There, I said it.  I said the “R” word.  And no, I’m not talking the political “R” word.  I’m talking about the potential of a… r-e-c-e-s-s-i-o-n.  There are many indicators pointing to the potential of a worldwide recession, and unfortunately during a recession, many organizations hunker down, cut spending, and try to ride it out – all the wrong things to do if you want to actually avoid a recession.…

One of the biggest threats to our world economy (outside of climate change, social inequality, unregulated proliferation of weapons and the rise of Terminators), is the retirement of the technician and engineering expertise that is necessary to keep our factories, hospitals, cities, trains, airports and other operational entities running effectively.  Deloitte’s 2018 skills gap in manufacturing study found that the skills gap may leave an estimated 2.4 million positions unfilled…

I continue to be infatuated with the potential of autonomous entities that self-monitor, self-diagnose, self-fix and self-learn without human intervention.  The vision of leveraging new digital technologies, growing reams of customer, product and operational data, and advanced analytics to create autonomous entities – farms, oil fields, factories, airports, theme parks, vehicles, ships, trains, etc. – seems like science fiction. 

Fortunately, the “3 Horizons of…

In the early 2000’s, IBM Deep Blue was on the lookout for its next Grand Challenge.  It had achieved an exhilarating win over chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997.  But that was a game with deterministic outcomes where superior processing power gave Deep Blue a significant advantage over even a human grand champion.  IBM needed a challenge commiserate with its Artificial Intelligence aspirations, and the wildly popular TV game show…