Change is hard and scary at times. And, embracing Industry 4.0 requires a lot of it. Manufacturers dread the idea of disrupting their supply chain or production output. How, then, can they make the complex changes across the board required to the industrial infrastructure and processes? What about corporate expectations? How can they lead their people to think different and follow the unconventional path to digital manufacturing? Based on the journey thus far, what are the learnings?

Contributor

• • Shantanu Roy, Chief Information Officer, Mahindra Logistics

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. And the topic for today is The Industry 4.0 Journey Thus Far.   And our guest for today’s show is Shantanu Roy, who’s the Chief Information Officer with Mahindra Logistics. Hey, Shantanu. How are you?

Shantanu Roy [00:00:42]:

I’m doing great, Sanjog Aul. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:44]:

Very good, sir. Very good. Thank you so much for joining us. And, the reason we wanted to talk to you today and explore the topic of industry 4.0 is because, of course, it’s been around for a couple of years, and manufacturers, logistics organizations, and everyone else who is trying to go in this direction where they can use the latest and greatest technologies to get the costs down and profits up, they are excited about it, but at the same time we hear that there is a confusion or rather some organizations dread the very idea that they will have to totally disrupt their supply chain and production. And they traditionally used to enjoy the stability in the operations. Nobody wants to disrupt it. So if we want to go to the new age of how things will be manufactured, how they will be distributed, and how the whole supply chain is gonna work. If we want the change, then we have to live with the change versus dreading it. And what we wanted to see is to what degree that adoption is happening, how are the organizations turning around, what is the step or a set of steps an organization and the leaders have to take so that they change the mindset, change the processes, change the technology, and make the most of this industry 4.0 opportunity is what I’d call it. So the first question for you, if you were to take a current state, litmus test, if you will, would you think industry 4.0 is still something which many of these manufacturers and logistics providers, etcetera, they’re confused about it?

Shantanu Roy [00:02:36]:

So Sanjog Aul, I don’t think anybody is confused about it. People are just trying to find out what is the best way to adopt it because change is inevitable. And, industry 4.0 is poised at such a delicate stage is that whosoever adopts it first, might kill the other, competitors in the market for the simple reason that it has an ability to increase your top line as well as your bottom line, both together. And when you once you do that, it’ll be very difficult for competition to catch up with this guy. So it’s definitely going to happen. It’s inevitable. The question is how. How do we go about doing it? And, from my perspective, there are three things which are required for any company to adopt industry 4.0. Most companies don’t take all the three steps in tandem, and that’s where they fail. So the first step, according to me, is the right skill sets. People do not hire the right kind of skill sets, which is required for industry 4.0 adoption. First of all, the skill sets are scarce in the market. And secondly, people are not yet ready to onboard them for various reasons. Number two, according to me, is digital trust. Companies, management, they need to be able to trust digital. I find that still there is a lot of inherent resistance in traditional industries when it comes to trusting digital workflows and digital data. And the third, and, not necessarily the lowest priority, actually, it’s the highest priority, is having a digital culture wherein our management actually leverages digital platforms to do their reviews, to actually do the analysis that they do every month. If these three things are done in tandem, I think the company would be well poised to adopt industry 4.0, and they will have that advantage in the market per se.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:17]:

It’s very well put together, those three steps or the three elements, which will allow someone or an organization to adopt industry 4.0. And there are some obvious issues which are more systemic or more environmental in nature. And those things you cannot change. And at the same time, what you described is also a utopic stage where everything is perfect. Then, of course, Industry 4.0 will yield the most benefit. But do you think people are holding back from even toying with the idea or starting out? Is there some hand holding that we need so that they don’t fall for the hype, number one. And at the same time, don’t just stand at the very periphery of this beautiful new environment or new opportunity that they can leverage.

Shantanu Roy [00:06:19]:

