“Who is the living food for the machines…- ? Who lubricates the machine joints with their own blood - ? Who feeds the machines with their own flesh - ? Let the machines starve, you fools - ! Let them die - ! Kill them - the machines - !” (Metropolis, 1927)

The climactic resolution of that cinematic tour de force didn’t resolve the dichotomy of worker vs. thinker paradigm. It proposed a mediation or empathetic détente between the contrasted social classes. The zeitgeist was understandable at that moment in history. But it should be less so now, while a “worker vs. thinker” perspective is offensive on its face.
Yet vestiges of the class perspective remain, instead of the person perspective. An executive who views the firm as such has forgotten that the company’s future depends on individuals, each of whom must innovate and grow, lest the firm wither and die.

Metropolis machines were sustained by bodies whose only value was rote care and feeding of the infrastructure and technology. The irony we recognize today (or we had better) is that care and feeding machines, adaptation of automation to processes, and the technological miracle that is quality of life, stem from a true collaboration among all management, every professional, and machine.
From exotica-driving execs to cart-pushing caterers.
Professionals by definition.
Supporters of the firm’s raison d’etre.

Machines won’t execute more nobly unless those who build and nurture them understand the day-in-the-life of our planet’s fellow travelers. The builders and nurturers are omnipresent. Their behaviors are manifest in humanity’s cycles. They are you. And everyone else.

Observational and experiential moments are culminated and encapsulated by data strings of history. Sadly, coffee-table books chronicle civilization’s walkways as who-killed-whom timelines, tales of good and evil represented in glorified narcissists or, conversely, execrated devils. And the beat goes on.

The true goodness in our mornings is comprised of pursuits, from riveting to reading, abilities of the knowledge professionals, masters of adaptation, and pillars of innovation. Knowledge professionals are mistakenly equated to so-called thought leaders, Rodin’s offspring, seated in technology spaces and boardrooms. Knowledge professionals are, rather, every individual in the firm.

The lifeblood of the company, man and machine, is the contribution of each, the customers’ benefactor. The teams are the forces of dynamic adaptation, adjusting to latest tools, processes, trends. It is incumbent on enterprise management to cultivate the mindset of flexible adaptation and knowledge, just as it is incumbent on all professionals to ensure their own value in the changing world of machines. And respect the participation of infinitely different personas.

We already know all this, I hear repeatedly.

Then why don’t we behave accordingly?

In an engagement a decade ago, I recall a divisional executive who was commenting on a senior manager (not present at the time). Well, he wasn’t commenting, but instead criticizing openly to others in the room. The executive characterized the manager as a “sycophant.” Startled by this condescension, I thought long and hard about it. I had watched that senior manager regularly, learned from him, coached him. He always struck me as open, transparent and hardworking. The manager was not a sycophant but simply polite to every human being in the building, extraordinarily respectful to the custodial staff, the cafeteria staff, every supervisor, executive and professional alike. He was more than the quintessential “nice guy”; he was openly decent and considerate.

He never shied away from challenging his supervisors; I saw him go head-to-head in a nearly heated exchange, which was also one of the most compelling and profound debates on strategy I had ever witnessed. So why would that executive characterize him as a sycophant?
I then considered the executive who bad-mouthed him -- a surly, sarcastic and arrogant soul. The final adjective gave me the insight. The executive just assumed that the manager was nice to him only because the executive was one of the “bosses.” It never occurred to the executive that the manager’s nature was optimistic and polite because that is who he was. The sincere kindness in every exchange was not just toward executives, but to everyone in the building.

Every professional, which means every single employee, partner, contractor, laborer works with the enterprise and other employees. They do not work for them.

That executive represented everything that is wrong with an organizational hierarchy. He never understood that each role in the connecting tissue was less about “boss and subordinate” and more about accountability and responsibility:

The manager mobilized an engineering team.

The executive reconciled priorities against external business factors.

The manager did a job.

The executive forgot his.
He, himself, was also another employee working with the firm, whose responsibility was to optimize performance for its customers. He instead paraded the power imbalance and behaved as reactionary decision maker, not a deliberate strategist.

Each function reporting along the chain would crush the overall success of the division if its teams were not effective, not seeing their own hands in the firm’s reach. But the executive had no empathy, no ability to comprehend other personalities, differentiate among contributions. He only sustained his outlook via his brusque ego, seeing kindness and courteousness as weakness.

