The first three industrial revolutions occurred as a result of mechanization, information technology and electricity. The rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings increased flexibility in production, increased speed, a new dimension of mass production, advanced productivity levels, superior quality results, and new emerging business models. Moreover, a whole different new perspective of leadership.
 
Leadership in Industry 4.0 has a clearly established direction, that is building cyber–physical systems functioning in a dynamic network of connections, and it is centered around a common object of interaction that is subject to constant reconfiguration depending on changing goals and conditions.
 
One should emphasise that the growth of the digital transformation requires some strongly built leadership skills such as:

• making the right decisions even in the absence of complete information
• gaining the trust of the team by taking responsibility for the results achieved
• interpersonal skills, cooperation, and information sharing
• critical thinking and conceptual skills

Leadership in such a continuously dynamic sector is about inspiring and motivating teams, but even more about encouraging people to envision the vision of the company and to contribute to its realisation. Leaders essentially must take full advantage of the capabilities and skills of the employees to thrive in Industry 4.0.
 
In cyberspace, the implementation of leadership is facilitated by skills. Personal competences (soft skills), in particular, have paramount importance, and this is why many organisations are increasingly focused on developing their teams by attracting soft-skilled individuals.
 
In conclusion, there is a major need for developing a “leadership 4.0” culture in organizations, as digital technologies have an influence not only on the area of information technology but also on how businesses are managed, and which leadership styles are applied. “Leadership 4.0” stands for leadership in the age of Industry 4.0, and so these “leaders 4.0” could therefore be also called digital leaders.

What about your thoughts on “leadership 4.0”?
Are leaders prepared to become digital leaders and tackle their teams differently?


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Benefits of Industry 4.0 are numerous, some of them still underestimated, although the phenomena is rapidly reaching all the imaginable sectors and include increased efficiency, safety, precision and even decreased costs.

As the fusion of physical elements and digital technologies, Industry 4.0 is defined by and can be divided into five stages, with the average manufacturer being only at stage one, two or three at the most.

This primary step is reached when a business is able to monitor certain aspects of its operations remotely and has a robust internal process for manually updating all of the necessary data for the parameters to be accessed remotely.

Installed sensors and/or IoT devices that gather data for different aspects of the manufacturing, full automated control of the data, but no full advantage of the data continuously collected. Enterprises can use the data they are processing to make profitable predictions, decisions and corrections based on AI.

Manufacturers reach stage three when they have been accumulating real-time sensor and IoT device data for at least one full year and have therefore collected enough data to make building business rules around anomaly detection feasible and effective.

​A manufacturer has reached stage four when it has gathered sufficient data, invested in structuring it, met the requirements to build accurate predictive models to raise alerts in case of such. This stage is when a company has fully incorporated all of the AI and automation technology.

Smart factory stage is achieved by a business that has multiple AI-driven predictive and forecasting systems in place across their production plants, and the systems have learned and evolved to a point where certain parameters can be changed automatically without human intervention.

What about your company and the stages you are aiming at?
​Tell us in the comment sections below.