So Sanjog Aul, standing at the edge is really not an option. You’re gonna be killed in the market because in the logistics industry per se, the margins are really thin. So from my perspective, if somebody can adopt industry 4.0 in logistics in India, they will gain so much of advantage in the market that other competition might really either get killed or will get acquired or will get merged or the competition just wouldn’t be able to cope because like I said, it impacts both top line as well as bottom line. Now how do you work along with the hype, which is your question number one? Now most companies that I’ve seen are hesitant to take all the three steps. And even if you take two of these steps, it’s not gonna succeed. Let me give you an example. I’ve seen companies where they hire the right kind of skill sets. They hire data scientists. They hire high end data modelers. But then there is no digital trust. In other words, whatever data is churned out by this team, is not actually used for strategic analytics. It is mostly to showcase the capability the company has in terms of analyzing data. It is not actually systemic in the sense that data is not being leveraged for day to day strategy, day to day tactical analysis. Another thing, let’s assume we have the right skill sets, and we also have trust on that digital data, which is getting churned out. But let’s say the management per se is old school management. They really don’t have the capacity to think outside of what they have been thinking the last 10 years, what I call the culture, the digital culture. So what happens is there is an inherent resistance. You have the right kind of people churning out the right kind of data. You’re also kind of using that data for tactical analysis. But at the top management level, it never becomes a strategic implementation. That means this data is not being leveraged for a pivot at a company strategy level. So all the three things have to get aligned. The three things have to be aligned together for a company to succeed in Industry 4.0. Otherwise, it’s only going to remain a hype. People are gonna try it, fail at it, and stand by the wayside and see other people who have adopted all the three, sway them aside. That’s what’s gonna happen, Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:24]:

So what do you, based on what you just mentioned, like, okay. People go ahead and churn out some data and come up with some insights. Even those are projects. Even those require investments. And if the sponsorship did not come from the top, it is puzzling to see that how come we got go ahead for the change in the way we when we used to get the insights and would invest in technology in other ways because even to get the data to come from different sources, new sources, that’s also a change. So if the sponsorship came from the top to make those changes, are we then stuck in the last mile to say, okay. I got you all the data. I got you the insight, but now I want you to change the way you look at business. And suddenly a person says, no. I’m not gonna do it, or they have cold feet. This whole thing is puzzling, or are we doing things in isolation? Somehow a technology leader or a business unit leader working with technology leader starts working on this and suddenly comes out and tells the top executive management that, hey. This is what we found. Would you buy this? And then they have cold feet. Is there a disconnect at the top?

Shantanu Roy [00:10:38]:

There is. For example, there are companies who have relied on their gut feel, relied on their sense of the industry for decades to do their strategy, to build their strategy, to think ahead. For somebody to actually come up with a data model or to come up with an analysis and a management actually looking at that data very, very unbiasedly, as in without any bias per se, and trying to see how does it actually influence their current model of the industry or of the business that they have in their head. Once they look at it from an unbiased perspective, the whole thing changes. What happens today is since there is an inherent bias involved, because data is just a recommendation. It’s not a decision. Decisions are always taken by human beings. Data can only give you some insights, can give you a recommendation. It can give you some analysis. But the final call has to be taken by a human being. And if that human being has a bias over their own judgment, vis-à-vis what data is coming through, the process breaks. And I’ve seen that time and time again that in companies, this happens. And eventually, that analysis actually ends up becoming a showcase. Then you find it very hard to retain the talent, which you have hired to do this analysis. And then finally, people would say, look, industry 4.0 is just a hype. It’s just a hype cycle. It really doesn’t work in my industry. So all the three things have to get aligned per se for it really to start making impact. And most people don’t focus on the culture per se, wherein they actually start looking at the data, start believing that data and start taking decisions based on data. Once that starts happening, you will see that the company’s journey towards Industry 4.0 has already started because they will start realizing the value of it, personally. That’s what I’ve seen in my industry so far.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:10]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners, and we’ll be back. And let’s besides the cultural shift, and I’m sure there would be some organizations who suffer more than others in terms of this top level cultural disconnect or inertia. But assuming that some of the more progressive ones see the value and are able to look at it in an unbiased manner, at least the ball starts rolling. But then we also have to make sure that we look at all these latest technology innovations that are coming out. We want to be able to fully leverage them. So besides the cultural issue or top level leadership disconnect, what else is essentially slowing the expected movement that we otherwise had that industry 4.0 seems like a no brainer? What’s the true holdup besides that culture which is holding us back, especially when all technology centric things, which is computational power connectivity, analytics, human machine interfaces, all of this new technology innovation is going in it at an amazing pace, and it’s also getting easier to provision. Let’s explore it when we come back. Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:33]:

Welcome back. So technology seems to be moving at an amazing pace. Provisioning is becoming easier by the day. Why we still see some slowness? And, of course, you spoke about the culture and leadership. But what else, Shantanu?

