The Urgency Paradox

Posted by admin on July 26th, 2010

The Urgency Paradox 939

As people live longer, some aspects of life are beginning to slow down

Tick, tick, tick. For virtually all working people, there is a clock ticking in the background. Tick, tick, tick.
Much like the rhythm of a beating heart, the sounds of time creates a rhythm for our lives, a world unfolding in iambic pentameter, pulsing to the tempo of life.
Some have turned the clock into their primary business tool, planning every moment in the finest of detail, placing the timing of their well-oiled business machine front and center for all to see.
“Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free!,”  “One-hour photo,” or “Overnight delivery” were common slogans from 20 years ago. Today, the urgency of business has shifted into an entirely new gear.
An on-demand generation has grown accustomed to an instant-world. Text sent, text received. Hear a good song, own it instantly. Record a funny YouTube video, the world is watching within seconds.
But while many aspect of technology have ramped up, pushing business to the limits, social urgency has slowed to a crawl.
You couples have somehow mastered the fine art of long engagements. Very often couples will continue to date for 8-10 years before getting married.
After World War II couples tended to marry in their early 20s. Today, with all the background noise of failed marriages and divorce, couples are putting their pre-marriage time into an extended test-drive.
Many women and couples are putting off childbirth, often waiting until their late 30s or 40s before giving birth to a child.
With work life and family life becoming increasingly blurred and seemingly all vacations turning into working vacations, there are many new social movements to “live off the clock” and regain control of your life.
In many parts of Europe and the U.S. the “slow food movement” is gaining ground…. slowly. Slow food is everything that fast food is not. Well-planned, hyper-individualized, slowly prepared, slowly-consumed, and slowly savored.
Food is a common language among people. Our universal need for food creates an important interdependency among us, and it makes sense that our need to form an anchor-post of stability in our increasingly fast-paced world would begin with food.
The Bigger Picture
Taking a bigger picture perspective, as life expectancy increases at a pace of 3 years every decade, much of our personal urgency will disappear. More than half of babies born in wealthy countries today will live well past 100. Not only will they live longer, but those added years will be spent with fewer disability and fewer limitations on daily routines than in the past.
In the years ahead we will begin to see a greater partitioning between the urgency-categories of our lives. The critical differentiator is personal urgency vs. competitive urgency.
On one hand, the time-is-money adage will continue to drive the world of commerce and business. We will expect ever greater levels of instant-fulfillment, instant-performance, and instant-gratification. More than instant downloads of music, news, and information, we will demand instant everything from the digital world.
We will also expect reduced times in other areas of life. Basic answers to questions, products delivered to our homes, and resolution of problems will all shift into a higher gear.
But contrary to life in the business fast-lane, other timetables will shift into reverse.
Young people will find little urgency to purchase a home when other forms of living allow them to live free, carefree, and mobile.
Planning for retirement will become an increasingly abstract notion among young people. To them the retirement age is shifting to the far distant end of the life spectrum and may very well disappear altogether over time.
Selling life insurance will also tend to be more difficult with more people living single and living longer.
The popular trend towards creating a “bucket list” of things to accomplish-before-you-die is increasingly being transferred into the category of “less-urgent” as our life expectancy climbs.
It’s easy to see that the pace of life is changing, but not everything is speeding up. People who can make sense of the “urgency paradox” will uncover huge new opportunities in the years ahead.
By Thomas Frey

Tick, tick, tick. For virtually all working people, there is a clock ticking in the background. Tick, tick, tick.

Much like the rhythm of a beating heart, the sound of time creates a rhythm for our lives, a world unfolding in iambic pentameter, pulsing to the tempo of life.

Some have turned the clock into a sophisticated marketing tool, planning every moment in the finest of detail, placing the timing of their well-oiled business machine front and center for all to see.

“Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free!,”  “One-hour photo,” or “Overnight delivery” were common slogans from 20 years ago. Today, the urgency of business has shifted into an entirely new gear.

An on-demand generation has grown accustomed to an instant-world. Text sent, text received. Hear a good song, own it instantly. Record a funny YouTube video, the world is watching within seconds.

But while many aspect of technology have ramped up, pushing business to the limits, social urgency has slowed to a crawl.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The Future of Libraries: Interview with Thomas Frey

Posted by admin on July 20th, 2010

Future Library 984

Libraries in the future will come in many different forms

NOTE: The following is a reprint of an interview that recently appeared in American Libraries Magazine

Without consulting a crystal ball, Thomas Frey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute, writes and speaks about a promising future for those libraries strongly connected to their communities and quickly adaptable to the changing world around them. Tom Sloan, executive director of the DuPage Library System in Geneva, Illinois, asked Frey to discuss the future of libraries.

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The Coming of the Terabyters

