Among the viewers of Kartik Sakthivel’s 2019 TEDxPortsmouth talk, perhaps the most important to him personally, were in Dover, NH that day. His two children.
“They now know that if they have an idea that they feel strongly about,” he says, “they absolutely have a forum and a responsibility to express it. They could change the world – even if they change one person, it can be a butterfly effect, compounding to change the world.”
Sakthivel’s 2019 talk (“The Technology Age – Thriving Through Disruption”) focused on the profusion of technology, its never-ending and ever-quickening development, and the need to adopt a “learning mindset” to thrive in this environment, if not just to keep pace.
It turned out to be a timely theme – within six months of Sakthivel’s talk, the Covid pandemic upended everything we knew, casting away all our comforting customs and conventions. Sakthivel reminds us, however, “not to waste a crisis,” but to use it as an opportunity to learn and progress. As examples, he runs through a litany of companies in wide ranging industries – from Blockbuster video to Kodak to Nokia – that confronted technological change in their industries, stood their ground, and watched the world move on without them.
Today, Sakthivel points to the technological changes brought to our everyday experiences that were boosted by the pandemic. From our online consumer experience, with expectations for immediate availability and delivery, to telehealth healthcare – none existed to the degree they do now. Include the ongoing development of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the world of the 2020’s is looking quite different than the previous decade.
If it’s not a “resistance-is-futile moment,” it is at least time to drop any hesitancy in adapting to the technological environment of a digital world. Sakthivel suggests simply finding a balance, that it doesn’t have to be a choice between living with our smartphones as bodily appendages or living in some off-grid, utopian wilderness.
Sakthivel’s own work changed course with the pandemic, and he put into practice what he preaches. While he has continued in his role as VP & CIO of LIMRA/LOMA, the longtime Dover resident has added a few major accomplishments to his CV during these pandemic years.
Two years after his talk, Sakthivel published his first book, “Find Your Red Cape,” on the art of leadership. Then, by the time we caught up with him again, he was preparing to mount the defense of his PhD dissertation on best practices for the use of AI in the life insurance industry.
Later this year, Sakthivel’s second book will arrive, extending his TEDxPortsmouth theme in which he urged the Portsmouth audience to “Learn, Unlearn, Relearn.”
“It’s a very different world and for me, I know I need to keep myself open to it because that’s what I’ve been preaching,” he says. “Anytime I find myself encountering personal resistance, I know that’s an opportunity for me to double down and change my own perspective or to know more about it.”
Following that prescription can be daunting, especially for anyone who is not a digital native. Technological changes have come rapidly in recent years and Sakthivel would be the first to point that out, as he compares the present digital world to the one that housed his old email address at NH College, gave us those loud, dial-up modems, and introduced us to the (choose one: benefit/curse) of P@$$w0rdz!. A time when there were no smartphones and MySpace was the social media juggernaut that Facebook was trying to unseat in the digital world. But, according to Sakthivel, age and experience have little to do with adapting to new technology in a changing world. Only know that it is necessary to change. “Whether you’re twenty-five or fifty-five,” he says, “I think it is absolutely vital for us to embrace digitization, to embrace technology.”
If these rapid developments have taught us one thing, it is, as Sakthivel asserts, that “the future is yesterday.” What the future has in store is not truly known. So while the digital world may alter how we work and how we live, from automating job tasks to reconfiguring learning platforms to augmenting our very reality, our response to technology is still within our control. And Sakthivel reminds us, being human is something that technology can never replace.