Episode 42: Business Beyond Buzzwords

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In episode 42 of the podcast (@AugmentedPod), the topic is: Business Beyond Buzzwords. Our guest is Jeff Immelt, Venture Partner, NEA, former CEO of General Electric.In this conversation, we talk about Jeff Immelt's new book Hot Seat, running a top tier manufacturing business, industrial tech, the impact of globalization, plant innovation, workforce training, global supply chain, virtual cloud connected value streams and what it is possible to do today and what was very difficult even a few years ago with the myriad of non-integrated enterprise IT and ERP systems and other challenges. Lastly, we discuss how industry will evolve in this decade.After listening to this episode, check out NEA, GE, Jeff's book Hot Seat as well as Jeff Immelt's social media profile: NEA (@nea): https://www.nea.com/GE (@generalelectric): https://www.ge.com/Hot Seat (book): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Hot-Seat/Jeff-Immelt/9781982114718Jeff Immelt (@JeffImmelt): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffimmelt/Trond's takeaway: Jeff Immelt's brave, honest, and wise book is unusually revealing and instructive. Jeff has shared not only how lonely it is at the top, but seemingly how few big choices and at times how many smaller choices you have at any given time. His struggles with industrial tech are near timeless. Nobody has all the answers in terms of getting organizational implementation of exponential tech right. Especially not if your organization is the size of GE. I was struck by the implication for leaders--be vulnerable or risk not only your own happiness but those of all your co-workers. Immelt's struggle was to digitize GE, a behemoth in transition. He chose to build an in-house capacity, at great cost, and with mixed results, but how many other options were there on the table? Hindsight is 2020. As Immelt points out, nowadays, low-code and no-code systems, such as Tulip, are about to transform frontline operations in ways we can only start to imagine. The promise is empowerment of workers and immense productivity gains from freeing up the human mind. Our challenges might, at times, seem or indeed be smaller in scale, but might feel equally overwhelming. Good to know then, that the folks at the top struggle as well. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode 21, The Future of Digital in Manufacturing with Çağlayan Arkan, VP of Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft, episode 32, Covering Industrial Innovation with Amy Feldman, Senior Editor, Forbes, or episode 27, Industry 4.0 Tools with Carl B. March, Director, Industry 4.0 at Stanley Black & Decker.Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.Special Guest: Jeff Immelt.