could be a finance person, you can be an HR person, you could be a salesperson, you could be lots of different roles that are not technical in nature. But what we strongly encourage is a level of technology literacy across all these roles. And so it's it allows us to kind of not rest on our laurels and use the excuse of "Well, that's not my job." Instead, what we're saying is, "look, these technologies may not be directly applicable to you right now. But they may be applicable to you in the future as you make decisions, or as we approach you to enhance your business as we start to bring you into ideation workshops and such." But two, even if it never applies to what you're doing, what this allows you to do is it helps you think critically about your business. It helps you to continuously go, "Okay, I learned about this new technology, reinforcement learning, okay, how does this apply to me? What could it apply to?" It's forcing me to kind of get outside of my comfort zone and really start to think about this in a material way. And so I think that tech intensity is another piece that while I think we're organizations and leaders often like to say, "Oh, yeah, well, you know, we got the best talent, we're doing this." However, folks think about this as kind of like a once and done type of thing. Well, he or she got the certification. Oh, well, we did this big, you know, whatever training session boot camp, what have you? No, no, no, that's not the point. The point is, is we're constantly going back to the well and learning something else and creating material plans around them.
Scott Allen :Yep. Love it.
Mike Walker :So I think that that that's, that's one key thing. Yeah. The second thing that that I want to leave folks with as well is, so we talked about the convergence. And that leads to things like digital ecosystems, you know, that your bill, you know, that you're, the reason why you're creating these digital ecosystems is because of these technologies that's creating these new business models that we talked about. And now these digital ecosystems...we now have to think about a world where everything's connected. Yeah, yeah, we have to think about a world where everything's on all the time. And so what does that mean? It means well, now we've got a thriving gig economy. Why? Because people can work anywhere, anytime. And any way to achieve a goal. Wow. That's, that's great. And we see that growing and growing and growing as time goes on. And again, the pandemic has amplified that even more. So also, what this is allowing me to think through with this whole digital ecosystem construct is, it's now not only about my company, it's about facilitating value exchange between all companies related. And so now we can kind of take a step back and see the broader industry in a more holistic way and maybe even industries in a more holistic way. And I don't want to diverge too far, because we could talk about this all day long as well. But, you know, the traditional constructs of what is an industry and what is not an industry are significantly broken down. And so, you know, you know, let's take Apple, for example. You know, Apple is a hardware company, they're a software company, Apple is a bank. So, you know, people don't know this, but they've got more credit card data in their databases, than any other financial services institution on the planet. So incredibly powerful. And, you know, there are retailers I mean, they're in many, many different industries. And so, I lovingly refer to this, you know, I've got lots of Mikeisms as Franken Industries, it's, you know, we're not in these singular industries anymore. There's a lot of kind of integration across these industries. And so I think that is a key component that digital ecosystems is breaking down is not only the industry construct, not only is this is only about me selfishly and singularly but also it's allowing us to tap into this "always on, connect to anything." Yeah...
Scott Allen :there's a quote, I read somewhere that was like, it said something to the effect of, you know, once electricity came on the scene, and anything that could be connected was, and it's the same thing with artificial intelligence and sensors, right? I mean, anything whether it's us as humans, or the light to the right of me right now, I'm gonna start getting data as to when it's about I need to repurchase the light bulb, right? I mean, everything will be connected in that data that's kind of coming off of that. That's, that's a great superpower of Tesla the data that they have, from the cars out on the road. Yep. Right?