Posted by admin on July 5th, 2010
The Coming of the Terabyters
A new breed of worker, equipped with uber-geek
data-capturing tools, are about to usher in a whole new information era
Recently I was preparing for a talk on the future of money, a talk I have given many times in the past, and I became absorbed with one singular thought – the relationship between information and money.
The value of a person, as an example, has traditionally been calculated based on hard number such as money in their bank account, personal assets, 401Ks, earning power, etc. As our ability to capture and process information improves, we are able to assign many more numbers to the intrinsic value of an individual.
Today we find ourselves in an awkward in-between state of trying to transition from a world based on hard currencies to one where things like talent, relationships, knowledge, reputation, personal networks, influence, and accomplishments all have growing significance. These attributes have always held value, but only recently have they been considered valuable enough to serve as a tradable commodity.
In the coming years we will see an explosion of systems designed around the quantification of human attributes and personal influence serving as the basis of new currencies. And these currency movements will be driven farther and faster with introduction of The Terabyters.
What is a Terabyter?
In 2008, Americans consumed 1.3 trillion hours worth of information, which translates into 12 hours of information per person per day. If 12 hours a day seems a bit much, consider the sources of TV, radio, games, social networking, surfing the Internet that continue to play an ever greater role in our lives. From a literary standpoint, Americans consume 100,500 words per day from these same sources. That amounts to 34 gigabytes each day or a total of 3.6 zettabytes total for 2008.
As impressive as these numbers sound, they are tiny compared to the walking information nodes we will see in the near future. These are people I have begun to call the Terabyters.
A terabyter is a person who produces more than a terabyte of new information every day. Today, only a handful of these people in existence, but the numbers will soon swell along with the development of new data capture equipment.
Consider the following scenario…
Each morning Winston rolls out of bed, takes a quick shower, and begins to strap on the trademark Gargoyle gear. Named after the characters described in Neil Stevenson’s Snow Crash, a Gargoyle is a person who equips themselves with a wearable computer of sorts, and is constantly collecting visual and sensory data about his/her surroundings, while continually being jacked into the Metaverse (Internet).
For Winston, his role in life is to serve as a human information node in the rapidly growing world of extreme data immersion, and his income is both directly and indirectly dependent upon the amount of information he is able to amass on a daily basis.
The information Winston collects is being continually streamed to the server farms for search engines designed for the physical world. Each video stream coming from Winston is layered with object recognition software, geospatial coordinates, and other sensory response data to the physical world around him into digital information that is searchable.
He represents a human version of the spidering bots that tech companies currently use to scan the digital web. But spidering the physical world requires a more human approach, and that’s where Winston comes in.
Search technology companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have agreed to buy the incoming data streams from Winston, and thousands more people like him, based on a percentage of ad sales associated with the display of his information.
Two years earlier, Cisco began a campaign to promote the lifestyle of the Terabyter as a way to force the other industry players like AT&T and Verizon to step up their game. Within a few short weeks, seemingly everyone on the planet knew what the hottest new ultra-cool profession would be.
As a full-fledged Terabyter, people can do whatever they want to, anytime, anyplace, and still make money.
For a mere $5,000 worth of equipment, and a commitment to wear the gear relentlessly, virtually anyone can become a Terabyter, and the money will start rolling in.
Admittedly it isn’t a lifestyle that will appealed to everyone. The equipment is a hassle and the income is rather sparse to begin with. But those who stick with it will see their income grow and, over time, the equipment will become far less intrusive.
However, for the people who start early and stick with it, this is the ultimate lifestyle. Every day is an adventure, finding new places to explore, new people to meet, and never bound to a desk or a computer. Their livelihood is directly related to how active their lifestyle is.
Creating the Terabyter Network
To be sure, there will be many players involved in developing a system to ramp up data collection to this level. All of the Internet service providers will have to gear up, new bandwidth needs to be allocated, routers and switching systems have to be changed out, browsers and operating systems will need to be updated, and search engine thinking will have to be revised.
Invariably, this whole shift will begin with a ragtag operation of sub-terabyters seeding the data universe. The initial capabilities will be quite limited with regional test-beds set up to demonstrate the potential inside a single city. But once a major player like Cisco begins to smell an opportunity, everything changes quickly.
Terabyer gear is already available, but still in crude, marginally-usable formats. Video capture goggles, helmets, and other devices will quickly morph into sleek, barely-visible equipment that can be mounted in, on, and around the wearers.
Once the world gets a glimpse of the potential, along with the right incentives, Terabyter gear will begin to fly off the shelves, system registrations will skyrocket, and a whole new income-producing lifestyle will spring to life.
In addition to the ongoing video stream of a Terabyter’s surroundings, the video images will be overlaid with biosensor response data, assigning emotional values to individual objects, places, and people.
Each month new sensors and data-collection gear will show up in the marketplace and Terabyters will have to decide which elements to replace on their apparatus. .
Some of the initial dissention will stem from whether or not it’s necessary to use humans. Terabyter equipment can easily be strapped onto cars and bicycles, but the most valuable data will come from the places that only humans could go.
To be sure, privacy and security issues will rise to the surface, but these will not be insurmountable matters.
Bridging the Relationship
After viewing the world through the lens of a Terabyter, I’d like to focus your attention again on the emerging relationship brewing between information and money.
Money based on rare commodities will hold its value until the commodity is no longer rare. Similarly, money based on confidence and trust will hold its value until faith in the system begins to dissipate.
For this reason, all money is fiat money, based on trust.
Money today is nothing more than information – digital nuggets that have been assigned value buried deep inside our information reserves. Mining for information is similar to mining for gold or any other precious metals. You have to know what you’re looking for.
Currency has been the traditional system for transferring value in the past. In the future, our ability to manage and control information will enable many new systems for transferring value.
If you’re still struggling with the concepts here, Dan Robles, founder of the Ingenesist Project offers this set of predictions for 2020 based on “an entirely new form of capitalism whose velocity and voracity will take the world completely by surprise.”
Hold on to your hats, the transition is right around the corner. And the change agents who will help usher in this new system will be none other than the Terabyters.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Terabyter 2

A new breed of worker, equipped with uber-geek data-capturing tools,
are about to usher in a whole new information era

Recently I was preparing for a talk on the future of money, a talk I have given many times in the past, and I became absorbed with one singular thought – the relationship between information and money.

The value of a person, as an example, has traditionally been calculated based on hard number such as money in their bank account, personal assets, 401Ks, earning power, etc. As our ability to capture and process information improves, we are able to assign many more numbers to the intrinsic value of an individual.