Shantanu Roy [00:16:51]:

So technology has always been progressing at a very rapid pace. But adoption of technology for an end goal is an incremental process. Most managements typically mistake it to be a one shot kind of a process. You take a technology stack, you implement it, and boom, that’s your top line. You get an increase and you get a bottom line increase, and that should sustain the whole story because it should be a spiral that way that whatever money you save through this process should actually fuel the next round of Digital 4.0. But what typically happens is there is a hockey stick which kicks in. Typically, when you invest in this kind of tech, what happens is you will actually see a dip. You will actually see a dip in your bottom line as well, and you might see some dip in your top line as well. And then there’s an incremental tinkering process, which happens. You have to kind of trust this journey and you have to stage manage or make some minor changes to the journey so that finally, you will see that upside of that hockey stick kicking in. And then you will actually see the actual upside on the top line and the bottom line, which will come through. Many of the organizations are not yet ready for the initial part of the hockey stick to kick in, which is where you actually end up going below and then you rise to the top. So people should have that strategic capacity to absorb that and then they will see that upside coming in. And of course, then once you see the upside, then every management is happy to keep sustaining it, to keep funding it because you see the fruit of that investment coming in. Question is how quick. That is the challenge. That hockey stick can be 6 months, 8 months, a year. It depends. Now that is where the challenge is. How much long can you wait for that upside to kick in is where actually the whole game is. And people who sustain with this process, wherein they keep doing incremental changes, still you find that upside kicking in, are the ones who are the early adopters of Industry 4.0, Sanjog Aul?

Sanjog Aul [00:19:51]:

So based on what you just said, it is still coming to no one been able to paint a picture to which will create confidence about what’s ahead. Because that’s why even for even if you show people that hockey stick, which looks very promising, people are taking it with a grain of salt or rather a lot of salt because they are not ready to put in even that small investment and any change because even when you’re making an investment, I’m assuming, not asking for a whole lot of investment. You’re just saying make incremental changes. Then what kind of leadership or what kind of growth expectations people had? So they are in a way almost ignoring the disruptive impact that Industry 4.0 can bring. So someone is not getting educated or someone is not educating the people at the top properly. Is it right?

Shantanu Roy [00:20:54]:

So Sanjog Aul, the incremental kicks in after you’ve done your initial CapEx investment. So that first investment is substantial. And then your tinkering kicks in, your delta incremental tinkering kicks in. So investment initially is decently high. And then you have to keep changing the course finally so that you see the light of the day and then it zooms up. Typically, what happens is once at your end of that first CapEx cycle, which is substantial, you are still at the bottom. You are still zooming towards the bottom. And then you will see that plateau and then it moves up. So question is when management start questioning the impact of that investment, they expect the investments to make an impact within a quarter, within two quarters. And if it doesn’t happen, they typically start writing off that CapEx investment thinking that if I put something more, it’s going to get even lower. So people who have the patience to kind of know that, yes, you know what, there’s going to be a plateau and there is going to be an artistic effect kicking in eventually are the ones who typically succeed and they rule the industry. But it’s a painful process. It’s not a simple process because sometimes you may not see the light of the day during a tinkering process. You might find that you have to do another substantial round of CapEx and still you don’t see the light of the day and people become jittery at that juncture. And typically, they shun the whole process and their faith in doing so kind of gets shaken and they don’t venture into it again. And that’s the challenge that we see in traditional industries. I’m not saying every industry is like that or every company or every management is like that. I’m not saying that at all. But overall, when I talk to my colleagues outside of my company and I talk to other people, I get a sense that this is what exactly is happening on the ground, Sanjog Aul?

Sanjog Aul [00:23:17]:

Yes. So with that said, would you think that there are not enough good examples, good success stories or even some semi successful stories for people to look and use them as the basis of sustaining their efforts. Because it looks like when we have this CapEx and you put in something and you think you’re gonna get the value, but you don’t. So you put yet again. And as you were saying, people start getting jittery. We are still at the nascent stages, I understand, But are there no poster children, if you will, created already across the world that they can look up to and say that, you know what? There is hope.

