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What’s happening?The speed of change

by Chris Lytle, CSP

“Know what’s weird?” said Calvin from Calvin and Hobbs.

“Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon . . .everything’s different.”

Futurist Robert B. Tucker puts it this way: “The post- bubble economy of slowed growth and mature markets

and intense competition promises anything but ‘business

as usual.’ Company leaders need to proactively manage

change, rather than react to competitors’ moves.

Innovation — coming up with ideas and bringing them to

 life — must take place at every level of the organization.Resting on one’s laurels is not an option.”1

W. Edwards Deming put it more succinctly: “It is not

necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”2

That brings us nicely to the business term obsolescence.

 According to Business, the Ultimate Resource (my giant new book – thousands of pages), obsolescence is a marketingterm that means “The decline of products in a market due

to the introduction of better competitor products or rapid

technology developments. Obsolescence of products can

 be a planned process, controlled by introducing deliberate

minor cosmetic changes to a product every few years toencourage new purchases. It can also be unplanned,

however, and in some sectors the pace of technological

change is so rapid that the rate of obsolescence is high.This is the case particularly in consumer and industrial

electronics, affecting computers, Internet-related products,

telecommunications, and television, audio and car tech-

nology. Obsolescence is part of the product life cycle, and if 

a product cannot be turned around, it may lead to product 

abandonment.” 3

Speaking of change, speed and unplanned

obsolescence, on April 10, 2003, this USA Today headline

caught my eye: “Concorde heads for permanent landing.”

For 27 years, the Concorde represented all that the Jet

 Age seemed to offer.Looking more like a space shuttle than a jetliner, it

rocketed celebrities and tycoons across the Atlantic

with supersonic speed and style. It lifted air travel tohigh art, made New York and Paris almost neighbors,

and compressed time and space in a way that suggested

anything was possible. Concorde prototypes flew thesame year the United States reached the moon.

This year, a century after the Wright Brothers’ firstflight, British Airways and Air France will retire their

Concordes because of falling demand and rising costs.

The jets will be turned over to museums.4

Twenty-seven-year-old “museum pieces.”

Yes, as I write, there’s a war going on and the economy

is iffy. And yes, some people are boycotting France and allthings “French,” thanks to Bill O’Reilly. And yes, there was

a Concorde crash in Paris awhile back. But the groundingof the Concorde to me is a sign of a much bigger change.

The article continues:

Meanwhile, advances in other technologies haveoutdistanced aerospace innovation. The seemingly

endless abilities of the Internet have made doing trans-

 Atlantic business in person less critical. Companies,

even the rich, find it hard to justify spending more than$6,000 for a 3-1/2-hour Concorde flight when a 6- or 7-hour flight can be bought for as little as $200 round trip

in coach, and even business class from New York to

London is $3,800.Economically, airlines can’t justify the Concorde

anymore. This sleek symbol of the future has become

an anachronism in an era when saving money seems

more important than saving time.5

“Know what’s weird?” said Calvin. “Day by day, nothing

seems to change, but pretty soon . . .

everything’s different.”

The Nature of Blur 

In their book Blur , StanDavis and Christopher

Meyer describe the nature

of Blur. At the heart of theirtheory are three forces:

connectivity, speed and intangibles. These forces are

 blurring the rules and redefining our business and our

 lives. Davis and Meyer write:

Has the pace of change accelerated way beyond your

comfort zone? Are the rules that guided your decisions

in the past no longer reliable? If so, you are just likeeveryone else who’s paying attention. You’re not

imagining things.

The elements of change that are driving these

momentous shifts are based on the fundamentaldimensions of the universe itself: time, space and mass

are the fundamental dimensions of them as well. Until

recently, this notion was too abstract to be very useful.

Now, we are realizing the extraordinary power this

insight has for the business world. Almost instantaneous communication and

computation, for example, are shrinking time and

focusing us on Speed. Connectivity is putting

everybody and everything online one way or anotherand has led to ‘the death of distance,’ a shrinking of 

space.6

You see, the Concorde did not get grounded by a faster

airplane. It got grounded by faster communication

methods. In this speeded up world, 1350 miles an hour

(the speed that the Concorde flies across the Atlantic) is

too slow.The term “Jet Age” sounds almost quaint in the

Internet age. A recent Reuters report announced:

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Chris Lytle is the author of The Accidental Salesperson and the creator of MAX, the newweb-based on-the-job sales training system that maximizes sales and minimizes time off thestreets. We want you to meet MAX.

