How to Prepare for the Future of Technology Jobs and Innovation

The future of technology jobs and innovation is an exciting and ever-changing landscape. In this video, Rania Hoteit and Nathaniel Schooler explore the future of technology jobs and innovation. We take a close look at the skills that will be in demand and what you can do to prepare yourself for these exciting changes.

Rania also shares her insight into what innovation looks like for managers and executives and this is an episode that should not be missed. Rania Hoteit is a multi-award winning serial entrepreneur, global impact leader, author, advisor and international speaker with recognitions from The White House, United Nations, UK Houses of Parliament, The Global CEO Excellence Award, The STEP Ahead Award, The Global Business Insights Award and other prestigious honors. Her experience in the field makes her uniquely qualified to speak on this topic.

This video is a must-watch for anyone interested in the future of technology jobs and innovation. It’s clear-sighted, informative, and offers concrete advice on what you can do to future-proof your career. So whatever your future holds, make sure to watch this video or listen to the audio!

Rania Hoteit is a multi-award winning serial entrepreneur, global impact leader, author, advisor and international speaker with recognitions from The White House, United Nations, UK Houses of Parliament, The Global CEO Excellence Award, The STEP Ahead Award, The Global Business Insights Award and other prestigious honors. With the depth of her expertise and exceptional success record, Rania is a sought-after executive advisor and leadership consultant who guides innovation transformation, human development and business growth for companies around the world.

As Founder and former CEO of ID4A Technologies, Rania built a global company whose cutting-edge developments have been revolutionizing manufacturing processes and creating significant environmental, economic and social impact worldwide. Under her leadership, ID4A was recognized by the White House Office of Science and Technology for ‘Fostering The Development of Advanced Manufacturing in the US as The World’; ranked on Entrepreneur 360’s list of the “Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America”; honored on Inc. 5000 List of “America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies”; received Real Leaders “100 Top Impact Companies” Award and other global honors, including Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards for the company’s innovative “Pandemic Response” and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2021 Citizens Awards for “Best Economic Opportunity and Empowerment Program.” Through her commitments to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, over 2000 businesses adopted sustainable practices. Additionally, she contributed to reducing labor exploitation in global production pipelines by improving the skills and working conditions of over 2 million industrial workers by the end of 2021.

Rania has been featured in notable publications including Forbes, Huffington Post, Inc, Entrepreneur, Le Commerce Du Levant, Thrive Global, The National Association of Manufacturers and more. She was recently named by Disrupt Magazine along with Oprah Winfrey among “7 Disruptive Women Paving The Way For Success in 2022”.

Q 1 ) Most leaders want to be innovative and futuristic yet they may struggle to do so. What are the major barriers to innovation and what steps leaders should take to make innovation a part of their strategic planning?

Q 2) Many approaches to innovation can either fail or prove to be ineffective in the long term. How can leaders build a competence in innovation to become successful serial innovators when leading companies into the future?

Q 3) What is the strategic value for interdisciplinary and collaborative innovation networks in business creation and how diversity plays a role in amplifying such value within organizations?

Q 4) What are the best tips or advices you have for people in business?

You can find more information on Rania here: http://www.raniahoteit.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/raniahoteit/

https://www.facebook.com/RaniaHoteitOfficialPage/

https://www.instagram.com/raniahoteit_officialpublicpage/

Here is the full transcript below.

Here is the full transcript below.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:00:22

Wow. Well, I am very privileged today to be joined by Rania Hoteit and she’s a multi award winning serial entrepreneur, a global impact leader, author, advisor, and international speaker with recognitions from the White House, the United Nations, the UK Houses of Parliament, the Global CEO Excellence award. The step ahead award, the global business insights award and other prestigious honors with the depth of her expertise and exceptional success record Rana is a sort after executive advisor and leadership consultant who guides innovation, transformation, human development, and business growth for companies around the world. And she was the founder and former CEO of ID4A technologies and ran and built a global company whose cutting edge developments have now been revolutionizing manufacturing processes and creating significant environmental economic and social impact worldwide. So I’m very privileged that you’ve, that you’ve agreed to join me. It’s taken a while to, to get you on this, this series and the timing is perfect right now because you’re in great company. So thank you so much for, for joining me.