Shantanu Roy [00:24:10]:

So Sanjog Aul, there are a lot of poster children in this industry. In fact, in every industry, there are a lot of poster children. But the difference is the fact that most of these iconic companies who have invested very, very heavily on digital tech or Industry 4.0 tech that we call are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest. So they have sustained their investments over a couple of years, not a couple of quarters, a couple of years. And they have taken the hard part. That means they have invested in CapEx, multiple cycles of CapEx because they knew they had to take the ship and take it out and make the ship see the light of the day. There was no other way out. There was no alternative. There was no plan B for them. There was only one plan that was plan A. It’s not an easy decision to take for any company. Most of these iconic companies had only one way out, that is go headlong into digital tech. So I see those kind of companies becoming iconic companies, and that’s the risk they took. It’s a fact of the risk. Maybe if those investments wouldn’t have rectified, maybe those companies would have gone out of business, but they didn’t. And that’s why they became iconic. Maybe there were 15 other companies who tried the same thing and they went down the tube and we didn’t hear of them after that. So many companies don’t want to do that. So they want to play safe. So they want to dabble in industry 4.0 tech and they want to kind of hit their toes, but not go any further because they don’t want to kind of go so headlong into it that they can’t recover the money out. And that’s where this bickering comes in, and that’s where the value per se is not coming out. But I’m sure as industry matures, as the cost of technology reduces, as the CapEx cycles become OpEx cycles, because most of these they are becoming platforms, all the IoT platforms are now becoming OpEx platforms. So as the cost reduces, the amount of risk that you can take also goes up significantly higher. You can start instead of just dipping your toes, you can dip your whole leg and hands into this tech and try out because you don’t spend much. And as the technology matures, as systems become of become more computationally higher of higher capacity, the chips become stronger, faster. What’s going to happen is the cost of adopting tech, cost of rolling out tech is going to become significantly cheaper. And I see that as an inflection point where everybody will try and adopt that tech because everybody knows that a successful implementation will mean both an upside of the top line as well as the bottom line. So I think still the cost of tech is still relatively high. It’s not cheap as yet. At least from an Indian perspective, it’s still not cheap. Hopefully, in the next 2 or 3 years, I expect the costs to plummet. And when that happens, I’m assuming and my forecast is every company worth its salt will try something or the other to stay relevant in this industry, Sanjog Aul?

Sanjog Aul [00:27:59]:

Let’s take a quick break. Listeners, we’ll be right back. And so we, of course, have spoken about what’s the current mindset, and hopefully, things will get better and the tech will become cheaper. Now let’s look at the process side because anytime when you’re trying to put in efforts into this kind of an initiative, it’s in many cases like changing tires of a moving car, which means whatever you’re trying to change, you also have to deliver using the same processes. You don’t have a parallel run, if you will. And for that matter, if you’re going after the industry 4.0 deploying whatever new that you want to deploy, and in the interest of efficiencies and perhaps some innovation, how do you retain the process effectiveness of what you already had in place, which was stable, which was paying your bills? So how do you eat the cake and have it too? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:50]:

Welcome back. So, here, the situation is that industry 4.0 is supposed to disrupt what an organization is doing. So a manufacturer has an assembly line. In the logistics, you’ve got a certain ways to deliver the services that people are expecting. And you’re expecting that industry 4.0 will bring some disruptive innovation and some hopefully top line and bottom line improvements. But that doesn’t mean whatever you are trying right now where we will still are waiting to get to see the results, we break our own systems which are paying the bills. So moving, changing tires of a moving car scenario. So how is this being tackled today? What are you doing to preserve what works today and yet not just tinker, bring something in because you cannot just do it in a sandbox. You have to literally try to operationalize some things to see whether they really brought improvements or not without jeopardizing what was currently working. How are you juggling this?

Shantanu Roy [00:32:01]:

Sure. So one of the mistakes which I see companies doing is they ask their current process in charges or the current process owners to implement industry 4.0 tech. So what happens is typically, you will have a process flow, which goes from A to B to C to D. And they would say, okay, from B to C for that particular process bit, let’s adopt an industry 4.0 tech. Now the challenge with this approach is, typically, if you bring in efficiency for a part of the process, actually, if you look at it from an end to end process flow, the process degrades. The efficiency of the process degrades. In other words, if I have a process which is manual, manual, digital, manual, vis-à-vis a process which is manual, manual, manual, manual, the second process flow would be much more efficient than the first. So if we have to adopt a process, which is industry 4.0, the entire workflow has to be done from scratch so that the efficiency from an end to end process flow is maintained. And for that to happen, you need to see the people who are actually not the process owners of the existing flow. We need to bring in people from a different department, a different culture, maybe from a different organization who’ve done it before. And the onus of this team or this person should be to look at it from an end to end perspective and not look at digitization in parts. Because in part, digitization actually is a recipe for failure. You need to kind of take an entire process flow and digitize it completely end to end. And only then you will actually see the benefits of digitization kicking in. Otherwise, it actually becomes a cost hogger, and you don’t actually get the benefit out of it. That’s what my experience has been. So that’s what people should do. They should actually look at the process flow end to end. And ideally, there should be a person who’s come from, who is not from the same process background, doing this analysis per se, Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:48]:

