Digital advances are never-ending. Here’s how to keep up. | Tony Saldanha | Big Think

We all know it’s almost impossible to keep up with the incredible amount of change that’s happening in the digital world. I want to kind of share a quick illustration. About four years ago, when I started down this journey of trying to digitally transform P&G’s multibillion dollar global business services operation, I went out and talked to a hundred different organization startups.

And in that context, I talked to a group of guys that were actually working on blockchain. This was about four years ago. And I asked them a question: how would you apply blockchain to Procter & Gamble? They said, well, we’re not quite sure. We think this is something that’s more applicable to bitcoin at this point in time. So I kind of filed that away in my memory as interesting but not ready.

I went back three months ago, and they had dozens of examples all the way from how you use blockchain for coupons to advertising to accounting — all within the space of three months. So here’s the issue. If I, as a technology person, find it difficult to stay abreast of this incredible change that’s happening, how do the average person who is proficient, who is a professional in accounting or finance or marketing keep up with the changes in technology?

And that’s where we came up with this discipline idea for staying current. Staying current isn’t about becoming a technology program. Staying current is about the discipline pursued of understanding how technology could change whatever it is that you are doing today.

So, for instance, if you’re a teacher, understanding where digital technology could change the dissemination of information, the organization of classrooms, the ability to coordinate across different geographies — that’s how technology, digital technology, can change training. And that’s really all you need to know. You don’t have to become an artificial intelligence programmer.

This is one of those reasons why I love the recent tendency of companies to recognize that digital literacy and retraining of their workforce is such an important thing. We read a month ago that Amazon’s going to set aside $700 million to retrain 100,000 employees. When I read that, I almost fell off my chair because arguably Amazon is one company that has the most digital skills and they were thinking of retraining their employees.

That is why this is such an important thing. It doesn’t matter if you are the most tech-savvy company in the world today. The question is, how do you keep up? And so you have leading companies including Amazon. AT&T did the same thing a few years ago where they set aside a billion dollars to retrain their workforce.

Loblaws, the Canadian retailer, has set aside a quarter of a million dollars to train their workforce. It’s absolutely important to follow a very disciplined approach to retraining your employees.