Rania Hoteit

00:01:34

Thank you so much for having me Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:01:38

Well, I think, I think really, we should just dig straight into some of these questions that, that I’ve got here. So I know, you know, this is a series on technology jobs, and we’re gonna talk a lot about that, but I think it’s also good to talk around leadership because that’s very, very important in that context. So most leaders want to be innovative and futuristic yet they may struggle to do so. What are the major barriers to innovation and what steps leaders should take to make innovation a part of their strategic planning?

Rania Hoteit

00:02:18

Sure. First of all, let me explain a little bit about what innovation is at its core definition. When we talk about innovation, innovation is the act of applying new ideas to create something that has impact and that results in measurable outcomes. So whether we’re talking about a process or a product service innovation, it’s really about producing a value-added novelty for the business or an organization or a government, or even society as well by transforming a market or by creating a completely new market that didn’t exist before. It could be the introduction of a new technology. It could be the introduction of a new segment or product line, or a new method or process of production, or it could also be an improvement of an existing product or service. In short, a better and smarter way of doing anything is what we call innovation. Back to your question,

Rania Hoteit

00:03:23

Most leaders do want to be innovative, and most organizations across different industries do understand that innovation is crucial for them to maintain a competitive edge and to continually grow as a business. Simply put, they do understand that if they fail to innovate, they will fail to thrive. The reality is that not all leaders succeed to innovate and many CEOs struggle to overcome various barriers because they lack the effectiveness to build a sustainable organization-wide competence for innovation. And that’s what most leaders do not understand why they’re having such difficulty and, and major struggles to innovate. There are six major barriers that I think leaders must break through, and there are steps that they can take to make innovation a part of their strategic planning. The first barrier I would like to talk about is the ‘Lack of Vision and Having a Short Term Focus’. Vision is the ability to see what is yet to come and vision puts an edge on what is being done at the present.

Rania Hoteit

00:04:39

When we talk about vision, vision is what keeps the company moving into the unknown. So those who lack vision, they deal only in the here and now. They can only work with that which is concrete. And they are able to think only very realistically and pragmatically. They are unable to think creatively and futuristically. Therefore leaders who want to instill innovation, they must have a vision. The second major barrier is ‘Having a Highly Complex, Formalized and Centralized Rigid Structures and Mindsets’. This one is huge. Allowing innovative thinking inside structures like that requires a change in thinking for everyone within the organization. When we’re talking about creative minds, creative minds are more likely to break the rules that bind them. They do not run after practical ideas. Also companies that are led by pure logic will never take risks because risking for them is illogical.

Rania Hoteit

00:05:55

So they will find it extremely difficult or improbable to innovate. Why? Again, because innovators make connections where none really seem to be logical. Innovation will need a place that has less form, that has less structure and logic. Innovative thinking comes from openness and having freedom to play, to explore and to form new, exciting ideas. Therefore leaders should be able to focus on building decentralized, low in complexity and formality types of structures if they want to be able to promote an environment of innovation. The third major barrier is ‘Conformity to Core Structures and Fear of Change’. I mean those barriers one after the other, like the more I think about it, this one is huge but the other one is bigger. They’re all equally destructive to innovation. The pull of the company’s core systems and structures can influence new ideas in a way that they want to maintain a resemblance to the past approaches that they’ve had and to conform to what a company had done before, not what is necessarily needed for growth and success in the long term.

Rania Hoteit

00:07:19

This particularly makes innovation slow and extremely complicated. The new ways of doing things require breaking old ways and habits, which can be a serious challenge for conformists. And we’ve met people like that in our lives. People who have struggled and they like to conform, they have difficulty changing. They have difficulty growing. They have difficulty breaking old habits, and it’s the same for companies. Cause we’re talking about a micro society when we’re talking about a company that is formed of many individuals. So when you multiply the mindset of one conformist at a scale of a company, it will make it exponentially more difficult to be innovative. Companies need to instill new mindsets and attitudes and build safe spaces to protect innovators from the pull to conform, because it’s a huge tendency and leaders need to actively step in to break standard operating procedures when required. And to carry this out, they will have to be perpetual non-conformist, creative thinkers.

