It’s one of life’s universal lessons: Look both ways before crossing the street. Parents have been impressing its importance on every generation since Henry Ford tinkered with the internal combustion engine. However, many of us forgot that good advice, or assumed it didn’t apply, when crossing from one decade of business into the next.
From the 1970s into the 80s, 90s and 2000s, the prevailing assumption was that the future would be relatively similar to the past, and that major changes only took place over long stretches of time, which provided plenty of leeway to adjust.
We stepped off the curb, looking straight ahead – and wham! Individuals and organizations were blindsided by massive changes. It happened to big companies like IBM, Motorola, Research In Motion, Sears and countless others.
4 Big Brands Who Were Blindsided
- IBM. The original computer giant was late to act on the Hard Trends shaping the future of computing and missed the huge need for personal computers, entering the market late. Then in 2005, IBM sold its personal computer portfolio of products, including the popular ThinkPad brand, to Lenovo, which is now the world’s largest personal computing vendor. IBM was also late to embrace the Hard Trends of the increasing use of mobility and the cloud.
- Motorola. Similarly, the historic telecommunications company failed to anticipate exponential changes of the early 21st century. Though it had many telecom firsts – first car radio, first handheld mobile phones in the early 1970s, and the first smartphone using the Google Android OS. Unfortunately, the Motorola Mobility branch relied on being Agile, reacting after a disruption occurs, while leading companies were Anticipatory, using Hard Trends to see the future first and jump ahead and stay there.
- Research In Motion. The company’s BlackBerry was the undisputed leader in business mobility with a highly usable mini keyboard and tight integration of mobile email and calendar functionality. When Apple released the first iPhone, Research In Motion’s leadership failed to see the new future Apple had enabled and focused instead on making improvements instead of embracing the Hard Trends that were shaping the future of mobility and taking its loyal user base into the smartphone future.
- Sears. Widely considered the first “everything” store, Sears had a winning business strategy: a notoriously large selection of goods in a catalog that was mailed to just about everyone, and products that were ordered were delivered right to the customer’s home. Like many big brands blindsided by game-changing Hard Trends followed by disruptive innovation, Sears didn’t see how serious competition had become – for both brick and mortars like Walmart and online-only retailer Amazon. The company’s past success and organizational ego limited its view of the future.
Based on these and other painful experiences, the prevailing assumption was dramatically adjusted: Change is speeding up – get used to it. But then with each passing decade, crossing the street of change became an exercise in advanced risk analysis. Dodging oncoming traffic was the name of the game.
Seeing Change Is Only Part of the Solution
Spotting technology-driven change provides only part of the solution, however. Literally thousands of important high-tech breakthroughs are zooming at us from left and right. Not only do we need to carefully look both ways, it is essential to actually see and understand the ramifications of what’s coming.
Hopping out of the way in a panic or jumping on board the next new thing isn’t the answer, nor is taking a wait-and-see attitude. By reinventing how we look at technology-driven change, it is possible to reinvent the way we think about change. Once that happens, the reinvention of how we act in response to change takes place.
Look. Think. Act. These distinct steps are the key to both finding and profiting from the many new opportunities that are headed our way.
Technology-driven change has been a ferocious problem for all of us because it comes from so many sources and directions at once. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded nearly 335,000 patents in 2003 and 2004. By 2015, the number had increased to 629,000 (uspto.gov, Statistics Chart, retrieved May 2018).
Those numbers are both impressive and depressing, especially for those who thought the pace of technology-driven change would let up by now.
Taking Acceleration from Infinity Down to Three
Soon, there will be a million new things out there waiting to happen. Is it humanly possible to keep up? You don’t need to. In this article, I will slash the number by 999,997. If you’re doing the math, you’ll see I have reduced the tech-driven change onslaught down to three.
This math is admittedly fuzzy because it is impossible to precisely calculate how many significant high-tech developments are emerging. The key point, however, remains: The catalyst for transforming our businesses and futures is generated primarily by only three technological forces.
Three Digital Accelerators
Three of the most powerful digital trend accelerators – computing power, digital storage and bandwidth – have reached an intense new phase and are already turning business models upside down as they spawn fresh generations of procedures, tools, products and services.
By focusing on the Three Digital Accelerators instead of only focusing on the dozens of new technologies covered by the press each month, we can get a more accurate sense of where technology-driven change is coming from and where it is likely to lead.
