MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Train Your People to Think in Code

Taking a code-centered approach to work will benefit organizations in three ways.

Today, most companies equate doing analysis with writing formulas in spreadsheets. But the business landscape has shifted seismically since the invention of the spreadsheet. Today, organizations must think in terms of millions of individual customers, not just a handful of segments, and solve problems with reusable solutions to avoid reengineering the process from the ground up. And they want to benefit from the latest advances in machine learning and AI, not simply throw regressions at whatever analytical problem they face. In short, companies need to retrain for writing code, not formulas, as the future of work will entail thinking not just analytically but also algorithmically.

This change of perspective is significant. Most companies might see code as something confined to obscure corners of the IT department or as the exclusive province of a select group of data scientists. But organizations that manage to make code the natural language for diffusing analysis across their business can often grow and innovate faster than their peers.