Mike Walker :Totally. And, you know, to take your example, and kind of bring this home for folks is, you know, you've got this light in your office that's shining on you. And there's a sensor in that light, it's saying, look, you know, it's got a little meter. So by the time it gets to 10,000 cycles is bad boys ready to be replaced. Now, that is an example of how businesses had traditionally operated kind of in isolation. Now with this eco ecosystem construct. Now, let's say you've got a pair of you've got a pair of glasses on, your glasses now have sensors in them. So your lens is looking at the ambient light that's hitting your glasses. And so not only is that light reading, you know, "when's this gonna, you know, go out," but also your glasses is reading what's the effect of my human body? What's the stress level? levels at where I'm at the duration in which I've been staring at a computer monitor now, it's saying, "okay, you're at a danger level of blue light, I'm gonna turn this down, adjust the temperature of this light." Oh, by the way, I'm also reading the sensors in my chair. I've been, I've been slouching for half a day, I noticed you changed your posture there, now it's gonna say, hey, it's gonna give a little vibe, a little haptic feedback. And a reminder. You know, I don't want to be your mom here. But you need to sit up straight. And so the digital ecosystem in your home office is everything around you. It's your wall being another screen. And it's everything around you from temperature to what you're doing, how you're doing, how things interact with each other. And that's the great thing about these ecosystems is putting all this raw data into context. Yeah, putting meaning behind this data so we can actually do something useful with it. And that's really the power behind these digital ecosystems. Now, I said that I was only going to want to do one last one. With a quick statement of all, this is fun. All this is great. But if people don't adopt it, it doesn't...It won't go anywhere. Yeah, and so never, never never forget about the user experience aspects of all of this. So we talked about a lot of things we talked about, you know, the people side, the business side, the convergence effect with this Golden trifecta, we talked about ecosystems. All this is predicated that people actually going to use it and we can materialize this into a business model that we can incentivize, and, and and really cultivate and foster a culture that will embrace a growth mindset and tech intensity, and so the user experience part is oftentimes overlooked, or assume that will come there because, "look at all this cool stuff!" That's not the case. It's something that business leaders have to think very, very deliberate about and plan out as they embark on this journey.
Scott Allen :Yeah. Yeah. Because ultimately, once it's in my hands or in my home, I'm building impressions very, very quickly about the value it's adding, or the annoyance that it's causing. Right? I love that. I love that. Okay. Hey, Mike. Fun conversation, fun conversation. I always close out the podcast by just doing a quick lightning round. So it's really one very, very simple question. It's kind of evolved into one question. What are you streaming, watching, or listening to that's kind of caught your eye recently.
Mike Walker :Hmmm? What am I streaming recently? That's a good question. Because I just find that it's a constant barrage of stuff. You know, I tell you there is a, there's a, there's a book that I picked up, I guess that can be considered streaming. It's by Amy Webb; The Signals Are Talking. She just released that book. That's a great book. I just finished that one. Another thing that I've been doing a lot of is education on education. My kids are being remote schooled, and I'm revisiting my IT support skills, my home networking skills. So there's a lot of that. But as far as other things that might be entertaining for folks, you know, we're about ready to go into the season of strategy, as I like to refer to it, as you know, we're starting to get to the end of the calendar year. And most companies start to go through their planning, their you know, long-range strategy and planning and their yearly operational planning. And so, you know, a few things that I've been doing to again, in a very growth mindset oriented way, is I've been challenging a lot of the existing workshops that I've been doing. Yeah. And I've been actually going to our own internal digital advisor and consulting groups, and even our partner ecosystem and stress testing that are saying, "okay, here's what we've been using for the past few years. Does it still make sense? What are we missing? What can we do better?" So I know I didn't directly answer with you know, what Netflix special am I streaming? I haven't had much time to do a whole lot of that. But I do look forward.
Scott Allen :You have your own podcast, right. So yes, hello listeners really quickly where they can find you.
Mike Walker :so you can find me a number of places I get around. But you can go to www.mikejwalk.com. Mike Walker is an incredibly popular name. And I'm digitally arm wrestling Mike Walker from the National Enquirer football players, all sorts of people to get that, that Mike Walker domain, but you can find me on www.mikejwalk.com, that's where you can get kind of a primary landing page and get all my social and all that. But also, you'd mentioned you know, I do a similar type of a podcast that focuses on helping digital leaders, both on the business side in the technical side, and, you know, help them through their journey by interviewing folks that are doing the same things they're doing. And so I have interesting guests from folks that are in these end-user organizations to even going out on a limb, and interviewing folks, like a woman that you'll hear from that has essentially used artificial intelligence to go from 70 recipes for whiskey to 75 million recipes of whiskey that is tailored to individual taste profiles. So, you know, I have fun with this thing, because life's too short not to have fun with this stuff. So we talked about emerging tech, we talked about innovation, and we just talked about things I think that are just generally cool. Whiskey, right? Whiskey.
Scott Allen :Yes. Mike Walker. Thank you so much, sir. It's been a fun, fun conversation as I knew it would be. I am gonna go have my last supper. And we'll see you next time. Maybe. Who knows.
Mike Walker :Thank you so much.
Scott Allen :Be well, thank you.
Mike Walker :Alright, thanks.