The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible

The emergence of today’s machine age is a once-in-a-decade breaking point that will transform business competition at least as dramatically as the quality revolution of the 1980s or the dawn of the internet age of the 1990s.

The Mathematical Corporation, by Booz Allen Hamilton machine intelligence experts Joshua Sullivan and Angela Zutavern, is the first book to show business leaders how to compete in this new era: by combining the mathematical smarts of machines with the intellect of visionary leaders.

While smart machines are a primary weapon for organizations—and what they can do will continue to amaze us—the drivers of breakthroughs will be leaders who master this new competitive zeitgeist. Only they, in league with machines, can ask crucial questions to capitalize on business opportunities; create novel strategies from patterns newly discovered in oceans of data; and engineer standout performance.

Exploring how to create new capabilities in partnership with machines, The Mathematical Corporation reveals how leaders can score strategic triumphs and fulfill missions that once seemed out-of-reach or even impossible to attain. It illustrates this with extraordinary examples that include:

• An entrepreneur upending preventive healthcare by getting people to volunteer real-time data on their sense of health and well-being
• An oceanographer using machine intelligence to adapt fisheries management to climate change
• A drug maker boosting vaccine yields with algorithm-driven manufacturing optimization
• A hotel chain rewarding individual customers with custom-designed hotel weekend deals
• A retail-analytics startup revolutionizing shopping through millions of customer smartphones

Merck, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Bloomberg LP, the U.S. Census Bureau, the FAA, the U.S. Army, Polaris, and Washington’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide are among the organizations featured in the book that are in the process of becoming mathematical corporations.

The Mathematical Corporation shows leaders in every field how to break free from outdated perspectives; develop the thinking skills needed to work in partnership with machines; muscle up their organizations with the requisite technology; and devise strategies for making the “impossible” possible. The winners will be the ones who have prepared for this revolution.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. Josh Sullivan is senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and one of the world’s leading experts in data science and machine intelligence. Angela Zutavern is vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and pioneered the application of machine intelligence to leadership and strategy. Together, they’re radically transforming how Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits and major government agencies perform by helping leaders shatter long-held constraints and reveal hidden truths in their organizations.