Good Morning.
Andrew McAfee, digital innovation guru at the MIT Sloan School, has a new book out this week. He joined Fortune senior reporter Sheryl Estrada, me and 40 CFOs at a dinner in Boston last week, held in collaboration with Workday and Deloitte, which sponsors this newsletter. Before diving into a preview of his book, we talked about the unprecedented invasion of generative AI in the workplace:
“This is weirdly powerful, and it’s weirdly fast. This stuff is going to diffuse throughout the economy. It’s going to separate winners from losers. And it’s going to truly turbocharge the winners faster than you and I have been expecting.”
I told him that many corporate executives I speak with are cautious about adopting the new technology because of concerns about data protection, misappropriated IP, and the confounding but continuing problem of “hallucinations.” Why not be a “fast follower” instead of an “early adopter”?
“That’s a recipe for long-term decline…Every risk that you just articulated is real. But if you are behind on learning about them, then you’re behind on the experience curve, you’re behind on the learning curve, you’re missing out on the productivity benefits. The risks are real, but they are manageable. And I’ve noticed that too many companies, when something new comes along, look for a reason to say ‘no.’ I think that’s a bad strategy.”
McAfee’s new book is called The Geek Way, which he explained as follows:
“The Geek Way is a way to run a company that has sprung up over the course of the 20th century largely concentrated in Silicon Valley, because a bunch of geeks started running companies, then they found themselves in these super turbulent, uncertain, highly competitive, weird environments. And I think a lot of them realized that the industrial era playbook wasn’t helping them run companies for this environment. So they did what geeks do, they dove in deep on a problem, they experimented, they iterated, and they came up with a set of practices that as I look across them are weirdly consistent. And they’re better. And when you look at the head-to-head battles between the upstart companies and the incumbents of the industrial era, in how many of those battles has the incumbent won or even held steady?”
I challenged him on that last point. In my view, many incumbents have done far better against digital upstarts than anyone expected a decade ago. I cited Marriott, which managed to claw back control of its customers via the Bonvoy app.
“Your glorious success story is booking through an app?”
“How about Daimler,“ asked one of the CFOs.
“Have you looked at the market value of the incumbent automakers compared to [Tesla]?”
Walmart?
“Continuing to exist is a really low bar.”
JPMorgan Chase?
“It’s a regulated industry.”
At that point, I stopped. But I challenge other CEO Daily readers to send their best examples of an incumbent company that has triumphed over technology disrupters. Other news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
American under pressure
The post-COVID boom in revenge travel is over. Share prices for the four major U.S. airlines are now hovering around the lows of the pandemic, with analysts blaming increased fuel prices and softer demand. That’s putting pressure on American Airlines, worth the least of the four, and its massive $25.5 billion in debt: The airline spent almost half of its operating income on interest payments for the first nine months of the year. Fortune
AI in meetings
The new trend of managers sending an AI-powered notetaker to attend meetings on their behalf helps breed a toxic work culture, experts say. For one, it sends a poor signal to other employees: “It says you’re not important enough,” says Jeanine Turner, a management professor at Georgetown University. Fortune
Lying flat in Vietnam
Young Vietnamese, like their counterparts in China and the U.S., are turning to social media to complain about working cultures and low pay. In particular, they’re worried about the increasing cost of living in major cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The complaints come despite a growing economy, as the Southeast Asian country pitches itself as an alternate manufacturing hub to companies trying to diversify from China. South China Morning Post
AROUND THE WATERCOOLER
Flexible work could decrease risk for the No. 1 cause of death in America, new Harvard research finds by Trey Willams
Recession? What recession? The unlikely factors shaping America’s economic landscape by Christiaan Hetzner
The ‘money doctor’ says America is turning European under Biden’s industrial policy. ‘The Biden agenda could be sporting a beret’ by Shawn Tully
Meet the women ditching the corporate rat race to become ‘Snail Girls’ with ‘lazy girl jobs’: ‘I live like I’m retired, which is what everyone is working so hard to do anyway’ by Orianna Rosa Royle
This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.
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