How Exponential Growth Changes Everything & What You Can Do About It

The Best Carburetor Repairman In Town
John was busy under the hood of the shiny Chevy. He was too busy to pay attention. He was the best carburetor mechanic in San Jose. He had work lined up for days, the future looked bright. As he was busy with his head stuck deep in the machine something interesting happened outside the machine: someone thought about a way to build cars without this pesky piece of equipment (as a matter of fact most of the 20 year old and younger generation may not have a clue what a carburetor was). Within a wink John became a historical footnote because he was too busy being busy with his head deep inside the machine.

Get Your Head Out Of The Machine
The next time you have a meeting with your management team pay close attention to their thinking process. Ask them wide ranging questions about technology developments, societal trends, how they gauge the markets and you may realize that you are faced by a room of carburetor repairmen. Highly focused artisans who have mastered their specific trade but are hopelessly disconnected to the real changes that are sweeping through all aspects of our existence.

It is time to take your team’s head out of the machine, their present knowledge and abilities may be obsolete within the next half decade, and here is why:

The Exponential Information & Computation Tsunami
The future will be dictated not by how much you know, but by how fast you can manage information. This flies in the very face of our whole educational fiber, after all we still like to grade stuff kids learn by heart. I still remember the day the first electronic calculators came on the market and how my engineer father fought the very preposterous idea of purchasing these machines for us. His fear was that this newfangled toy would dumb us down and, worst of all, what if there was nuclear war and electricity seized to exist… who would do the calculating then?

The fact is that information and it’s delivery are growing at an exponential rate:

• Over 3000 new books are published daily
• 1 week of today’s New York Times contains more information than was gathered in the lifetime of a human existence in the 18th century
• 1.5 exabytes (1.5 * 10 exp 18) of unique new information will be generated this year
• This is more than in the previous 5000 years
• New technological information doubles every 2 year currently
• By 2010 there will be a doubling of technological information every 72 hours
• NEC & Alcatel are currently testing 3rd generation fiber optics, these push 10 trillion bits/second, equivalent to 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous phone conversations/second

What Does It All Mean?
It means in the simplest terms that whatever knowledge you own at this very moment is most likely obsolete in real-time terms. It means that you have to get your head out of the machine and become a broad based reader, researcher and Information Glutton, an Information Synthesizer who is adept at reading trends and re-mix this information into cutting edge solutions.

The artisans, individuals who are only able to perform a small range of professional services (accounting, client servicing, actuary services for example) will become second-class citizens, much like worker ants, who deliver a dependable yet duplicable service for an ever lower income.

Change Is The Name Of The Game

• The US Department Of Labor estimates that the average new human will hold between 10-14 jobs… by the age of 38!
• Former US Secretary of Education Richard Riley projected that the top 10 jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004
• This mean we are preparing students for jobs that don’t exist using technologies that have not yet been invented. Students starting a 4 year tech degree will find that ½ of all they learned in year 1 will be outdated in their 3rd year of study.

The Future Belongs To The Synthesizer & The Orchestra Conductor
This onslaught of information goes beyond the capacity of an individual to comprehend or control. The old strategy of becoming a highly knowledgeable specialist in a narrow field is self -defeating, as you focus on becoming the best in a given field someone else is busy creating a new, disruptive and better solution.

To stay relevant it is imperative to step back, observe trends, do a massive amount of wide ranging reading and you-tubing. As mentioned above: Information Gluttons & Synthesizers will be the most valuable members of future organizations.

Start thinking like an Orchestra Conductor: stop focusing on just mastering one instrument, focus on getting different instruments (trends) to make sense together and re-mix them into a new symphony (strategy).