. . .

Quality of life is rising. With distressing concern.

Empowerment of individuals is growing thanks to machines, our robot allies. Those robot partners help us deliver the innovation, in mass production, speed of analysis and ironically in risk mitigation. Disruptive innovation demands knowledge professionals who are advancing their own careers in line with the advancing capabilities of the firm and growing automation. These knowledge professionals are mythology’s Argus, the giant guardian of a hundred eyes, now provoking mutual discovery and analysis in every action across ecosystem.

Jobs are not static; they are transient and ever changing. The noun is also a contentious concept. It’s unsettling to accept that nobody owns a job. Jobs are human executables during a day-in-the-life. They are not owned any more than one owns a career or task, a relationship, a morning jog, a written keystroke. (Now if you want to argue that machines are slaves, I’d defer the philosophical challenge to when robots become sentient and emotionally self-aware.)

We travel through our individual timelines by trading for mutual benefit. The acceleration of contributions is correlated with diminishment of marginal cost. And the institutional dilemmas are amoral.

The near-term outcome: human pain of displacement.

Arguing against this changing tide is unavailing. But arguing about ways to mitigate human impact is not. Displacement cannot be ameliorated without innovating toward new human action, new pursuits, and portals of change.

When managers and team contributors both recognize that they are mutually dependent, and are responding to change as well as driving change, they are both enabling an innovative company and future. And enhancing mutual respect. It’s a call to action.

Forward-looking HR plays the vital role here. Treat displacement as a strategic challenge, partnering with leaders on innovation opportunities. Eschew transactional offboarding checklists. Embrace the intersection of corporate strategy with workforce dynamics and needs. View the operating model as roadmap, with deep thinking adjustments on the horizon. Leverage the human factors that are seated right in front of you.

As we face the “great change,” both manager and individual contributors are accountable for adapting the robots around us, building better robots, adapting to seas of enterprise metamorphosis, and realizing new ways of adding value beyond rote activity. Noblest of firms see not busy work to sustain, but as engagement and discovery of new avenues of worth, inside human skin.

Executives are accountable to recognize, to notice, every professional in the company. They are the lifeblood of our machines who are the lifeblood of convenience. The conceptualizers, imaginers, and futurists are also accountable for whistleblowing: errant machine behavior, and opportunities to counter displacement.

Fritz Lang’s pioneering film, extraordinarily produced a century ago, was prescience. We recognize again, we have been here before, as the robot ‘Maria’ reminded us:
“There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.”

All of us are Argus now, watchful innovators, great empathizers.

An executive without empathy and an individual contributor without empathy are dysfunctions on the horizon, like malware in an unsuspecting machine, hallucinations accepted by rote acceptors, failing to see their own significant accountability.

The professional, the executive, and the enterprise have something else in common. At the heart, if none of them innovate, none of them will survive.

In the Louvre Museum resides one of the most famous portraits in civilization. The Mona Lisa is visited by nearly nine million tourists, art aficionados, historians, teachers, every year. Among those millions are many insurance professionals, who can find parallels to their own careers among the museum’s hallways.

I recall trying to see the portrait during a springtime visit, twenty years ago. Such a disappointment.
There must have been three hundred or more individuals pressing against each other, to catch a glimpse of that icon of western civilization. It also seemed an icon to my eyes – a computer icon! It was over 50 feet away, small and distant, blurred by the ebbing throng, with security monitors and guards stationed in every corner. I wasn’t inclined to inch ahead among that mob, no disrespect to da Vinci.
I moved to the next wing, wondering when there was a slow day.

The valuation of the Mona Lisa is approaching $1 billion today, benchmarked against estimates from 1962, when it was transported to Washington and New York for exhibition.
More accurately, it was priceless; thus, it was not insured.
With premiums far exceeding the cost of physical security, the residual risk was acceptable, based on probabilistic calculations – the sustenance of actuarial analysis.

In that same Parisian landmark lies another piece of art, honoring another man, who sits at the foundation of insurance’s quantitative discipline.

A sculpture attributed to Augustin Pajou shows a mathematician contemplating the cycloid. Pajou’s subject was Blaise Pascal.