Today we find ourselves in an awkward in-between state of trying to transition from a world based on hard currencies to one where things like talent, relationships, knowledge, reputation, personal networks, influence, and accomplishments all have growing significance. These attributes have always held value, but only recently have they been considered valuable enough to serve as a tradable commodity.

In the coming years we will see an explosion of systems designed around the quantification of human attributes and personal influence serving as the basis of new currencies. And these currency movements will be driven farther and faster with introduction of The Terabyters.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 6 Comments »

Next Generation Literacy

Posted by admin on June 28th, 2010

Next Generation Literacy 761

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read & write,
but those who can’t learn, unlearn & relearn.” – Alvin Toffler

So what is literacy?
The first time I listened to an audio book I thought I was cheating. As a child, reading for me seemed like a lot of work, and my teachers kept piling on more reading assignments, continually feeding into the notion that reading is hard work.
Later, I rationalized that the process of reading is the process of taking characters on a page and turning them into mental concepts and images. Listening to an audio book is a little different process where we convert sounds into mental concepts and images.
Today, when someone talks about literacy there is an instant assumption that they are talking about the ability to read and write – basic ink-on-paper communications 1.0. However, communications is evolving and our ability to craft words and preserve them on paper is being replaced with digital forms of communications, and the options people now have to communicate with each other have exploded into thousands and thousands of nuanced variations of what was formerly called language.
Tomorrow there will be even more.
Understanding Literacy through the Words We Consume
In 2008, Americans consumed 1.3 trillion hours worth of information. This information consumption translated into an average of 12 hours per person, 100,500 words, and 34 gigabytes each day.
If we base the notion of literacy on the number of words that flow into our mind on a daily basis, we suddenly realize that the incoming words are coming from a variety of different sources. Today the vast majority of our “word intake” comes from television and computers with only 9% coming from print media. In 1960, print media accounted for 26% of our word consumption but has shrunk to 9% today, with the prospects of getting even smaller in the future.
For many people working within the book-centric world of today, it’s difficult for them to wrap their mind around the changing attitudes of today’s information consumers. And even for those who can, it’s not clear what the next steps should be, and how fast the changes should be made.
Programming as a Language
In 1972, I was a young engineering student at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD and for my first computer programming class I was trained to “speak” the language of Fortran. We were taught a basic form of machine communications to “talk” to the giant computer through punch cards that were fed in and out of the beast through a card reading input-output device.
In this class our training involved such sophisticated tasks as sorting numbers, basic addition, and putting lists in alphabetical order. The whole process was very time-consuming with very little to show for the effort.
At the end of the class, being the true visionary that I am, I concluded, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there would be no future for the profession of computer programming.
Computers spoke a different language. In many ways it was similar to the language differences of people in Europe or Asia. While learning French, German, Mandarin, or Japanese required learning foreign words, definitions, and vocal inflections, the mastery of a computer language required the writing and interpretation of computer code, Boolean algebra, and many long and frustrating hours of dealing with non-human, no personality machines.
Next Generation Literacy
So going back to my original question, what really is literacy?
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) describes literacy as the “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.
Going beyond the textbook definition, literacy is evolving, and deep inside this evolution we can begin to understand some of the underlying complexities associated with the options currently at our disposal.
1. Reading and writing
2. Computer literacy
3. Web surfing literacy
4. Cell phone & telephone literacy
5. Smart phone literacy
6. Body language literacy
7. Financial literacy
8. Cartooning
9. Online commerce literacy
10. Online security literacy
11. Graphical literacy
12. Animation literacy
13. Audio literacy
14. Video literacy
15. Social networking literacy
16. Gaming literacy
17. Virtual world literacy
18. Cultural literacy
It is a common trap to associate our talent for communicating with our ability to read and write. However, texting is different than cartooning. Audio podcasts are different than video podcasts. Each new form of communications comes with its own unique style and attributes for conveying thoughts and ideas.
Literacy will continue to evolve along with every new system and each form of technology that gets created along the way.
Basic reading and writing forms of communications will no longer be sufficient for the workforce of the future. People will still need to read and write, but they will also need and a whole lot more.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

So what is literacy?

The first time I listened to an audio book I thought I was cheating. As a child, reading for me seemed like a lot of work, and my teachers kept piling on more reading assignments, continually feeding into the notion that reading is hard work.

Later, I rationalized that the process of reading is the process of taking characters on a page and turning them into mental concepts and images. Listening to an audio book is a little different process where we convert sounds into mental concepts and images.

Today, when someone talks about literacy there is an instant assumption that they are talking about the ability to read and write – basic ink-on-paper communications 1.0. However, communications is evolving and our ability to craft words and preserve them on paper is being replaced with digital forms of communications, and the options people now have to communicate with each other have exploded into thousands and thousands of nuanced variations of what was formerly called language.

Tomorrow there will be even more.

Read the rest of this entry »

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A Country of 90,000 Governments

