Opinion | Stubbornness in the face of rapid technological change is a recipe for disaster
‘The Last Jedi is a marvel of cinematic touch … but for all the lightsabres, interstellar transport and spherical energy shields, the absence of any workable artificial intelligence was jarring’
We tell ourselves stories in order to learn. Kodak failed because its managers did not take digital photography seriously enough. Blockbuster died because its chief executive refused to invest in Netflix. Nokia disappeared because its executives were initially blind to the potential of the smartphone, and when they finally realised its importance, they stopped short by not cultivating enough app developers. We tell ourselves repeatedly that understanding the past will hold out the promise of making the future better.
No story is more captivating for managers than a grand theory about “accelerated changes”. It once took the landline telephone 75 years to reach 50 million users, light bulbs 46 years and the television 22 years.
Surely our lives are changing faster than ever. In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Thomas Friedman lays out why changes are speeding up everywhere.
“One of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is the power of exponential growth in anything – what happens when something keeps doubling or tripling or quadrupling over many years – and just how big the numbers can get,” he writes while referring to Moore’s Law, an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, which states that the number of microchip transistors etched into a fixed area of a computer microprocessor would double every two years. Since transistor density correlates with computing power, the latter would also double every two years.
