"There's never been a worse time to be a worker
with only 'ordinary' skills and abilities to offer, because
computers, robots and other digital technologies are acquiring
these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate."
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The New Machine
Age1
The digital organisation
The triumph of Moore's Law
In the five years since we wrote our first paper on leadership
in the digital age the subject has turned from a niche interest in
the media industry into a zeitgeist topic for leaders in all
sectors of the economy. Leading academics such as Erik Brynjolfsson
suggest that we are at the dawn of a Second Machine Age, in which
digital technologies such as the microprocessor, the internet and
social media have created the basis for exponential economic
growth. If true then this is a troubling realisation. Human beings
are not wired for exponentials: gradual change is hard enough for
most of us, let alone sweeping shifts in the ways we