Rania Hoteit

00:08:39

It’s a very conscious way of living and of being, because the tendency is to conform and the tendency is to fall into habits, which makes it very difficult to grow and innovate. The fourth barrier is ‘Sense of Urgency and Unrealistic Expectations For Sooner Payoffs’. And I can’t emphasize how much this barrier impacts companies from the early startup stages. Innovation can be a long process. It requires a depth of thinking. When we really study innovation, those who do study innovation teams know that creative ideas that make a difference in the marketplace and eventually in the business itself can take time. It’s extremely difficult when leaders don’t understand that ideas are conceptual, they live in the mind. They need incubation time to develop, to adjust, to refine, to reconstruct over and over again before producing anything functional or concrete. And time is sometimes expensive. So when we combine those factors: money, time and power are associated closely.

Rania Hoteit

01:10:08

Leaders can overcome this barrier by taming their sense of urgency by developing a sufficient level of patience for the creative process and a willingness to spend the time it takes to innovate, and using their power; instead of suppressing innovation, using the power to allocate resources accordingly, including time people and money. Which leads me to talk about the fifth barrier and that is ‘Inadequate Funding and Allocation of resources’: money, time, and people. Any company that spends time pulling together a number of diverse creative individuals into a team for the purpose of innovation and not funded fully is simply making a false show of innovation. If the team is constrained by money, it will fail. And we have to be extremely realistic about that. To fund an innovative team, a company has to understand how a creative team behaves, how a creative mind processes, and to be able to stand behind it financially as well.

Rania Hoteit

01:11:31

Because as I mentioned, time is gonna be a factor and it will cost money in order to develop innovative products and services. For an organizational leader to request such funds from its board, and I speak from experience, they have to be able to stand up to questions by understanding and knowing the facts. Leaders being the force behind making changes, they need to have the strength of will to bring it about. And when it comes to a change in how money is spent, it takes so much per persuasion. So these factors are tied together and leaders need to develop so many skills that are fundamental to pushing forward innovation. The sixth and last barrier I would like to mention is ‘Fear of Failure and Risk Avoidance’, which is another common barrier that a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of organizations struggle with at a certain stage after the initial risk taking. As with life, businesses that do not risk because they fear to fail will not be as successful nor they will be able to survive in the future.

Rania Hoteit

01:13:00

That’s my opinion, and that’s been proven throughout history of business formations and growth as well. Yet, there are those leaders who cannot move past the fear and the risk of creating innovative thinking within a company. Cause courage is multi-layered right? So there’s the courage to be patient, to take the time. There’s the courage to spend the money. There’s the courage to ask for the money. There’s the courage to be understanding. There are so many levels to taking risks when you’re leading a business forward. So in those cases, those leaders who have the tendency to fall into the fear and the risk avoidance, they will protect themselves so much that they can’t function. Innovative thinkers concentrate on making connections between various points and ideas that might not be obviously linkable, but they do not fear reaching far because they don’t worry about being right.

Rania Hoteit

01:14:12

And this is the difference again between creative thinking and rigid thinking, they recognize that failure and destruction is often critical to the process of discovery and creation. Therefore it is crucial for companies and for leaders to allow for risk-taking and for experimentation and doing things differently and accepting that they might be wrong, that they might fail. But they can also open channels to new breakthroughs and allow the flow of new, innovative ideas that can empower a company to break out of the pack and lead the way. Innovation failure is the key to success and risk is the cost of true innovation. It is risk that brought about most of the best inventions we use today. So to wrap all this up, I know it was a lot of information. But all that said, being aware of these major barriers and taking the steps I mentioned to make innovation a part of the company’s strategic planning will be critical to overcome these barriers. Which also requires a wholistic approach to build a sustainable organization-wide competence in innovation to ensure serial success in the long run.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:15:35

