If it's digital, it will be cognitive. If you think that, you're going to change the way you run a business.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Think about when a digital business marries up with what I'll call 'digital intelligence.' It is the dawn of a new era about being a 'cognitive' business. When every product, every service, how you run your company can actually have a piece that learns and thinks as part of it, you will be a cognitive business.
I've always been about how will digital be transforming established businesses, and that's what I've done.
The digital business is a fantastic business to be in. The only thing you have to do is build a cost structure for a declining business, which is different from the structure for a growing business.
Not since the digital revolution in the early '90s has technology placed such a comprehensive burden on business, employees and individuals to reinvent their business plans, services and products, and themselves to keep pace with the changing marketplace.
Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
It's not about revenues: The fundamental economics in digital business is scale and margins. The top line has become the bottom line.
More and more, more and more digital, in particular, I think you'll see in our stores next year, as we start combining these digital products and they interface with each other, you'll see that represented in Wal-Mart.
You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.