Chronicled in letters and correspondence – rather, collaboration(!) -- with Pierre de Fermat, nearly 400 years ago, Pascal laid the groundwork and inspiration for much of the statistical science that impacts an insurance carrier’s combined ratio.
Pausing before the cycloid, we are reminded of Pascal’s contribution to recursive logic, forerunner to the foundational constructs of artificial intelligence: hazard identification, impact assessment, control development and selection, execution, evaluation…
where it shall begin again.

Your partnerships in Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) will make or break your AI investments.
The enterprise perspective is not a catch-all canvas with splotches of risk management in isolated departments – Manufacturing, IT, Security, Legal, Sales…. Enterprise risk programs distinguish among departmental accountabilities, yet still string the disparate efforts into one holistic lens. Your enterprise business processes are threads of interdependency. Are your AI analyses spending as much time deconstructing the processes as they are in building company PowerPoints? Oftentimes, the business process hierarchy is absent, or immature -- not formalized nor socialized in the firm. I wish I could say that is rare, but it is typically a cultural omission.

The firm’s leadership can mitigate this particular risk by lending weight to the foundational expectation – formalized business processes that are embraced by every leader in the organization. The wheel is at a dead stop in ERM establishment if process hierarchy is not validated. It is the artwork that all leadership eyes should recognize.

Show it.
Over and over.
Then you can chip away at the layers.

I can’t tell you the times I’ve heard in various firms, “We started a business process effort but I’m not sure what happened to it.”
So then, just do it.
Think of the cycloid as our iteration reminder -- continuous improvement.
Start at the highest levels and then iterate in broad brushes, capturing the hierarchy of business processes, then departmental processes, and then assignment of risks within each.
AI is great at patterns and structural conceptualization. But far less so is its ability to assign accountability and determine what truly matters.
Like Pascal’s immortalized geometric tablet, risk management continuous improvement begins with a point in time.

Enterprise risk sits atop several key domains that contribute or diminish the firm’s confidence. For example, in one engagement, we settled upon the four top-most risk clusters: financial, supplier, operational, and reputational. Depending upon the organizational architecture, your workflows, business processes, and exposures, your enterprise risk hierarchy will be customized to your value proposition as a firm. Remember that your taxonomy is your taxonomy.

Your enterprise risk platform connects the enterprise value chain to departmental processes and then to the control environment. Stay within a paradigm. If you are a department manager, ensure your departmental risk metric is aligned to the metric ERM uses. I’ve seen ERMs have an entirely different methodology for scoring risk than an interrelated department -- untold headaches and wasted cycles.

This should be flagged in your internal audits. Those audits are often considered operational headaches, ostensible regulatory requirements that slow us down.
This is also a mistake.
Audit management pays dividends not only in mitigation of penalty risks, not only in reduction of errors in your control environment, but throughout the ecosystem.

If you built your control environment according to the firm architecture, which every leader should know as well as their favorite streaming channel, then you can create optimized audit readiness.
The day of an audit is not the day to scramble for a process owner, or search for testing documents, or signatory evidence.

Further, we don’t implement risk management or quality management because of regulatory expectations. We do it because it’s the right thing to do. With the pace of evolving AI, audits are safety necessities.

If you are running ERM meetings, and the leaders throughout the organization are dreading them, then they do not understand their fiduciary responsibility. Each ERM meeting should be a recognizable progression of improvement.

Perhaps your firm’s valuation may well exceed the Mona Lisa’s.
Or maybe not.
Like that priceless portrait, insuring against every hazard is not always feasible.
Like the cycloid, ERM is a recursive effort, institutionalizing predictability and minimizing exposures.
Like Pascal and Fermat, collaboration is comprised of challenges and corrections.

When you are next inside a museum of art, consider the monumental effort in assessing exposure. Traversing the expanse of the galleries, think of the iterative cycle of identification-through-valuation -- recursive and collaborative.
Think of the Renaissance souls whose mathematical collaboration eventually guided an industry.

The risk management commitment of every departmental leader is an expectation. It is another discipline accelerated by AI, which is incomplete without a human sculptor’s shaping, guiding, auditing hands.

Through your own eyes, respect your unique contribution to the enterprise, your unique contribution to the ecosystem, your unique contribution to humanity.

Being mortal means your own time is priceless.