It was a lot of information, but it ties into everything I’ve been kind of studying and learning about for the last, I don’t know, 2, 2, 3 decades, right? Cuz my dad, my dad was an industrial engineer, right. So he went to MIT and so did his, so did his father, after they moved to the states, when my grandfather was like 13, he moved there and put himself through MIT and then started a company like a manufacturing company. Right. So we have a lot in common actually in that respect. And I respect what you’ve done. You know, you, you, you move to America, you didn’t speak the language. You, you, you, you basically built a, built a number of different businesses and became really successful. Right. And I think, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a matter of like just determination isn’t it and determination and not being scared to act. Right.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:16:33

Because that was what I took away from what you just said, you know, is the fear can paralyze you to not taking action. Right. And that’s, you know, in the context of this series that we’re doing, the inspiration behind this series was actually from this chat with Prathik, and Prathik is a hacker, right? He’s a hacker in India. He, he’s in a wheelchair and he has a one handed keyboard. I probably told you this before, but he actually came along and he approached me and he would not leave me alone. He literally kept messaging me on LinkedIn for like just days on end. And he would not leave me alone. And without his persistence, I would never have built a relationship with him and actually launched this series.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:17:20

Right. And, but he was, he’s still afraid to act. Everybody is afraid to act. Right. But actually that fear of action is stopping you from what’s on the other side of that activity that will take you to the next level of success. Right. And you know, like I’ve got a friend right now from my Jujitsu class that I go to and he’s quite young. He’s like 31 or something. He’s creative. He does like coding and stuff like that. And he’s looking for some work, but he’s only been coding for kind of a year and a half. So for him, you know, he probably, I think he does Python and maybe another language or two. So what sort of advice would you have for someone like that who’s looking to further his career in, within the technology space, in coding and stuff?

Rania Hoteit

01:18:14

I mean, I think the first, most important thing is education, to really refine your skills at coding. If he wants to be a great coder and if he wants to be able to be accepted in companies that are building very effective teams and very talented teams, he wants to be able to level up in his own skills and his own individual line prior to wanting to be part of a larger team that’s creating something very complex. I think that with coding, like any other skill, you need to do a lot of practice and you need to be, it’s like being a musician, you need to use your brain, you need to use your hands and you have to do it as much as possible in order to get better and better at the language that you are coding with. So that would be my top advice.

Rania Hoteit

01:19:14

The second one is to really kind of have a very specific goal. What do I want to achieve by being a coder? Do I want to build a company? Do I have an idea for a business that I want to start? Do I have an idea for an app or service? Do I want to be part of a team or of the dream company that I have, and, and I wanted to go in and be part of that company and be able to show off my skills and be part of the innovation that’s being created within that organization. So I think those are the top two: your skills, get as good as you can at the coding languages that you are trying to learn and mastering that really well; and decide what you wanna do with that skill, how you really wanna deploy the skill and how you wanna monetize it and how you want to use it. Cause skills are gifts, but they’re not gifts in the sense that’s a given gift. It’s a gift that you give yourself by refining it and mastering it. So be very strategic about how you wanna use it, because you don’t wanna be spending all the time mastering the skill and not knowing how you’re gonna deploy it and how you’re gonna monetize from it and how you’re gonna make it impactful and useful for other people.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:20:41

Yeah, yeah. Very much so. And I mean, I think, you know, over, over here in Croatia, a lot of people find it hard to get their head around working on a global level and working remotely. And, I think for, you know, for me, I’ve worked remotely for years. Right. But, you know, I dunno how many years, long time. Right. And, but people really struggle with that. And I mean, I’ve got a friend who I just interviewed. I think his episode went live today actually. And you know, he runs remote teams. I mean, his office is completely empty. There are no people there. Right? So he just hires remotely, like a lot of people do now. And I think for certain people, they need to get rid of this thing in their head, this barrier that says, well, I can’t do it like that.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:21:23