Copyright ©2002 by Apex Performance Systems. Permission is not required for sharing anoccasional copy of an article with a few people. Permission is required to post on-line or reprintany of Chris Lytle’s articles. See “Terms and Conditions.”

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Scientists have set a new internet speed record bytransferring 6.7 gigabytes of data across 10,978

kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the U.S. to

 Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute. Using

a quantity of data equivalent to two feature-lengthDVD-quality movies, the transfer was accomplished at

an average speed of more than 923 megabits per

second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical

home broadband connection.7

That’s pretty quick.

Obsolescence Can Happen to You

What do change and obsolesence have to do with you,

 besides making it harder to keep up? Obsolescence can

happen to people too. You’re either growing or you’reobsolete.

Let’s consider how not to end up a museum piece —

 like the Concorde. Here are three ideas.

1. Change the way you think about change. Anne

Morrow Lindbergh said, “Only in growth, reform, andchange, paradoxically enough, is true security to be

found.”8

Push out the thought that the change is making youinsecure and embrace the idea that growth and change put

you on the path to security.

2. Become aware of just how secure you are. SadakoOgata is examining the impact of global trends on refugee

protection while completing her 18-month residency at the

Ford Foundation. She writes on Fast Company’s web site:

Security takes on a truly basic meaning for people whohave lived in an environment of extreme insecurity for

most of their lives. For the people of Afghanistan, who

have experienced the devastation of continuousconflicts for the past 23 years, security means the

promotion of genuine possibility. . . . Real security is

not about weapons. It’s about the widest possible range

of people having enough faith about living to seetomorrow — that they actually start to think about the

next day, the next week, the next year. Feeling secure

incorporates what you might call the elements of a

normal life. It’s about rebuilding your house. It’s about

going to school. It’s about having enough hope to plantin time for the spring season, because you know that

spring will come.9

Feeling a little more secure now?Inventory your skills and start NOW to improve them.

Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC)has produced a list of nine transferable skills deemed

“essential” by Canadian employers. [I think you’ll agree

these are universal and not merely Canadian.] These

essential skills, also known as transferable skills oremployability skills, enable you to perform the tasks

required by your occupation and other activities of 

daily life, provide you with a foundation to learn other

skills, and enhance your ability to adapt to workplacechange. Essential skills are not specific to any onecareer and they are not highly technical in nature,

rather they are the skills people use to carry out a wide

variety of everyday life and occupational tasks, and believe it or not, you’ve been using many of them

throughout your life.10

The nine essential skills include reading text, documentuse, writing, numeracy, oral communication, thinking

skills, working with others, computer use, and continuous

 learning.

I don’t think that any of those skills are optional and I

don’t think that they are “givens”—that you have them just because you graduated from high school or college. You

need to pick one skill from the list and work on it for 30

days. You might consider getting some testing to see howyou rate on problem solving. Videotape yourself making a

presentation and have someone offer you suggestions.

Join Toastmasters. Or do something simple like learn aword a day. You could read your computer manual or

online tutorial to learn something today that you didn’t

know yesterday about your computer, or take a business-

writing seminar or some other class.

Chipping away at and improving these nine skills aswell as your selling skills set could keep your career

flying — unlike the Concorde.

1http://www.innovationresource.com/articles/article_files/

driving%20forces.htm2http://www.motivatingquotes.com/survival.htm3Business: The Ultimate Resource, Perseus/Bloomsbury

Publishing, 2002, p. 12974,5http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2003/2003-04-11-

concorde.htm6Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, BLUR: The Speed of 

Change in the Connected Economy, Reading, Mass.:

 Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1998, p. 67http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2822333.stm

8http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/q126192.html9http://www.fastcompany.com/online/59/one.html10http://www.careerpathsonline.com/skills/article.html