Why digital transformation is now on the CEO's shoulders

Big data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence hold such disruptive power that they have inverted the dynamics of technology leadership. When science and technology meet social and economic systems, you tend to see something akin to what the late Stephen Jay Gould called "punctuated equilibrium" in his description of evolutionary biology. Something that has been stable for a long period is suddenly disrupted radically--and then settles into a new equilibrium.1 1.See Stephen Jay Gould, Punctuated Equilibrium, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Gould pointed out that fossil records show that species change does not advance gradually but often massively and disruptively. After the mass extinctions that have occurred several times across evolutionary eras, a minority of species survived and the voids in the ecosystem rapidly filled with massive speciation.