Here’s What 5G Could Mean For The Future Of Business | WIRED Brand Lab

Hi, I'm Beth Comstock.

I'm the author of a book called Imagine It Forward

and a former corporate executive.

I ran innovation as vice chair of GE.

My name is Beverly Rider.

I am the chief commercial officer at Hitachi.

[happy upbeat music]

So I'm Margaret Herndon.

I'm head of marketing and communications

for North America Ericsson.

You are here in D15.

This space is for solving problems

and using technology on our 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G platform.

5G sparks our imagination.

What I think it will allow people to do is collaborate,

share information that hopefully connect people

in ways that they can innovate faster.

Innovation happens at the intersection.

One of the things I kinda focused on

when I put my book together

is this notion of what I was calling the imagination gap

and I saw this in business.

People are expected to be handed a checklist

to tell you what to do.

I used to have this fantasy that we'd take some

of our top executives for new models

of training and development and we'd take

them like to the middle of the country

and we'd say figure out your way back.

In collaboration, technology has an important role

to allow humans tools and methods

to get to their ideas faster,

to get them out into the world faster,

hopefully it frees us to be more creative.

To be better problem solvers,

to be more critical thinkers.

You have to have connectivity.

You have to have hardware and you need solution.

So that collaboration, that co-creation

to figure out what the next solution is is a great thing.

[upbeat bouncy music]

What's happening with the climate crisis

is so urgent we need to rise to it

with a sort of more heroics instead of less defeat.

And I think one of the things that we ought to be more

excited about with 5G is what it's gonna mean

for environmental science.

The ability to have faster bandwidth

to get the feedback and the data

is gonna bring a whole revolution to farming

and hopefully get a faster handle on climate change

and some of the things that are of concern

to a lot of people.

Technology used to be a consumption type of vertical.

What we're seeing is that technology is having an inverse

reaction on sustainability.

I love this idea of having innovation spaces

for government, industry, and consumers to work together.

[happy upbeat music]

You're not gonna have a perfect business plan to tell you

exactly the inflection point

and be able to tell you what your business plan

is 10 years from now.

That's what's exciting but also probably nerve wracking.

I hope Ericsson is going through all their planning.

Like, tell me everything that's wrong with 5G.

Tell me why there's a better alternative

and why we shouldn't be doing that.

Are you growing through a regular series of exercises

as a next gen leader to challenge

the things you think aren't gonna change?

My son is 14.

He has refused to get a phone.

He thought that he would lose his resourcefulness

if was too reliant on GPS.

I think that you've got a future leader

you're, this is the kind of person we need in leading

our organizations. [laughing]

No, the sort of resiliency.

The figure it out-ness.

I think next gen leaders

have to be ready for whatever emerges.

The ability to challenge your perspectives.

I call it emergent leadership.

This idea that there's so much new emerging

in the face of speed and complexity.

There's no playbook.

Am I developing a good enough network

of enough women, enough people of color.

What am I gonna do?

It's empowering to see powerful women

who have gone out on their own and been successful.

I really wanna pull each other up

and find those people in the organization that we can help.