Acceleration
The old adage of “haste makes waste”, is no longer applicable because in the world today it is being done well and fast
In a book called “Microtrends” M. Penn and E. Zalesne show peculiar data regarding small changes that we can see in today’s world. The American people, for instance, sleep 25% less than 100 years ago, and spend only one third of the time dining than they did 30 years ago. This acceleration of time can be seen in several ways. “It took radio 29 years to reach 50 million users. Television needed 13 years to reach that same number of users; the Internet only took 4 years, iPod just three, and more recently Facebook reached 100 million users in less than nine months”.
With its growing influence technology has represented different roles in society throughout the last decades. In the 1980s it mainly meant a way of increasing productivity. In the 90s, the email era, it took on a role of information and knowledge sharing. Currently, it clearly asserts itself as a way to connect people and facilitate their collaboration. The adoption of technology is therefore today’s most dynamic “measure and qualifier”; this confirms Moore’s law, which relates, among other things, the semi-conductor industry’s ability to double their capability every twelve months, reducing in proportion the costs, allowing for a continuous and massive adoption of new products and solutions.
A minute still has sixty seconds, but what can be fit in there is much more than a decade ago, and that confirms the notion of compression of the times in which we are living. At this point, we can say that with the mobility of information, which is now flying above us in a cloud, and with simple and cheap access to technology, the size of organizations has ceased to be the only means of sustaining their business model. Many organizations that we know will be surpassed by others that we haven’t even heard about, simply because “more haste, less speed”.
David Lopes