Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The Mathematical Corporation breaks new and important ground by restoring the importance of people, especially those in leadership roles, in harnessing the synergistic combination of fast computing, algorithms, and big data to attain organizational and competitive advantage. The technology is powerful but it is still a toolone used by people to apply human ingenuity, imagination, and problem-solving skills to see trends, patterns, anomalies, and relationships in what were once inscrutable or unmanageable issues.
In their years spent working with hundreds of companies, governments, and non-profit organizations, Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern have consulted with a wide range of leaders developing new capabilities that lead to new business models, the creation of breakthrough products and services, and potential solutions to vexing global problems. Their stories include Ford developing not just smarter cars but also smarter roads and cities; an oceanographer obtaining a holistic map of the oceans, with ramifications for both the fishing industry but for humanity at large; and health care entrepreneurs developing new products that significantly reduce heart attack fatalities.
These are but a few examples of leaders tapping the power of the digital world and creatively collaborating with computers. New capabilities are developed that then give birth to new business models as leaders envision and shape the future. Businesses are reaching goals that until recently seemed difficult, if not impossible, to attain. The winnings will go to organizations that take steps to deliver "impossible strategies," and The Mathematical Corporation provides leaders with the new way to think and work in this era of data science and drive the revolution.
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Synopsis
The most powerful weapon in business today is the alliance between the mathematical smarts of machines and the imaginative human intellect of great leaders. Together they make the mathematical corporation, the business model of the future.
We are at a once-in-a-decade breaking point similar to the quality revolution of the 1980s and the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s: leaders must transform how they run their organizations, or competitors will bring them crashing to earth--often overnight.
Mathematical corporations--the organizations that will master the future--will outcompete high-flying rivals by merging the best of human ingenuity with machine intelligence. While smart machines are weapon number one for organizations, leaders are still the drivers of breakthroughs. Only they can ask crucial questions to capitalize on business opportunities newly discovered in oceans of data.
This dynamic combination will make possible the fulfillment of missions that once seemed out of reach, even impossible to attain. Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern's extraordinary examples include the entrepreneur who upended preventive health care, the oceanographer who transformed fisheries management, and the pharmaceutical company that used algorithm-driven optimization to boost vaccine yields.
Together they offer a profoundly optimistic vision for a dazzling new phase in business, and a playbook for how smart companies can manage the essential combination of human and machine.