And what you just mentioned also then creates this boiling the ocean syndrome because you said manual, manual, manual, manual will be more efficient than three manuals and one digital, and which makes sense. Like, theoretically, it makes sense. But then if you suddenly ask someone to sink in money and you got four elements to a workflow and out of which you say sink in money to make everything 100% digital, that’s like seeking perfection. But then in real world, would there be a possibility of focusing on progress versus perfection? And, yes, in theoretically, you may not have the highest efficiency and you would not be better than the manual, but at least you’ll get the process started and it’ll be three steps away. And then later on, two and then one to eventually get to that all four elements being digital. So at least you’ll get something done versus, again, people staying standing on the edge and say, no. I cannot do it because it’s too much money upfront. Could we not bite by bite versus taking the whole burger in one shot? Just bite only as much as we can chew and even there is an incentive for the top management to even buy into this whole idea of investing. If it’s not too much investment, perhaps they’ll be more likely to invest.

Shantanu Roy [00:36:11]:

So, Sanjog Aul, I will put it this way. Just to take an analogy, let’s say, I have a four wheeler, a three wheeler, and a two wheeler in my garage. Now I can take the four wheeler, and somebody says, now convert this four wheeler into a Ferrari. Now that’s an audacious task because I have to change everything. Every part has to undergo a change, transformation for it to and it’s a difficult task, like you correctly pointed out, to take a complex process and make it complete digital. There’s a lot of risk involved. And there’s always a risk of breaking the existing process flow. But I can always take that two wheeler and make it completely electric, make it completely digital industry 4.0 centric tech, and then take it out for a spin rather than take that four wheeler, change the engine, change the headlight, and say, okay. Now it’s a semi four wheeler and a semi fast car. And let me take it out for a spin and then slowly change the other parts and slowly convert it into a full fledged Ferrari. Now that typically doesn’t happen. When you have a part Ferrari and a part common automobile, it definitely falls flat. So you would rather take a smaller process flow, convert it end to end digital. You see the value of it coming in, kicking in. And then you attempt to convert that three wheeler into a completely on the new tech platform and then attempt the four wheeler and convert it into a Ferrari, let’s say.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:06]:

It’s a great analogy. Right. Now the way you explain it is to essentially recommend that we should take smaller initiatives, which are more manual and then convert them to digital. And that’ll create the belief system, and people will have more appetite to work on the bigger one. Now since when you try to touch the bigger initiatives, which we need to go full digital, the investments and the resources and the risk will be much more. Do you think people at the top and also the changes that you have to bring about just because you’ve shown some earlier examples, will they be good enough, or are they good enough for people to suddenly say, okay. I was eating this small bite, but now I’m gonna suddenly gulp in a whole big burger in one shot. Are they okay with that? Is that what you’re seeing happening?

Shantanu Roy [00:39:10]:

So what happens is when you take up a large complex process flow and start to digitize it, typically, there’s a lot of business tools of reengineering which happens. You typically don’t take an as is flow and digitize it. And that would be a recipe for disaster. So you take the whole flow. You put it on the drawing board again and see how this complex flow can be simplified. More often than not, when you put the end to end flow on a whiteboard or on a piece of software, you will see that there are a lot of places which could be short circuited. And once you do that, then you bring in digitization, then you bring in automation and then you try and make sure that the end to end process is digitized. Taking an as is process and trying to make it digital just doesn’t work. It’s going to be too complex to run, too complex to maintain and too complex to even do the transformation. Complex flows. And typically, that’s what people do. They will actually try and reinvent the whole process flow, think of it from end to end because you have to understand that these process flows have evolved over time. So there have been incremental changes which have happened on the process flows. And that’s why after X number of years, they have become really complex. Nobody has actually gone back to the drawing board, put that whole process flow from start to end and rethought about it. And when you do that, things become inherently simple. Doing that thing is complex. Changing a complex flow into a simple flow is a complex process. But once you do that, only then you bring in automation. And then you first bring in digitization, and then you bring in automation. Then it works. Typically, it works. So BPR is a very important component of this whole thing, Sanjog Aul?

