On December 16, 2023, at the 2023 Shanghai Management Science Forum, Xi Youmin, Executive President of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Vice President of the University of Liverpool, delivered a speech entitled "Making the Impossible Possible: Ecology and Leadership in the Digital Intelligence EraSpeech. President Xi Youmin started from the background of the times and its impact, the characteristics of the times, the construction of industrial ecology and its key foundations and links, and the ecological dividends of the digital intelligence era. The following is an excerpt from the live presentation.
At a time when the world is facing major changes unseen in a century, how should enterprises, universities and individuals find new opportunities and achieve high-quality development through "disruptive" innovation?The upgrading of the minds of industrialists and the change of leaders' perceptions and management behaviors are the key.
Xi Youmin first introduced the phenomena of the connection revolution, digitalization, artificial intelligence and robots, and emphasized the core of the new mechanism behind these phenomena, namelySharing, symbiosis, human-machine integrationThese three aspects will break the organizational boundaries, integrate resources, create more ecology, and reap ecological dividends.
In the era of digital intelligence, Xi Youmin predicts that there will be a paradigm revolution that will break organizational boundaries for resource integration, so as to create a high-quality ecology. He pointed out that industrialists and leaders need to refresh their minds, be brave and take risks, find the direction of adventure, and gradually realize innovation to adapt to the changes of the times.
Subsequently, Xi Youmin mentioned that in the context of ecological evolution and power mechanism change, the concept of power in management has gradually evolved into symbiosis and sharing. He said that in recent years, the concept of "industrialist" has been proposed, and compared with "entrepreneur", "industrialist" can cross the boundary of enterprise organization for resource integration, so as to create a new industrial development ecology. In this context, the philosophy and mental model of all leaders and managers need to be upgraded.
Therefore, in this context, enterprises need to transform from traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises to ecological forms, and the key factors include technology, digitalization and intelligent foundation, and digital transformation is one of the challenges.
Talking about the dilemma of digital and intelligent transformation faced by Chinese enterprises, Xi Youmin believes that many enterprises are caught in problems such as business software, business dynamics and process coordination while understanding the necessity of digital intelligence. In this process of change,The roles of managers and leaders are evolving, requiring new ones, such as the industry's project officer, process officer, digital officer, coupling officer, etc.
Enterprises need to pay attention to key issues when solving the dilemma of digital and intelligent transformation, including the perception of all things, the interactive governance of the Internet of Everything, the information governance of business digitalization and distributed collaboration, the organizational governance of demand customization and customer-oriented integration, and the formation of business partnerships and ecological governance. This involves five stages: digital transformation of enterprises, digitalization of business management, industrial interconnection, and formation of industrial ecosystems.
In the construction of ecosystems, the key aspects of governance and links include the perception of all things, business digitalization, demand customization, business partnerships, and ecosystem ecology. The emergence of new management roles has become necessary, and the training majors of traditional business schools and management schools may need to adapt to the changes of this new era to cultivate managers and leaders with more comprehensive capabilities and cross-cultural leadership.
For the cultivation of industrialists, Xi Youmin emphasized the requirements of character, quality, mind, global vision, professional attainment, cross-cultural leadership and lifelong learning. The core content of industrialists is value creation, and integration capabilities and integrated intelligence are irreplaceable human advantages of artificial intelligence and robots.
The harvest of ecological dividends is closely related to the leaders' integration ability, governance structure, and cognition of the paradigm of the new era. Shared dividends, symbiotic dividends and system dividends are the three parts of ecological dividends, which depend on the structural quality of ecology, and diversity and heterogeneity are the key factors of symbiosis and systemic dividends. In the end, ecological governance becomes the difficulty of realizing ecological dividends, and the performance of leaders in terms of integration ability and governance structure will directly affect the harvest of ecological dividends.
Although the ecological dividend sounds good, in actual management, problems such as departmental fragmentation and unit interests make it difficult to realize ecological formation. The trend of management has gone through traditional management, section-level control, specialization, matrix management, and cross-collaboration, and now it has gradually entered the stage of ecological management. In this process, technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and large models can improve the control ability of local humans, but the complexity of the whole system has a greater evolutionary effect, so management needs three mechanisms: scientific management, evolutionary management, and integrated intelligence.
In terms of thinking, the management academic community has proposed a shift from traditional brains to complex heads, emphasizing dynamic attention, whole-person ability, strategic clarity and sincere cooperation. However, this transformation is not enough, and modern management needs to pay attention to the law of symbiosis, evolutionary management, and complex minds. As a new paradigm of management, ecological management needs to emphasize evolution and autonomous game, and has the characteristics of voluntary cooperation.
So, what should managers do in the new era?Xi Youmin pointed out that managers must first have a firm belief (leadership) and the concept of development (organization), and transform their understanding of the world and the operating system into organizational concepts. The next step is to have a sense of direction, form orientation, and positioning. Finally, how to make each ecology run with higher quality requires not only strategic planning and dynamic optimization, but also a kind of ambidextrous rationality and integrated wisdom, which is also the trend of the future world.