And I need to innovate my own mind and kind of just open my mind up to the potential of where this could go. And it ties in beautifully with what you were saying about having a vision and having a vision for your business life. And actually a vision for your working life is, is not. Yes. It’s, yes. It’s different, but actually it’s the same, right? Because it’s still a vision. Like you’re still visioning what you actually want your life to look like and how you would like it to be, right. Just because your vision doesn’t involve building a massive company, not necessarily a bad thing, if you don’t wanna build a company. Right. Because some people just don’t wanna build a company themselves, you know, so

Rania Hoteit

02:22:10

Absolutely that’s why I mentioned that you master the skills, whatever they are. And in this case we talked about coding, but it could be anything. You master the skills and you really identify the gifts that you have, but it’s very important in parallel to that to have a vision for your life and how you wanna deploy and utilize the gifts and the skills that you are mastering. And it could be like you mentioned, it could be anything. It could be starting a business. It could be just really knowing how you want to evolve in your career using that skill by being part of another team or another company, or by being a freelancer and doing small projects here and there. There is no rule for how you want to live your life and how you see success. And I say that to my mentees all the time is that don’t buy into what’s being sold out there about success, because success is very subjective and it’s very personal.

Rania Hoteit

02:23:18

And if you start to really look at what’s out there and tie yourself and your life and start to create, you know, a vision board that’s kind of patched up with other people’s, you know, puzzle pieces, it’s not your life anymore. It’s not your vision anymore. It has to be yours. And you have to be very focused on what makes you fulfilled, what makes you satisfied, what makes you feel that you are contributing in your own life. And from there, everything else falls into place. But it has to be motivated intrinsically. It cannot be motivated by external factors and external symbols of success.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:24:06

That’s funny because it’s just what I was talking about in this interview earlier that I did on the 16th, actually, that was live. And, and it’s, we’re sort of talking about purpose. Aren’t we, we’re sort of talking about purpose. But the thing is with purpose is that it is intrinsically part of your life, but it can change and it isn’t sometimes, it’s not tangible to you, like, but then when you find out what it actually really means to you, you’ll find out that it really was there all along and that’s, and that’s what I find. That’s what hit me. When I found out what my purpose was, I was like, oh, that’s what my purpose is. Hmm. That’s been there for like decades and I’ve been doing it, but I didn’t really notice that I was doing it. And that’s, what’s so super weird, you know. It’s fascinating really when you, when you sort of look at it. But in terms of, you know, there are many approaches to innovation that can either fail or prove to be ineffective in the long term. I know you’ve talked a lot about innovation and how leaders can build their skills around this. So how can leaders build a competence in innovation to become successful serial innovators when leading companies into the future?

Rania Hoteit

02:25:34

First of all, many approaches to innovation fail or prove to be ineffective in the long term because they address the obvious. For example, if resources appear to be a problem, then companies’ typical solution is to appoint an innovation team to carry the innovation effort forward. If scarcity of ideas is an issue, then they hold more idea generation sessions. But it’s important for those who are leading companies and aspire to become successful serial innovators to recognize that most barriers are symptoms of deeper innovation problems that are not so obvious. That said, to become a successful serial innovator and to achieve innovation effectiveness in the long term, a systemic approach that addresses all underlying and interrelated causes of ineffectiveness across all four major areas of a company structure is needed. What are these four major areas of a company’s structure? Leadership and Organization, Processes and Tools, People and Skills, Culture and Values.

Rania Hoteit

02:26:51

Those are the four major areas of the company’s structure. So for the first one, Leadership and Organization, leaders must put effort to walk the talk and spend time acting on it, not just talking about it, that’s (A); (B) they must be able to communicate effectively regarding innovation, activities, successes, and failures. So communication is key, not just communication, having transparency and having an effective method of communicating everything that’s happening within the company. And a lot of leaders do struggle to do that; (C) is having to assess innovation performance and allocate resources needed to fund innovation efforts; and (E) the last one is setting objectives and measures to drive innovation. Those are the main key things that leaders can do at the level of leadership and organization. And in the second area, which is processes and tools: (a) they must develop new innovation and product development processes that are easy to understand and use to effectively turn out new growth initiatives for the company and, (b) leverage or deploy technologies and tools that are readily available to help innovate more efficiently.

