Hunter Muller - Future State 2025: How Top Technology Executives Disrupt and Drive Success in the Digital Economy

The book is extremely relevant as digital has become pervasive throughout business. Every function and process in every industry will be reinvented by technology. If you are not doing it for your company, you'll cease to exist because someone else is doing it at their company.

Andrew Campbell

CIO at Terex Corp.

What if you could assemble the brightest practicing CIOs and ask them candid questions about leadership, culture, and strategy? Hunter has done just that. The result is a rare view inside the digital hearts and souls of today's most successful companies.

Ralph Loura

SVP and CIO at Lumentum

HUNTER MULLER

This edition first published 2020

2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119574798 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781119574835 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119574811 (epub)

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For Brice and Chase

Together, all over the world, we are experiencing a historic moment of accelerated transformational change. For many of us in the technology community, the COVID-19 pandemic represents the ultimate challenge of our careers.

The speed of the response is truly extraordinary. In a matter of weeks, we have transformed our organizations and our workforces. These processes of swift change and rapid transformation will likely continue.

What remains unchanged is the essential need for authentic leadership expressing a strong message of hope, confidence, compassion, kindness, and courage.

Over the past 30-plus years, I've been blessed with the opportunity to work with visionary leaders at amazing companies such as Zoom, Darktrace, Adobe, Moveworks, Zendesk, Nutanix, Okta, RingCentral, UiPath, and many others.

Based on my experience, I am absolutely convinced that now is the best time to be a technology leader. Despite the crisis, we are on the cusp of a new era of technology-enabled innovation and reinvention fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G, cloud computing, edge networks, virtual reality/augmented reality, facial recognition, and geolocation.

When the scale and severity of the crisis became apparent, our team at HMG Strategy pivoted quickly to shift from a live summit model to a digital summit model. In addition to producing and presenting a full slate of virtual summits featuring top-tier world-class industry thought leaders and executives, we also produced dozens of virtual briefings, meetings, conferences, and webinars.

None of this would have been possible without clear-eyed and confident executive leadership, and a team of dedicated colleagues who shared an optimistic and uplifting vision of the future.

Eric Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom, put it nicely when he said, Hunter and the HMG Strategy team confirm that now is unquestionably the best time to be a technology leader. Executive Leadership Summits highlight the responsibilities and opportunities we have as pioneers guiding the next amazing cycle of innovation on a global scale.

Patty Hatter, SVP Global Customer Services at Palo Alto Networks, told me that HMG Strategy provides a looking-glass view into the future state of technology and its global impact. Every tech leader needs to be inclusive in thought leadership and HMG Strategy provides the necessary, diverse viewpoints.

I sincerely appreciate the affirmations we have received from our network and I am deeply grateful for their continuing support and engagement throughout these difficult times.

I find it fascinating that world-class executives such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bob Iger of Disney, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have resumed their primary leadership roles during the crisis. Modern leadership requires presence, even in a world of virtual meetings. Exemplary leaders actively demonstrate their commitment and sincerity, no matter where they are in the table of organization.

From our unique vantage point at HMG Strategy, we can see the shift and observe how great leaders adjust and adapt quickly to the new normal. Facing a torrent of new and unknown challenges, our leadership capabilities are being tested as never before. From my perspective the new and pressing challenges include:

• Leading the digital enterprise courageously and enabling strong growth, inventing new business models and creating opportunities for growth, and profitability in core, adjacent, and new markets.
• Redesigning and reinventing the organization's portfolio of digital assets and capabilities.
• Elevating the customer experience and reducing friction at all levels, in all markets.