The terms “computing power,” “digital storage” and “bandwidth” are not new, but it is imperative to realize that their newfound power will continue to have a major impact on the future.
We are all just now entering a new technology-driven change curve that will create more personal and organizational change than you have seen since 2010. Unlike the past 25 years, this change curve is much steeper and will cause far more disruption and opportunity.
Let’s take the three accelerators one at a time.
Computing Power
“Moore’s Law” states that computer processing power doubles every 18 months. It has been that way since the mid-1970s (when the rate slowed somewhat) and, thanks to constant innovation, it shows no convincing evidence of abating again.
Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, first made this observation in 1965, and his name has been attached to it ever since.
What’s driving Microsoft 365? Moore’s Law. What’s behind our ability to wear a computer on our wrist? Moore’s Law. What’s behind connected speech recognition products like Alexa? Moore’s Law. What makes self-driving cars go? Moore’s Law.
Special Note: When I first identified the Three Digital Accelerators in 1983, I used the term “processing power” as one of the three accelerators. Thanks to our ability to access supercomputers in the cloud from any of our smart devices, we have recently gone beyond using processing power and Moore’s Law as a key driver of exponential change, and moved to the exponential growth of the entire computing ecosystem in the cloud. That is why I now call this element “computing power.”
Digital Storage
The second digital trend accelerator is storage. The capacity to store digital data is doubling every 12 months, even faster than computer processing power.
One great example of storage acceleration comes from the evolution of Apple products. What could once be stored on an iPod, one of the first smart music storage devices, could later be stored on an iPhone along with photos, video and much more.
Having a terabyte of storage on a thin laptop was unthinkable to many just a few years ago; now it’s common. Having large servers on location was the norm not long ago; now we use virtual servers in the cloud with seemingly unlimited storage potential.
Bandwidth
Finally, there’s bandwidth. Screamingly fast bandwidth, which is doubling every nine months, was primarily generated by advances in fiber-optic technology and, more recently, the implementation of new wireless broadband technology.
Using a dial-up modem not that long ago was good for email and documents only. Today, we can stream high-definition video to our phones, wearables and much more. 5G will be followed by 6G, 7G and beyond, opening new pathways to innovation.
Sweeping Change
The relentless doubling of computing power, digital storage and bandwidth form the epicenter of sweeping large-scale innovations that will continue to transform how we live, work and play for the foreseeable future. For example, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers predicts that nanotechnology will have been applied to virtually every aspect of our lives (industry, medicine, new computing systems and sustainability) by 2020 (amse.org, Top 5 Nanotech Trends, retrieved May 2018).
Artificial Intellignece, machine learning, chatbots and robotics are a few other advancements destined to be extremely potent change agents as their development is accelerated by the concentrated forces of computing power, digital storage and bandwidth.
Transformation
A statistical model showing the doubling of the number 1 every year would display data points on a curve that rises gradually for the first five years, turns sharply steeper at 10 years out, then quickly blasts off toward a 90-degree ascent and goes straight up and off the chart.
If we look at the history of processing power alone, this exponential growth rate has been occurring for 40 years. For example, to go from a 5-megahertz chip to a 500-megahertz chip took 20 years; however, the jump from 500 megahertz to 1 gigahertz (1000 million hertz) took place in only eight months, and that was a number of years ago. We are way beyond that now.
The pace is astounding. The other two technologies have been at it for a couple of decades and are racking up even hotter numbers. For example, companies such Cisco have recently created methods for increasing broadband speed between 400 and 1,600 percent.
What the resulting vertical lines on the chart tell us is that transformation is now replacing change as the business headache du jour.
Disruptive change is only disruptive if you didn’t know about it ahead of time. Now that you know the forces that will drive the change curve higher, it is imperative that you focus on being Anticipatory by identifying the Hard Trends that will shape the future and take advantage of the game-changing opportunities they are creating for developing new products and services that are coming our way.
Ready to see the future and plan with greater confidence? Have a look at my Anticipatory Organization System at www.AnticipatoryOrganization.com
Byline: Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and innovation experts. He is the CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advances in technology driven trends to help clients profit from technological, social and business forces that are converging to create enormous, untapped opportunities.
He is a strategic advisor to executives helping them to develop game-changing strategies based on his proven methodologies for capitalizing on technology innovations. He is the author of seven books, including The New York Times bestseller Flash Foresight, and his latest book The Anticipatory Organization.
To Order FREE book: Visit https://www.anticipatoryorganization.com/get-the-book
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