Posted by admin on June 17th, 2010
A Country of 90,000 Governments
The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. During normal economic times there is plenty of money to go around, but now every city, state, county, parish, township, and special taxing district is competing for the same tax dollars that the federal government is.
Governmental entities are living, breathing organisms, each fighting for survival. With tax shortfalls cropping up in nearly every corner of the U.S. economy, most are struggling to preserve their own piece of the pie. With money declining, many are compensating with unusual policy decisions that they hope will shore up their balance sheet.
But it’s not just about money issues. Along with taxing authority, each one of these governments has its own ability to create and enforce new laws, rules, and regulations. Working with a limited set of tools in their toolbox, governments have resorted to using new laws and regulations to solve virtually every conceivable problem. The volume of new laws being created are truly stunning.
Abraham Lincoln once said, ““The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” Similarly, the quickest way to bring America to its knees is to strictly enforce all of its laws.
Sales Tax Battles
Most of the governmental entities are funded through some form of sales tax, a system designed during an entirely different era, a system that is now on the verge of collapse.
At the heart of many of the current debates is a 1992 landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that determined retailers are not required to collect sales tax from shoppers unless they have a physical presence in the state where customers live. Initially, this ruling applied mainly to catalog companies and home-shopping channels on TV. But it also applied to the emerging online retail industry, giving them a distinct competitive advantage, and consumers a reason to change their buying habits.
Local retailers who have invested in their community, who send their kids to local schools and volunteer for local charities, find themselves competing with faceless online companies, most of whom have never set foot in the town. The problem with current sales tax laws are that they create a disadvantage to those who are local. But here is where it gets complicated.
If an online business has a physical presence in a state, such as a store, office or warehouse, they must collect sales tax from the customers who purchase items in that state. Without a physical presence, no sales tax needs to be collected. That sounds simple enough, until you get into the definition of what constitutes a physical presence.
Some states now claim that anyone doing affiliate sales, placing referral ads on their blog sites and receiving a commission, can be construed as being a local sales agent, and therefore the entire transaction is subject to sales tax. As a result, companies like Amazon and Overstock who count heavily upon the no-sales-tax advantage have cancelled affiliate relationships with anyone doing affiliate sales on their behalf in those states.
Maximizing the Failure Points
Rest assured sales tax issues are but a small piece of a much larger problem.
Complexity creates failure points. Every decision point along the way increases the odds that something will go wrong, and we have moved into an era of non-stop decision points.
A country with 90,000 governments, whose primary tools for solving problems involve creating new laws, is a country that has maximized the number of failure points.
As I’ve often said, “The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it.” From this perspective, we live in a very sick nation.
Over time, these complexity-laden systems that will invariably descend into the lower levels of disfunctionality, with anger and finger-pointing setting the stage for more graphic battles to follow.
In a tough global economy, the good people of the U.S. have chosen to tie ankle weights of complexity around their legs as they attempt to swim towards a better economy.
The Futurist Perspective
Backcasting is a tool used by futurists to look at the present from some point in the future.
In much the same way we stand in amazement as we read about the Salem witch trials, or 18th century doctors who used bleeding to cure diseases, or Polynesian tribes who sacrificed virgins to appease the volcano-gods, a country comprised of 90,000 governments is destined to appear equally ludicrous in the future.
One hundred years in the future, people in 2110 will look back at this era of history and marvel at the insanity of our times. They will be amazed at how people managed to live in a country with more laws than anyone can count, a tax code that, according to NPR, is over 67,000 pages long with 1,638 different tax forms, and a justice system that controls one out of every 31 people in the country, and has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in history.
All of our defensive posturing for maintaining the status quo will quickly deteriorate into the equivalent of modern caveman thinking as future generations make us the punchline of their jokes and the universal symbol of “what not to do.”
Reining in the Unreinable
So how do we reverse the avalanche of complexity that is cascading around us? In philosophical terms, how do we create the immovable object to deal with the unstoppable force?
The short answer is that abrupt change is simply not possible. Systems that have evolved over decades cannot instantly be traded in for something newer.
With a society that is already heavily invested in our current systems, and people already pre-programmed to think and act accordingly, the operating system can only be changed by rewriting the source code. In short, we need to create systems for changing the system.
We currently have no check-and-balance system for impeding the excessive law-writing now taking place. Simply by adding friction to the rule-making process will slow it down. Adding a lifespan to the laws will help force decision-makers to focus on the highest priorities.
Here are a few examples:
1. All laws must be posted in one central location online. As a first step towards getting a handle on the runaway law-creators, we need to create a law that requires all laws be posted on one central website online. Any laws not posted will be deemed unenforceable.
2. Any laws that have not been enforced in that past 20 years become unenforceable and must be removed from the list. Time spent getting rid of the clutter means less time for creating new laws.
3. All laws must be written on an 8th grade comprehension level. No laws can become law until they are certified as having been written on this level.
Aspiring to Synergy
History has taught us that governments can only exist if there is an adversarial relationship between a government and its people. For this reason, few have bothered to question the abrasive relationships that have developed.
However, business and government need to maintain a synergistic relationship. Governments provide the operating system and businesses shares the wealth, proving the revenue streams upon which governments operate.
Companies in the U.S. are continually facing new forms of global competition, and anything that makes it more difficult to conduct business, makes them less competitive.
For a country to prosper, it’s not necessary to be perfect. When we find ourselves being chased by a bear, we only need to be faster than the other guy.

Maximizing our own failure points

The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. During normal economic times there is plenty of money to go around, but now every city, state, county, parish, township, and special taxing district is competing for the same tax dollars that the federal government is.

Governmental entities are living, breathing organisms, each fighting for survival. With tax shortfalls cropping up in nearly every corner of the U.S. economy, most are struggling to preserve their own piece of the pie. With money declining, many are compensating with unusual policy decisions that they hope will shore up their balance sheets.

But it’s not just about money issues. Along with taxing authority, each one of these governments has its own ability to create and enforce new laws, rules, and regulations. Working with a limited set of tools in their toolbox, governments have resorted to using laws and regulations to solve virtually every conceivable problem. The sheer volume of laws emerging from these 90,000 rule-making bodies is truly stunning.

Abraham Lincoln once said, ““The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” Similarly, the quickest way to bring America to its knees is to strictly enforce all of its laws.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, powerful idea, prediction, scary future 7 Comments »

Maximum Freud

Posted by admin on May 19th, 2010

YouTube Preview Image

A few thoughts on “Maximum Freud”

In 1972, I was young engineering student at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. One of the first courses I was required to take was a short-course on slide rules. For those of you who don’t know what a slide rule is – first came the abacus, then came the slide rule, and then came the calculator.