Sanjog Aul [00:41:15]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we are back, we very well started in the beginning, with talent. We spoke that digital talent is tough to come by, tough to develop, and frankly, there is no pool available. We have to develop it either as a community or within the organization. But what is the challenge in making it happen because the outcome we are looking for in industry 4.0 will be dependent on the amount or the number of talented people you have and their capabilities. It’s not a challenge which anyone has solved yet and it is becoming complex because suddenly there is a glut of needs for such talent, and there are fewer organizations who can even come close to claiming that they have the ability to churn out such talent, whether academia or training houses or consulting firms or even the enterprises. So what is being done today with respect to talent so that industry 4.0 doesn’t remain a dream even after you had the strategy, even after the

Sanjog Aul [00:44:39]:

Welcome back. Talking about digital talent, I go across the country and many parts of the globe discussing this. And number one, maybe in the top three among the top three is the ability to build talent or having talent available when we need it and it’s always been a challenge. So industry 4.0 requires talent which has got some type of training and know how which was not required in the past. There were no academic houses which were training such people. And in many cases, even the trainers are not qualified because this is so new. What’s your observation regarding talent development, and what are you doing in your organization to tame this beast?

Shantanu Roy [00:45:35]:

So, Sanjog Aul, you are absolutely right. Talent is the most scarce resource in adopting or implementing Industry 4.0. There are just so many practitioners out there. And first things first is we have to build communities, communities of people who basically are passionate about tech, especially digital tech, automation tech. And I already see that happening in India. I see a lot of these tech social communities forming. And they are actually the genesis of companies. Eventually, I expect or I foresee that a lot of these services companies will start spawning who would actually provide Industry 4.0 as a service to various organizations, be it manufacturing, logistics, retail, whatever. I see that as a massive opportunity, especially in India, wherein, as you know, Sanjog Aul, Indians are quick to learn tech, but they’re not so quick in envisaging where to use the tech. So I foresee that a lot of these use cases will start coming in, and I see a lot of services company getting spawned out of these communities, which are getting created as services companies who would actually go in and start solving these use cases, these problems and challenges. And if one or two of these use cases become successful, I see that as a spiral. A lot more and more companies will be incubated who would actually start adopting this tech. And I already see most of the traditional IT services companies trying really, really hard to morph into Digital 4.0 tech companies. They are trying really, really hard to inculcate these kind of technologies in their brochure. And I see that as a very, very positive change. Of course, academia has a very, very key role to play. I do foresee a lot of these tech communities going back to the academia and teaching students on this tech, which will actually increase the curiosity level, increase the entire vibe around this tech, which will make more and more students adopt this tech. When I say students, I mean students in their bachelor’s courses who start adopting this tech. And then it becomes a spiral. Once it hits a threshold number of people doing services on this tech, then it just explodes. And as we have seen in India, there was this explosion of IT services, which happened about a decade ago. I expect that something similar should happen in the next couple of years, maybe a couple of quarters even, because I see this tech almost becoming virulent in the next couple of quarters across industry because everybody is panicking whether the other peer company would adopt this earlier. And if that happens, then there is a possibility of this company getting wiped out of the business. So everybody is trying really hard to adopt it first. And I see that as a positive thing. It’s going to inspire a lot of people. It’ll create opportunity for a lot of people to learn and provide services around it, Sanjog Aul?

Sanjog Aul [00:49:40]:

So when you spoke about and this is my last question for you, and 60 seconds is what you can take to respond to it. Think about leaders. You mentioned about the folks who are having issues or have reservations regarding going the industry 4.0. But if you were to paint the picture of an ideal leader or the leadership style, which will allow an organization to prosper individually as an organization or the whole value chain? What type of leadership are we looking for?

Shantanu Roy [00:50:23]:

According to me, a leader who is open, who is vulnerable, who is ready to accept that whatever has been the thing may not be relevant in the future. That kind of a leader, I assume, would be the fastest on the tracks when it comes to adopting new tech. The more ignorant you are, the better because that will make you adopt it faster. The resistance will go down and the bias will also come down. So that level of vulnerability should be there in the leader, per se. 

Sanjog Aul [00:51:12]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much, Shantanu, for sharing your thoughts and views on how leaders can look at themselves and the organization where it wants to go and where it needs to go and start making changes across the board, whether it talks about people, process, or technology to make industry 4.0 a reality. Thanks so much.

Shantanu Roy [00:51:37]:

My pleasure, Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:40]:

And listeners, hope you enjoyed, got some nuggets out of it. Please like us on Facebook. Search for CTN, that’s CIO Talk Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.