Bob Johansen, Speaker at Industry 4.0 Event, Pens Op-ed in Los Angeles Business Journal

Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow and Past President, Institute for the Future, was one of the speakers at the Graziadio’s 50th anniversary event Industry 4.0 - The Future of Humanity in the Smart Machine Age where he talked about the competencies we will need to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

He captured his insight on how to lead a company into the future in the age of automation in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Business Journal. Johansen said that in order for the “Southern California region to prosper in the next digital wave, business leaders need to prepare now for this major disruption at work. He cautioned that the majority of tasks will become automated and that executives should “embrace shape-shifting organizations. New organizational forms will become possible through distributed computing networks, which have no center, grow from the edges and will be uncontrollable. Economies of scale (where bigger is almost always better) will give way to economies of organizational structure, in which you will be what you can organize. Authority will be much more distributed.”