This was a time when the real “cool geeks” on campus walked around proudly displaying their black carrying case for their slide rule that was attached to their belt. Brainiacs on parade, a way of telling the world how smart they were.

Early calculators were first showing their face around 1970, but in 1972 they were still pretty expensive. I remember arguing with my teacher about whether or not the slide rule course was necessary and his response was that “all engineers need to know how to run the slide rule.” Tough to argue with that logic.

But of course his thinking was wrong. Even though I took the course and passed it with flying colors, I’ve never used a slide rule in doing engineering work. Engineers at Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments who were working on next generation calculators at the time would have laughed at my teacher’s assertion that slide rules were always going to be the centerpiece of the engineer’s tool chest.

Clearly this period of time was the end of an era. It was the end of the slide rule era and the beginning of the calculator era.

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business trends, historical perspective, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 1 Comment »

Addressing the Problem of Addresses

Posted by admin on May 3rd, 2010

Address 567

When Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans the US Post Office was faced with a major dilemma. For countless centuries, the modus operandi for the post office was to deliver mail to a location, and the individuals who lived at that location would stop by and pick up their mail. But during the hurricane, the floods had destroyed all of the “locations”.
Normally, if a location has been destroyed, the post office will simply put a forwarding address into the system and the mail will reroute to the new location. However, there was nothing normal about the Katrina disaster, and countless thousands of people were suddenly placed in limbo, transported to cities across the country, some to live in the new city permanently, others to continue on a nomadic journey that would find them living in as many as 10-15 different locations over the course of the coming years.
Katrina victims and the people trying to reach them by mail faced a significant delay, at best, as their mail was either held up in the post office of origin or sent to a succession of temporary addresses. At worst, many letters became permanently lost as the legacy systems inside the U.S. Postal Service tried desperately to adapt to some rather extraordinary circumstances.
This disaster brought home the fundamental problems associated with delivering to a ‘location’ rather than delivering to a ‘person’.
The average person in the US will move 16 times over the course of their lifetime, roughly once every five years. In any given year, approximately 20% of the population will change the place they call home.
Complicating the problem further, the average teenager today will hold 11 different jobs by the time they are 30, and with work becoming more project-based, that number is sure to climb.
Over the past decade the telephone industry began going through a similar transformation. In the early 1990 the vast majority of phone lines went to a location. Today, the vast majority of phones sold are going to individuals with little regard to their ‘location’.
Similarly, in 1995 the vast majority of all email addresses were for location-based computers. You had to be using a specific machine to get your emails. Today, the email systems have been adapted so people can receive their email where ever they may be.
All of the more recent communications technologies, such as text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter, have adopted the policy of sending information to the individual as opposed to a location.
While it is true that in some cases we want things delivered to a business at a specific location, such as parts for a manufacturing operation or books for a school, our current systems don’t allow for the separation of individuals and locations. Consider the following scenarios.
• Scenario #1: In the military, soldiers can’t wait for the next letter from back home. Because of the sensitivity of their position many don’t have access to cell phones, and being mobile, moving from base to base, the delivery of letters becomes a logistics nightmare.
• Scenario #2: The number of telecommuters have grown rapidly over the past decade and in many companies, over 30% of the workforce now works from home. In the past it was easy to send a letter to a person at the company’s main address. With employees scattered across several continents, the problem with tracking all these addresses continues to escalate.
• Scenario #3:  One of the past guests on the David Letterman Show was Dean Kamazes, an ultra-marathoner who runs 200-300 miles at a time. During the interview, Letterman asked Dean how he managed to eat while he was running. His answer was that he used a cell phone to call a pizza delivery shop and had the driver meet him at a location he planned to be at 30 minutes later. In this case, the pizza was being delivered to a future location.
It is easy to make the assertion that the postal system is stuck in the past. However, there is a big difference between the delivery of a physical item and the delivery of digital item. Rest assured, the postal system is not alone. FedEx, UPS, and local courier services are all heavily immersed in the delivery of physical items to a physical location.
The world of addressing has become a growing source of friction, slowing the connection between buyers and sellers. Most people know how difficult it is to receive a “signature required” package through FedEx or UPS. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the item delivered directly to you, no matter where you happen to be?
So, is it possible to create a technology for the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS that will enable them to switch from static location-based addresses to dynamic, ever-changing personal addresses? More importantly, if someone invents the technology, will any of the delivery services implement it?
The starting and ending nodes of our connected world are often major disconnect points. The efficiencies we have come to expect in the online world simply don’t translate well into our current systems in the off-line world.
So where do we go from here? What are the systems we need to create to solve these problems? The answer to these questions is a system that will redefine our future.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans the US Post Office was faced with a major dilemma. For countless centuries, the modus operandi for the post office was to deliver mail to a location, and the individuals who lived at that location would stop by and pick up their mail. But following the hurricane, the floods had destroyed all of the “locations”.

Normally, if a location has been destroyed, the post office will simply put a forwarding address into the system and the mail will reroute to the new location. However, there was nothing normal about the Katrina disaster, and countless thousands of people were suddenly placed in limbo, transported to cities across the country, some to live in the new city permanently, others to continue on a nomadic journey that would find them living in as many as 10-15 different locations over the course of the coming years.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea 3 Comments »

Systems Thinking and the Future of Education

Posted by admin on April 27th, 2010

YouTube Preview Image

Short video clip on “Systems Thinking”
recorded at the Plan Fort Collins event on March 3, 2010

A recent article in iLibrarian explained it this way.

