I retired from my long, 37-year career at IBM in June of 2007. At the time, I had already become affiliated with MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, and was looking forward to the graduate seminar that I’d be teaching that fall at MIT on Technology-based Business Transformation.
“This course covers how to leverage major technology advances to significantly transform a business in the marketplace,” read the course description. “There is a focus on major issues a business must deal with to transform its technical and market strategies successfully, including the organizational and cultural aspects that often cause such business transformations to fail.” As a concrete case study, I planned to disscuss my personal experiences leading IBM’s internet strategy in the mid-late 1990s.
The internet ushered a historical transition from the industrial economy of the previous two centuries to a new kind of knowledge-based digital economy. Advances in information technologies and globalization were among the major forces propelling this transition. Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat became an international best-seller in 2005 by nicely explaining the implications of this new age of globalization, including the ten flatteners that brought it about, such as the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and the rise of outsourcing, offshoring and global supply chains.
But, as explained by MIT economist David Autor in “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the US Labor Market,” technology and globalization had a major disruptive impact on US workers. While employment opportunities and earnings increased significantly for high-skill technical and management occupations that required a college education, they declined for mid-skill production and administrative occupations. “The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental to the earnings and labor force participation rates of workers without a four-year college education,” wrote Autor.
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