More than 1,000 CEOs and senior executives gathered in London this November for our first flagship conference on the digital revolution, called BLINK. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the event’s opening keynote before joining McKinsey global managing partner Kevin Sneader for a conversation on leadership in a disruptive world.
The conference takes its name from the split-second nature of the world in which we live, where business and technology advances upend the status quo, creating opportunities and challenges, seemingly in the blink of an eye. Blink: your house is talking to you. Blink: your competitor is your partner. Blink: your market has moved halfway around the planet.
The event took place at the Olympia Grand, which has a storied 130-year history of hosting exhibits, horse shows, rock concerts, and political rallies. But for this one day, BLINK offered a glimpse of the future.
The agenda included a mix of informal conversations, panel discussions, networking sessions, and “tech zones,” areas where the latest digital tools and equipment were on full display. Experts shared insights from their companies’ own digital transformations and discussed the growing pains they experienced when changing from a “start-up” to a “grown-up” organization. And while some sessions addressed how businesses could catch up to new tech, others flipped the paradigm, exploring ways in which new tech could open doors for organizations to think and operate differently.
On the exhibit floor, for instance, attendees had the chance to redesign a lemonade factory to learn how adding the right technology can juice productivity. Elsewhere, they could try a virtual-reality simulator to understand how designers used the technology to develop a surgical robot, and then trained surgeons to work with it.
And for those who wanted to see how the slightest adjustment can deliver an outsize competitive edge, our QuantumBlack team demonstrated how it applied advanced analytics to help race-car drivers make strategic decisions on the course.
Woven through all the tech talk was a human thread: how to inspire trust in your online users; how to hire the right people to guide your company through convulsive changes; how to learn what your customers truly value in your products and services; how to tell inspiring stories.
“When I think about solving the problems ahead of us, the answer is people,” Eric Schmidt said, explaining that businesses, governments, and society at large would do well to invest in remarkable people first and existing technologies second, a point our firm’s research supports.
“The notion that the firm with the most data wins is temporal,” he said. “We’ll soon find that the firms with the smartest engineers—not the most data—will be the ones who win.”