Online education seems set on its course to overtake traditional colleges within the next few decades, especially as our society becomes ever more dependent on the internet to get our work done.  Thomas Frey, an expert on online education, compares our growing reliance on the education system to the reliance of ancient Romans on their numeric system.  He indicates that much like the Romans, we have become increasingly reliant on our education system which is meant to pass on information from one generation to the next, hesitant to any change that may occur (explaining the rough transition to online education).

historical perspective, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends No Comments »

Competing for Status

Posted by admin on April 10th, 2010

8 status symbol 684

Competing for Status
32 accomplishments that will give you the influence of a college degree
“Does being smarter make you happier?”
This was the question I posed to the audience at a recent DaVinci Institute event, hoping to gauge their reaction.
I found it fascinating to watch this very conflicted group of amazingly bright people as they struggled to put their thoughts into words. In the end, the answers, which varied tremendously, seemed to fall mostly into the category of “No, but…..”
A natural follow-on question would be, “Okay, so what constitutes being smart?”
Ignoring College
Last week it was announced that Han Han, a Chinese professional rally driver, best-selling author and China’s most popular blogger, has been nominated as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is also a person who never graduated from college.
Han Han has taken his place among the likes of Bill Gates, Tom Hanks, Madonna, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Paul Allen, Ben Stiller, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Sean Combs as some of the smartest and most influential people in the world, none of whom have ever graduated from college.
Over the years, college degrees have evolved into a significant status symbol, one of the world’s most recognizable symbols for being smart. A college degree is a definable accomplishment requiring years of study, so there is some validity to the notion that people who graduate from college, on average, are indeed smarter than the average non-degree holder.
However, it is also clear that some of the world’s most successful people took a different path and never bothered with finishing college. In fact, few people know, or care, that the sheepskin is missing from their walls. They have achieved status in other ways.
Logically then, if you are a talented person and haven’t had the time, money, or opportunity to go to college, are there some legitimate substitutes for status that the rest of the world will consider to be of equal or greater value?
College leaders have done a tremendous job of cementing the value of a college education into the minds of virtually everyone.
If you asked a cross-section of business leaders, “What other accomplishments would you consider to be as important as a college degree?” chances are they will struggle to give you an answer that doesn’t have a college education somewhere in the background.
But many options do exist.
A Status Symbol under Attack
In one of my recent papers, The Future of Colleges & Universities:  Blueprint for a Revolution, I talked about how colleges were on the verge of being attacked, and one of the areas they will be attacked on is the areas of “status.” College degrees are important but new status symbols are beginning to emerge that compete directly with the inherent status of a degree.
Until recently, colleges have primarily faced competition from other colleges. Even though they will debate the value of one college degree over another, they remain unified in their support of higher education.
Today, there are many status symbols that compete with college degrees, and in the future there will be many more.
Royalty, such as the King and Queen of a country, is a great status symbol that comes with tremendous privilege, but it is not an accomplishment. People are born into it.
A Nobel Prize is also a remarkable status symbol, but it generally requires one or many college degrees somewhere in the person’s background.
So what kind of accomplishments are accessible to most people that could be construed by a potential employer, business colleague, or acquaintance as being the equivalent to a college degree, or for that matter, even better?
To answer this, I’ve decided to break this discussion into four categories:
1. Components of Equivalency (equal to a course or multiple courses)
2. Equivalent to a College Degree
3. Better than a College Degree
4. Future Status Symbols
Even though we are discussing alternatives to going to college it doesn’t mean that there is no learning involved. Quite the contrary. Learning becomes an essential ingredient in virtually every path to success, but in some cases, far less formalized.
The following examples are simply intended to expand your awareness of literally thousands of options that currently exist.
Components of Equivalency
Much like taking a series of courses that stack up and form the basis for a college degree, a series of smaller achievements can easily be used to form an equivalent status.
1. Certificate Programs – Most certificate programs are intended to either replace or supplement existing degree programs. The weight of this accomplishment varies tremendously with the institution that is granting it.
2. Certification – Certifications, such as Microsoft, Cisco, or Oracle Certification, have become a very popular way to bestow credentials.
3. Apprenticeship – The age old process of working for years under the tutelage of a master craftsman is still alive and well in some industries.
4. Foreign Travel – With foreign travel becoming increasingly common, it tends to hold less value today than in the past, but is still recognized as a significant achievement.
5. Own a Patent – Becoming a patent holder is also less rare in today’s world than in the past, but is still regarded as a noteworthy accomplishment.
6. Produce an Event – Events range from small to huge. But a successful event, no matter the size, has the ability to position you in a way that will cause others to take notice.
7. Memberships – Status by association. The credibility of an association adds to the credibility of you as an individual.
8. Starting a Business – Launching a business is a significant learning experience regardless of how successful it becomes. It also adds a new dimension to the identity of the founder.
Equivalent to a College Degree