Rania Hoteit

02:28:23

Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The third area, which is people and skills: (a) they must provide training in creativity, innovation, and problem solving techniques and methodologies; (b) they must be able to facilitate finding space and time for potential innovators to pursue promising opportunities and ideas; (c) effectively transfer knowledge, ideas, and skills across all departments and across sites and regions if you run multiple operations, of course; and (d) they must recognize and reward people appropriately for contributing to the company’s growth and success. The fourth area, which is culture and values: (a) they must encourage exploration, experimentation, and informed risk taking; (b) they must learn how to learn from failure and turn mistakes into accidental sources of knowledge and mines of unchartered discoveries and opportunities as I like to call them; (c) is make sure that the company’s strategy is clearly understood and its values are firmly believed by everyone in it.

Rania Hoteit

02:29:48

And again, this is a key that a lot of leaders do miss cause the effectiveness of communication at the leadership and organizational level is lacking; (d) is encourage all people within the organization to participate and innovation efforts and make sure again, to reward them for their contribution. So without having a systemic attack and all these four areas, innovation efforts are likely to fail or at best they could produce a one-time gain that won’t be repeated for the organization. So that’s what I think must be done in order to build a competence in innovation across the board.

Nathaniel Schooler

03:30:38

Makes a lot of sense. I mean, the culture of innovation is for me, like having a big organization and not utilizing the people that are actually doing the work to create the innovative ideas, it seems like lunacy to me, you know, and, but all loads of companies do this, right? Like loads of loads of governments, you know, all around the world. Right. But right now we’re in a really exciting place. Yeah. Like if you think about the technology that we’ve got access to now and how that’s changing the way that we work, it’s changing the way that we can become so much more productive. And we can basically have so much more time to spend with our families, go to the gym, you know, hang out with friends and eat and whatever we wanna do, right.

Nathaniel Schooler

03:31:26

Or study more and learn new things. And it’s, you know, there’s a theme throughout this series. We’ve sort of talked about basically just people that are lazy, that don’t wanna learn and grow and, and move forwards. And, you know, I mean, I’ve got another couple questions here. I’m not sure we’re gonna get time to, to go through those today. But you know, with that in mind, I’m gonna go to the last one. What are the best tips or advice you have for people in business? And also I in work who, who wanna get into work, I think that would be really helpful for, for people.

Rania Hoteit

03:32:09

Sure. I mean, I’m gonna skip the basic business tips that people can hear and listen to and have access to anywhere on the internet. So I’m not gonna talk about basic business tips. I’m gonna address more higher level issues that I think would be really important for people who want to get in business, or they want to accelerate the growth of their businesses. Those are key areas. First one is ‘Technology Leadership’. I personally believe, and I think we have seen that as well as things are evolving in the marketplace, that the new leaders of the future will be businesses who maintain a clear technology strategy and a sharp focus on accelerating their digital transformation. This is going to be key for people moving into the future. The recent rapid digital acceleration has placed technology at the basis of global leadership. And it’s become clear that there is no leadership without technology leadership. That said, the new leaders of the future, again, will be those businesses who maintain a clear technology strategy and a sharp focus on accelerating their digital transformations because, in this new era, empowerment, collaboration, and productivity are all intertwined.

Rania Hoteit

03:33:37

And the future of human capital also lies in empowering leaders to redesign work in ways that create new outcomes and values and channels for growth. And as you mentioned, we are on this platform, which is enabling us to have this interview at the moment. We’re in two different countries on two different time zones. And, and in the past, we wouldn’t have been able to do this without having major inconveniences or major cost associated with us having this meeting at the moment. So again, there has to be a vision to really understand how to ride the wave of digital transformation, and that’s gonna be key for new businesses. The second one is the human capital aspect and how to support the new era of work. Cause when we’re talking about businesses and organizations, we’re talking about collective of people that are joined together to execute on a vision and a mission that’s set by the leadership of this organization.

