Future-Ready Leadership: Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Provides executive leadership teams with information, tools, and advice they need to lead their organizations into the "future of work," characterized by transformative, smart, and connected technologies already under way, including artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, and automation.

The technological and economic forces of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) are shifting organizations in radical new directions. Automation is taking place not only in factories but in retail environments, and it is not just powerful or precise: it is intelligent, and it learns. Leaders must learn to rely on new sources of data, analytics, and intelligence in their efforts to anticipate emerging trends, forecast unforeseen consequences, make sense of systems and complexity, communicate constantly, build strong networks based on trust, and ultimately, win a following.

Future-Ready Leadership is an invaluable resource for leaders and leadership educators seeking to transform 4IR trends into a source of collaborative (as opposed to competitive) advantage. A blueprint for reshaping the future of work, the book meets readers' "awareness need" by exploring cutting-edge research on technology's impact on the workplace. Each chapter uses data to set up a specific future of work leadership challenge, offering readers practical solutions and advice, actionable recommendations, and tools for reflection and action that can be put into practice right away.

• Fully unpacks what 4IR and the rise of new industries will require from leaders
• Illuminates the central role played by behavioral economics in the 4IR era, rather than just the macroeconomic implications for society of the convergence of the megatrends under way
• Introduces tools for helping leaders to prepare themselves and assess their organization's readiness for managing high-velocity change
• Provides a roadmap for rethinking how learning and development are fostered in "always-on" learning organizations of the future
• Clarifies the critical role of public-private collaborations in meeting the development needs of the future of work
• Introduces discernment as a strategy for managing future-of-work ethical decisions that inevitably accompany the integration of AI in the work force