ANDREW MCAFEE

Co-Founder and Co-Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy



Andrew McAfee is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how computer technologies are changing business, the economy, and society.

His 2014 book on these topics, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson, has won several prestigious awards and has been both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal top ten bestseller. He is also the author of the 2009 book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. Andrew’s next book, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing the Digital Revolution, scheduled for publication this spring, will offer an executive’s guide to succeeding during this turbulent era when technologies are hurtling forward at such a startling pace.

Andrew has been named to both the Thinkers 50 list of the world’s top management thinkers and to the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics. He writes popular blogs, academic papers, and articles for publications including Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times. He’s talked about his work on CNN and 60 Minutes, at the World Economic Forum, TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival, with Tom Friedman, Charlie Rose, and Fareed Zakaria, and in front of innumerable global and domestic audiences. Andrew was educated at Harvard and MIT and lives in Cambridge.

Prior to joining MIT Sloan, McAfee was a professor at Harvard Business School. He has also served as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. McAfee received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT. He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences and has taught in executive education programs around the world.

  • Analytics

  • Business Intelligence

  • Business Strategy

  • Enterprise 2.0

  • Managing Change

  • Social Networking

  • Strategy

  • Web 2.0

Machine, Platform, Crowd: A Leader’s Guide to Success in a Rapidly Changing Economy

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; strangers on the Internet are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs.

To master this digital-powered shift we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. In all three cases, the balance now favors the second element of the pair, with massive implications for how we run our companies and live our lives.

This talk delivers both a penetrating analysis of a new world and a toolkit for thriving in it. It is designed for startups and established businesses, or anyone interested in what the future holds.

The Second Machine Age

We are living in a time of brilliant technologies: cars that drive themselves; Jeopardy!-champion supercomputers; cheap, flexible, and useful robots; algorithms that make better decisions that humans; and countless others. They are bringing us into a second machine age, the greatest era of transformation since the Industrial Revolution.

In his talk, Dr. McAfee, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Second Machine Age, will discuss both the great promise and thorny challenges — for organizations, leaders, and workers alike — of the world we’re creating as we create and deploy digital technologies that are the stuff of science fiction.

Business in the Second Machine Age

The amazing new innovations we’ve seen in the past few years — robots, drones, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, the Blockchain, and so on — are not the crowning achievements of the second machine acts; they’re the warmup acts. Over the next 10 years tech progress will bring more business change and disruption than we’ve seen in the past 50.

How can business survive and thrive in the turbulent years to come? How do their leaders need to think differently about their markets, strategies, and management philosophies? In this talk, Andy McAfee will tackle these issues, and give an executive’s guide to succeeding in the second machine age.