- [Instructor] In 1962, President John Kennedy stood
in front of the United States and declared that
within the decade we would put a person on the moon.
Insanely cool and insanely aspirational.
But predicated on the rules of physics that gave him
and the scientists at the time the confidence to make
such a bold declaration.
What then followed was extraordinary investment,
collaboration, and drive.
And you all know how the story ended by 1969 we had
Neil Armstrong declaring the sheer scale of the step
he just took on the lunar surface.
While not of exactly the same scale, today's C suites
are in a moment in time in which they must make their
own declarative moonshot statements.
They must back it with actions and be confident
in the fact that the digital toolkit is available
to support such a statement and they must make sure their
organizations succeed or else they run the very real
risk of obsolescence.
I call this moonshot statement the top down mandate.
Much like any trend, this one began with early adopters
and was characterized by discreet proofs of concept
projects or what we now often called random acts
of automation.
But like any trend it's evolved and something I find
so interesting is that we've begun to see strong
commitments and promises being made by CEOs and others
in the C suite.
Without those strong commitments, every organization
is doomed to become a large pile of random acts
of automation and remember those silos we talked about?
I guarantee you at this very moment you have inspired
individuals in every one of those business functions,
tinkering and toiling away at putting in digital solutions
to the operational problems they face on a day to day basis.
And while that's commendable, it's not optimal.
You run the risk of a robo randomness propagating quickly,
the time to act is now, you must declare a strong
top down mandate or experience levels of robo randomness
from which you may never recover.