I do research and write about how technological progress changes the business world, and the world.
My most recent book is The Geek Way (2023), which argues that a bunch of computer geeks concentrated in Northern California have iterated and experimented their way into a better set of practices, philosophies, and norms for running a successful business — a better doctrine of business competition, if you like.
In 2019 I published More from Less. It describes how digital technologies have at last enabled us to tread more lightly on our planet even as populations and economies continue to grow, and to escape the trade-off between human prosperity and planetary health that plagued us throughout the industrial era.
Way back in 2009 I wrote Enterprise 2.0, which argued that the Web 2.0 technologies spreading across the Internet were also going to be adopted within companies.
In the 2010s Erik Brynjolfsson and I wrote the “Machine Trilogy,” which started in 2011 with Race Against the Machine, continued with The Second Machine Age (2014), and finished with Machine | Platform | Crowd (2017). Across the triptych we made the case that we were entering a period of technological progress as profound and consequential as the Industrial Revolution. I stand by that contention.
My professional home is the MIT Sloan School of Management, where I co-founded the Initiative on the Digital Economy. I’ve also been a professor at Harvard Business School, a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute and the inaugural visiting fellow in the Technology and Society Organization at Google.
With Erik, Daniel Rock, and James Milin I cofounded Workhelix, which lets enterprises know and grow the ROI of their AI. We apply data science, machine learning, and econometrics to reveal how an organization’s AI transformation is going, and how to accelerate it.
I speak frequently to leadership teams and at conferences about where today’s science-fiction technologies are taking us and how to get the most out of them. If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, please get in touch.