College degrees are viewed as a significant personal accomplishment sustained over a longer period of time. Similarly any accomplishment competing for that kind of status needs to convey a similar sustained effort. Here are a few examples:
1. Published a Book – If a major publisher gives the green light to publish your book, their endorsement brings with it considerable esteem.
2. Produce a Documentary – There is something noble and noteworthy about producing a documentary that puts documentarians into a class of their own.
3. Foreign Travel with a Cause – Whether you’re working with Engineers Without Borders creating bridges or water systems for desolate villages or working with Teachers without Borders and teaching young people a much needed craft, foreign travel that is tied to a cause carries far more weight than travel alone.
4. Serve on a City Council – Local elections have a way of validating your status in the community and serves as a wonderful learning experience.
5. Commissioned Artwork – Artwork is only as important as the artist who tells the story. Commissioned art brings with it a rare position of honor.
6. Become an Expert – Brendon Burchard, Founder of the Experts Academy, has defined 10 key elements that qualify someone as being an expert. Most people can achieve the ranks of “expert” once they understand the process.
7. Creating a High-Traffic Website – The size of your digital footprint is directly proportional to your online status.
8. Dog Breeder – This is an example of a well-recognized industry specific title that virtually everyone recognizes as important. Dog breeders hold prominence in social circles far removed from that of the pet-owner community.
Better than College
It is a fine line between status symbols that are the equivalent to college and those that are considered better than college. Here are a few that fall into the better-than-college territory:
1. Become Famous – Whether you become famous as an actor or actress, writer, cartoonist, artist, columnist, movie director, or fashion designer, fame is a rare privilege bestowed on the limited few.
2. Prestigious Awards – Granting awards is a time-honored tradition, but over the years, only a few awards have risen to the top. These awards bestow tremendous privilege on the recipients.
3. Elected to a Higher Office – When people vote someone into office, it’s a unique and powerful way of telling the world they are important.
4. Build a Financial Empire – There are many ways to build a personal fortune, but only a limited few who actually figure it out. People who have amassed a financial empire command tremendous respect.
5. Building a Business Empire – Building a business empire is like playing the game of chess without the rules. It is a game of skill, timing, determination, and chance that only the exceptional few have mastered.
6. Game Designer – Much like movie producers, game designers are relegated to the lofty ranks of royalty in the emerging kingdom of the pixel elite.
7. Successful Inventor – Becoming successful as an inventor is far different than what Hollywood would have you believe. It requires mastering many complicated skills. Successful inventors are part business people, part visionaries, part opportunists, and a big part lucky.
8. Create/Manage a Fund – Those who are placed in a position of “trust” and granted the role of gatekeeper to the money, tend to command special respect among the general public.
Future Status Symbols
When systems and technologies evolve, so do the opportunities. Each change in these areas comes with a need for next-generation rockstars. Here are a few possibilities.
1. The Outlier Label – As Malcom Gladwell so aptly described in his book The Outliers, any person who dedicates over 10,000 hours of their life to a particular skill or profession moves into the elite ranks of revered master or expert. The dedication and proficiency exuded by an “outlier” is far beyond that of the vast majority of degree holders.
2. Owner of a Unique Data Feed – Information is still powerful and having access to a novel and unique data feed will grant you unusual clout and status in the future.
3. Global System Architect – We are transitioning from national systems to global systems and one of the coolest monikers in the future will be that of a Global System Architect.
4. “Disturbance-in-the-Force” Web Presence – Having a significant online presence is one thing, but causing the center of gravity to shift among the digital natives, with the introduction of a new organic business model, will grant you unusual preeminence in the online world.
5. Clone Designer – “I need a clone.” As time constraints begin to overwhelm much of the world’s population, the pent-up demand for clones can be felt almost everywhere. Uniquely positioned at the apex of this soon-to-be emerging industry will be the clone designers.
6. Launch a Network – Networks have far reaching influence and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Whether it’s a communications network, a professional network, or a social network, the founder of a network is also the heart and soul of its significance.
7. Launch the “You Inc.” Brand – You are your own brand. When you, as a brand, become a household name, many new doors will open for you.
8. Founder of a Movement – With every movement comes a certain nobility and distinction that helps circumvent the traditional path to success.
The Seeds of Competition
After listing all of these ways to gain status without going to college it occurred to me that I’ve only tangentially discussed the competing forms of status that will be putting colleges on the defensive.
Status ends up being a culmination of who you are, not how much you know. While the experience of going to college can be quite valuable, so can other experiences. Competition will come in the form of competing experiences, and going beyond the experience itself, and translating it into significant accomplishments.
Successful people don’t have jobs, they have a calling. Each accomplishment stems from a passion and drive that is uniquely their own, not from a requirement that someone else dictates. Competing experiences will be designed to nurture the budding talents in people and give them ownership of the path they choose to take.
We are entering the age of hyper-individuality, and the path to each person’s most significant accomplishments will demand a hyper-individualized approach. Competition will be framed to fit around the wants, needs, and desires of that specific individual at that specific moment in time.
In the end, it will be far less about the path and far more about the results.
By Thomas Frey

