Reminiscing Transformation from Industry 4.0 to Smart Society 10.0
Looking at her granddaughter’s nutrients report, Preeti Menon, former Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) of the tech company Toggle, beamed with pride. The intelligent algorithms her team had implemented for nutrients improvement within growing teenagers did wonders. Using prompts from the Toggle app, she quickly ordered the indigenous Mushrooms from the valley, which were to be delivered by ‘Quicky’ Drone in precisely 2 hours. Just in time for the Cookie Robot to prepare the delicious and healthy pasta as Tiara was visiting her. Preeti wanted to hear all about her granddaughter Tiara’s latest project on the ‘Journey of humankind till 2070’. Tiara in her v-msg to Preeti exclaimed, “Dadi, I look forward to gorging on yummy food, along with our insightful conversation on women’s role, especially, in Smart Society 10.0 transition.”
While at the dinner table, Preeti started the conversation on where it all began. In 2020, the situation was gloomy for India, which ranked 112 among 153 countries as per World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index 2020, down by four ranks from the previous year. In economic participation and opportunity for women too, India’s rank was worse at the 149th position amongst a total of 153 countries. As per the McKinsey report, it was estimated that overcoming the gender gap in India could lead to around a 6.8% gain in GDP and could result in incremental GDP to the tune of $0.7 trillion by 2025. She shared that until the early 2000s, workplace cultures had evolved to assume that men are better suited to represent the position of power in an organization. If a woman did rise the ranks wading through various hurdles such as tighter scrutiny with biases, impostor syndromes, she was still expected to behave in a certain way. But the situation started to change for a brighter and positive outlook from the early 2020s.
Tiara could not hold back the curiosity on how her grandmother had helped in driving the change as a CTO. Backing with statistical data, Preeti emphasized that when women participated in the workforce or as entrepreneurs, they brought many benefits to the organization and society.
The HBR article reinforced the seven leadership lessons that men can learn from women. One of the key lessons from the research suggested that women are more successful in leading by inspiring, transforming people’s attitudes and beliefs, and bringing alignment among people with meaning and purpose, which trumped the conventional leadership with carrots and sticks. In another study by McKinsey, 38% of women are more likely to mentor and sponsor other women of colour, which indicated that if there were more women leaders in the workforce, then there were more allies and champions of women at all levels. Women are found to be more resilient, as they can take on many roles at once and still complete them successfully due to their innate ability to organize and think on the feet. When the business or personal goals are connected to a higher purpose, specifically, for women, it brings out passion, provides energy, and pushes them to the limit. Among many other traits, allyship, mentoring, sponsoring, resilient nature, and meaningful goals serve as a cornerstone for collaborative innovation and success of the businesses, products, or services of the future. To top it, these traits enable the creation of a human-centered society.
Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States, had rightly said, “No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half of its citizens.”
The twinkle in her grandmother’s eyes prompted Tiara to ask for Preeti’s personal motivation. Preeti spoke about how an event had a significant impact during her school days. Preeti said, “Like many students, I was the biggest beneficiary of the ‘AIforYouth’ program that Intel had set up with the Government of India. They attempted to teach AI to 13,000 students in 2 days and 24 hours, and set a Guinness World Record, and helped India leapfrog its digitalization journey. After attending this event, I enrolled myself with the International Centre for Transformative Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) to learn and apply AI-led solutions within the healthcare sector, and thus, the Toggle was born.
One of the trailblazers to have brought around this revolution was a technological leader, the former country head of a tech-giant in India. She believed in bringing grass-root changes to the national level problems through cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G (fifth-generation cellular network technology), the Internet of Things (IoT), and more. She led various initiatives to build a solid foundation and ecosystem around these advanced technologies.”
Hearing about Preeti’s role model, Tiara’s eyes twinkled, and she matched Preeti’s energy and enthusiasm now. This led Preeti to share another example that had inspired one of her philosophies at Toggle. In her early days as CTO, Preeti had read about gendered innovations and their impact on healthcare, automotive, and many other industries. The research portrayed how making assumptions was hurting the actual purpose of a few systems. In the automotive world, crash test dummies were used for safety testing in the 2000s. The studies with a limited set of dummies, not inclusive of the diverse attributes in the human population, led to safety-critical situations for those left out. Digital technologies addressed the gap by allowing seamless inclusion of a broad spectrum of human attributes for all verification tests of the vehicles. By extending this to Toggle, Preeti ensured that data biases were exempted from all smart products of her company. And that’s how Tiara’s recent nutrients report and the supplemental recommendations were accurate to the dot.
Hope you enjoyed this enlightening chat between a grandmother and a granddaughter. We hope it could transcend you to a society of the future, where innovative products and businesses thrive because there was the inclusion of diverse thoughts, and where women’s strengths corroborated the society and its economy to thrive, and not go against it.
The article was co-authored by Stueti Gupta, Director, and Co-founder, BlueKei Solutions, and Riya Thakkar, Functional Safety Manager, Mahindra Electric.
