Today's digital revolution

- Here's a quiz for you. What do a train, a light bulb, and artificial intelligence have in common? Sounds like a bad joke, doesn't it? Seriously, they're all more closely related than you might think. Consider this. There have been three great industrial revolutions. The first started at the end of the 18th century and brought us innovations like steam engines and trains. About a hundred years later, the Second Industrial Revolution occurred. That one delivered electric lights, cars, and radios. Finally, the revolution we're living in now has brought us advances such as the internet and artificial intelligence. You could actually argue that what we're experiencing at this point in the Third Industrial Revolution is significantly different from what was happening when it began 50 or 60 years ago. At first, hardware was big and expensive. Then, it was the software that was large and expensive. Just 20 years ago, we were installing software using floppy disks or CDs. Now, we're installing everything from the cloud. These days, innovation is happening so quickly that technology, the Digital Revolution, is spilling into more and more areas of our lives. Where digitization spills over can create significant disruptions to industries. For example, cryptocurrencies are disrupting the financial industry and changing the ways people invest. Advances in vehicles make it next to impossible to fix a car on your own, thus disrupting automotive aftermarket sales. These changes are about technology, but it's more than that. These changes are really about people, you and me. In order to stay competitive, our companies have to stay flexible and adapt to the changes that are being thrown at them every day. Companies are trying to understand how their goods and services can remain relevant in a world where everything is available on demand. In an effort to be more responsive, companies and leaders have already shifted to more collaborative ways of working, shifting from clearly defined roles and responsibilities to more fluid, less hierarchical organizations. For us as professionals, it's really about how we adapt and adopt new ways of working. We also have to foster in ourselves new ways of thinking. Our ability to adapt and change how we work will be the defining quality of whether our companies and we as leaders can survive the digital transformation. These abilities will determine whether we as professional can remain competitive, so back to our original question. What do a train, a light build, and artificial intelligence have in common? They've all required people to adapt. Now, it's your turn to adapt. You'll be changing not just how you live your daily life and interact with new technology. You need to change how you work and what you must master to remain competitive.