32 accomplishments that will give you the influence of a college degree

“Does being smarter make you happier?”

This was the question I posed to the audience at a recent DaVinci Institute event, hoping to gauge their reaction.

I found it fascinating to watch this very conflicted group of amazingly bright people as they struggled to put their thoughts into words. In the end, the answers, which varied tremendously, seemed to fall mostly into the category of “No, but…..”

A natural follow-on question would be, “Okay, so what constitutes being smart?”

Read the rest of this entry »

historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea, social trends 8 Comments »

Ghost Towns of the Internet

Posted by admin on March 27th, 2010
Ghost Towns of the Internet
When today’s data goldmines becomes tomorrow’s data carcasses
In 1859 the tiny community of Tin Cup, Colorado got its first taste of gold fever. A tiny amount of gold was all it took for prospectors to start poking around with hopes of striking it rich. Twenty years later they landed their first major strike and rumors of the find spread across the country.
By 1900, the once insignificant mountain settlement had mushroomed into a bustling gold town with over 2,000 people. But in a short time the mines were exhausted, the people left, and the post office closed its doors in 1918. Today, the only remnants of this once thriving community are a few abandon buildings and a couple signs along the road.
Ghost towns are a rich part of world history. There are literally thousands of examples of these now-irrelevant pin pricks on a map. Overnight sensations quickly became a distant memory in the years that followed.
Is the Internet today really that much different than the gold rush stories of the late 1800s?
For ghost towns, the reasons behind their demise vary tremendously. Pripyat, a small town in northern Ukraine, reached a population of 50,000 before the Chernobyl Nuclear Power disaster. Today, it is glowing with abandonment.
Jonestown, Guyana was founded as both a “socialist paradise” and a “sanctuary” from media scrutiny by cult leader Rev Jim Jones. After reaching a population of nearly 1,000 people, the entire population participated in a mass suicide, causing it to become little more than an entry in the why-in-the-hell-did-they-listen-to-him history books.
These, of course, are unusual examples. But the world is filled with unusual examples. A disaster is still a disaster no matter how unusual the circumstances may be.
Will the digital ruins of today’s Internet ever compare to the physical ruins of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome? Will anyone even know they existed?
Ghost Brands
In 1962, Woolco began a 20 year rollercoaster ride through retail history. At its peak the Woolco name was a powerful force in the marketplace, with hundreds of big box stores in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain employing tens of thousands of people. Today the name hardly merits a mention in history books.
In the 1970s, IBM’s Selectric Typewriter had established itself as a critical cornerstone of office activity. But when computers arrived in the 1980, typewriters began to disappear and now the Selectric brand is little more than a museum piece.
In 1999 some of the top Internet properties were Lycos, Xoom, Excite, AltaVista, and GeoCities. Each of them were attracting millions of web visitors each month, competing head to head with companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon. Today each exists in name only, resting quietly in the shadow of its former existence.
Organic Content Creation
As we entered the 2000s, many companies began to focus on organic content creation with customer doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the time and labor used to build a primo web property.
As a result of this trend, data has been accumulating so fast that companies are investing heavily in server capacity to accommodate customer demand. While the exact numbers are being closely guarded, here are some notable data points to consider:
• Google is rumored to manage over one million servers in its various data centers around the globe. Google’s data capacity for its search, YouTube, G-Mail, and other data-heavy services is said to be over twice the size of its competitors – Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and IBM.
• Microsoft’s newest data center in Chicago has been architected around installing entire containers filled with servers. Each container holds over 2,000 servers and can be installed in less than eight hours.
• Amazon currently runs the world’s largest online store and one of the world’s largest cloud computing operations.
• IBM currently operates eight million square feet of data center space on six continents.
• EDS is now managing over 380,000 servers in 180 data centers.
• Facebook’s data centers store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second.
• The Tokyo Data Center serves as Japan’s Internet backbone. Japan claims it to be the largest data center in the world
• IDC is predicting that the cost of powering data centers around the world will reach $40 billion annually by 2012. How long before that number doubles, triples, or quadruples?
The difference today between the ghost towns of the Wild West and the brand names of the 70s is the speed with which changes are happening.
Organic growth often leads to organic abandonment. Is the speed with which they arrive a predictor of the speed with which they will leave?
Future Ruins Viewed as a Digital Past
As we look at the next generation of the Internet, watching carefully as it unfolds, we cannot help but be struck by how quickly it has infiltrated our lives and how much of our attention it currently commands.
Much like the physical structures in our cities that form along the horizons of our urban landscapes, the data structures inside today’s data giants represent some of mankind’s most remarkable feats. True, they exist only as a digital compliment to the bricks and steel of physical buildings, but they hold within them vital clues about who we are, what we find valuable, and our drives and passions for forging ahead.
So what will happen to the likes of these ground-losing giants?
• Second Life – Less than 3 years ago this one time buzz-dominator of the virtual world’s industry was the darling of media discussions, but has now been relegated to competing for mindshare with lesser contenders like video games and social media.
• MySpace – People have rapidly shifted from the chaotic page-building systems on MySpace to the cleaner look and interface on Facebook. How long before some new contender arrives and begin to steal market share from both?
• Plaxo – Starting off as a constantly updating business card service, Plaxo has lost ground to other mindshare grabbers like LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Monster.COM – Monster suffered a 33% decline in revenues in 2009 compared to 2008 as the bad economy and lack of jobs drove many would be customers to CraigsList and other contenders.
• Friendster – An early pioneer in social media, Friendster has lost its footing and remains a distant memory among the historians for social media.
• PhotoBucket – Riding on the coattails of MySpace, this one-time darling of the photo hosting world has lost ground to companies like Flickr and Picassa.
Certainly each of the companies has the potential to breathe new life into their business and add buoyancy to their sinking ship. But even the best business managers can only hold things together for a while.
Life expectancy for modern day businesses, even the remarkable ones, is measured in decades, not centuries.
Are today’s success stories nothing more than a prelude to tomorrow’s disaster stories?
The digital world as it exists today contains the keys to humanity, the raw essence of personhood, and in the long run, the future of our children’s children.
More important than the decaying wood and weed infested streets of physical ghost towns, what will happen to the data reserves and important scraps of our civilization that can be instantly erased with the flip of a switch rather than the erosion of time?
These are all hard questions without good answers. But rest assured, the ghost town era of the Internet is coming, and for some, it has already arrived.

Ghost Towns 676

When today’s data goldmines becomes tomorrow’s data carcasses

In 1859 the tiny community of Tin Cup, Colorado got its first taste of gold fever. A tiny amount of gold was all it took for prospectors to start poking around with hopes of striking it rich. Twenty years later they landed their first major strike and rumors of the find spread across the country.

By 1900, the once insignificant mountain settlement had mushroomed into a bustling gold town with over 2,000 people. But in a short time the mines were exhausted, the people left, and the post office closed its doors in 1918. Today, the only remnants of this once thriving community are a few abandon buildings and a couple signs along the road.

Ghost towns are a rich part of world history. There are literally thousands of examples of these now-irrelevant pin pricks on a map. Overnight sensations quickly became a distant memory in the years that followed.

Is the Internet today really that much different than the gold rush stories of the late 1800s?

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, prediction, scary future, technology trends 5 Comments »
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