Rania Hoteit

03:34:55

Correct? So there has to be a vision on how we’re gonna support the new era of work in order to maximize the potential of the human capital. The future of work will be radically changed with the rapid developments in automation, artificial intelligence, globalization, and we also have shifting demographics. While some jobs will be lost, many others will be created and new skills will be required. Those are information that every new, every business, every existing business leader and every aspiring leader and every new entrepreneur, they need to understand these fundamentals. To be able to boost business agility and thrive amid future disruptions, organizations and companies will need to capitalize on their workers capabilities by supporting them to adapt, to re-skill and assume new roles that are changing with the rapid acceleration of the digitization and all types of technological advancements that are going on.

Rania Hoteit

03:36:08

We also have an opportunity to maximize human potential and build new strategies that align the future of work with social equity to ensure that underserved populations have access to opportunities, that people that are lifelong learners and the next generations of workers are also built into the new economy through access to the proper education and the re-skilling. So businesses have huge roles to fulfill. And it’s not only about ‘I have this business idea and I wanna execute on it’. No, you have a much bigger mission in this world than just building a business or capitalizing on an idea for monetization purposes. You have an opportunity to partake in how our societies are formed. I believe that mobilizing workers and mobilizing workers around common goals and infusing meaning into work will be imperative to creating a lasting value for the future workforce and for society at large.

Rania Hoteit

03:37:22

So when, you know, with the many technologies that are emerging, also we’re seeing that some of these advances are gonna be disruptive to the status quo and altering the way people work. So to support the new era of work, also businesses and business leaders need to understand that a partnership between humans and machines is gonna be critical for creating more equitable and productive workplaces. For example, AI can be leveraged to increase productivity, to reduce human biases in hiring processes, to optimize collaboration and so much more. We have immersive technologies like extended reality or XR. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, which can improve workforce productivity by empowering workers to interact and collaborate in real time. So there’s so much going on in the technology space, and there’s so much impact that technology is having on how humans work. Which also means that it’s gonna impact how businesses need to be created and managed and how infrastructures need to be built in order to maximize the potential of having a great business idea and having a talented team and having access to all these amazing technologies.

Rania Hoteit

03:38:49

So to conclude, modernizing infrastructures, deploying technologies, empowering workers are gonna be the most important steps to take to lay the groundwork for the digital future and also for the next wave of technology-led progress. Those are really the two major areas that I wanted to really get people to kind of wrap their minds around is understanding technology leadership, and understanding the human capital aspects and how to support the new era of work. If we have time, I would like to address one more thing, but I don’t know if we do have time for that. So

Nathaniel Schooler

03:39:31

I’m afraid not, not today, but I, I would love to, I’d love to interview you again in the next, in the next couple months, if you can, if you can make the time, that would be amazing. Because you know, I’ve been digging right into this topic. I’ve been digging into, you know, if you analyze people’s skills and then you analyze their qualifications, you ask them a few questions, you look at the market of where the jobs are going, right. It’s not actually rocket science to use some AI modules to recommend that they do this course, that course, that course, and that course based on their personality types and all of these different factors, right. Which will in essence, create the human capital of the future that actually benefits the world and also the people themselves, right.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:40:21

And this is what I’ve been talking to Monique Morrow, who I’m gonna interview, hopefully in September, October around this again. And we talked about this like a few years ago, and everything you said just brought me back to that moment when we had this deep conversation around this whole subject. And I agree completely with you. That’s why I’ve just been nodding away really to be, to be fair, because it’s just lovely to kind of hear, hear it from you to be honest and confirm that I’m not like losing it or anything.

Rania Hoteit

04:40:55

No you’re not.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:41:00

Well, thank you.

Rania Hoteit

04:41:01

You’ll be accused of losing it from the people that are not, haven’t caught up yet with the reality of where we are and where we are headed.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:41:11

Yeah, of course, but you know, that’s, that’s, it’s just the way that it is, right. They’re gonna be, there are Luddites everywhere. We, everywhere we go, but Rania, you’ve been, you’ve been absolute joy, and I really appreciate you. If anyone wants to look at Rania’s website, it’s raniahoteit.com, and I will be putting some links in the show notes for everybody. So thank you.

Rania Hoteit

04:41:35

Thank you so much for having me.

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