May 11, 2007

Technological Change and Irrelevance

The oft-used quote by General Shinseki has haunted me. I’m a change agent by nature and am constantly driven to innovate. But recently I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the rapidity of change. It’s exciting and overwhelming at the same time. Let me explain.

When the group of businessmen that eventually formed InsideWork® came together to study the Scriptures and discuss the role of commerce in God’s kingdom, e-mail was just gaining traction. Over the next years as we met together, we saw the tech bubble come and go as the calendar turned to a new century. Many in the group probably thought that the bubble was the logical comeuppance of the over-hyped tech sector that was always breathlessly announcing the next new, big, world-changing…whatever.

Well, the bubble popped, but it is important to note that it was an economic bubble (and the economy has recovered nicely), not a technology bubble. So while the businesses were shaking out and regrouping, the technology kept moving on…faster and faster. In the past 6 years, we’ve seen the explosive growth and penetration of new technological applications – instant messaging, texting, iPods, Podcasts, video sharing, social media, cell phone, cable, satellite, Tivo, etc. It’s coming at us fast and furious, and these things are changing life and the way business is played.

A Flashback of Communications Technology

When I immigrated to the U.S. and started my first business in 1972, mail was still in. Touch-tone phones were gaining ground. And being the technological wonder that I am, I even had a telex machine in my house for communicating with overseas customers. (If you know what a telex is, then you’re really showing your age! If you don’t know what it is, think loud clacking ticker-tape machine.)

This age gently continued until the advent of the fax machine and its ubiquitous status in the mid-1980’s. The fax not only began to transform business but also had a role in social/political movements. Underground groups used the fax to disseminate information and coordinate activities in the former Soviet Union prior to its fall.

The early 1990’s saw the rising tide of personal computing and the acceptance of email. At that time we had no idea of the sea-change that was coming in the next few years.

Resistance to Technological Change

With each technological change, there was a certain amount of resistance. Each wave of technology challenged conventional ways of doing things from how we handled business communications to how the businesses and markets were organized.

We resist in two ways. The first is the resistance of “that’s not how things are done.” I flash back to my required business communications classes in college. It was irrelevance at its best. We typed letters on IBM Selectric’s and were graded for composition, punctuation, and proper corporate language. And the highlight of the class was when he scooped up our letters, one by one, held them to the light to count how many “whiteouts” we had to correct for typos. More than 2 was cause for being dropped one whole letter grade. How did this professor cope when faxes made it acceptable to dash off hand written notes, and emails developed their own informality, let alone texting and IM with their own shorthand? Recently, I’ve had friendly discussions with businesspeople my age, who can’t understand how business can be done without email and how young people who largely use other means to communicate (IM, Facebook, MySpace, texting) can ever succeed in business.

The second form of resistance is our fear of learning new technologies. Don’t laugh. Some of you are still worried that you might push a wrong button on the key board and break your computer. Some of you continue to ask for paper copies of newsletters. Now, I’m not saying you have to adopt every new technology that comes along, but there is nevertheless no need to fear.

It occurred to me, in perhaps an oversimplified way, that in the seventies and eighties and even into the early 90’s, you basically had to adapt to one major technological shift per decade. We all had time to master the fax machine and get comfortable with it before email came along. Now in the last six years, technological shifts are coming every year. Many people are not just one technology behind, but four or five or six!

Now as we each respond with the two forms of resistance, change doesn’t stop and with each technological shift we miss, we risk becoming more and more irrelevant because these shifts are fundamentally changing how people communicate and learn, how businesses organize and go to market, how people collaborate and create, and how people interact and support one another.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is increasingly shaped by technology for good and ill. So, in this newsletter, I’ve included some video presentations to help us laugh at ourselves in our sometimes fearful attempts to embrace new technology, to help us understand how a younger generation views technology, and to help us learn one way of managing the information overload.

In future newsletters we will explore the impact of technology from a biblical worldview.

Video Link

The First Helpdesk

Mastering the Breakthrough Technology: The Book

This masterfully and humorously captures our own nervousness in learning a new technology. Enjoy!

Watch Medieval Helpdesk on YouTube

Video Link

OnHollywood Conference

Understanding the New Media Generation

Recently several of us at InsideWork® attended the OnHollywood Conference hosted by Tony Perkins of the AlwaysOn Network. Tony describes the conference thus: “OnHollywood is where cutting-edge technology CEOs from the back streets of Silicon Valley meet the Hollywood digital entertainment and media elite. This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the video, music, gaming, search, and mobile industries.”

We’ve linked to Tony’s opening presentation at the conference for two reasons. First, Tony provides a brilliantly clear description of a rapid but fundamental change that is occurring that he calls Goodbye PC Generation – Hello IM Generation. Just when we had settled into email as the prevalent form of communication, a new generation only uses it to communicate to grown ups and people in authority like teachers. The IM Generation is already making its mark in a big way.

Second, Tony’s team videotaped a group of 14 year olds discussing how they use technology. It is stunning. And maybe you’ll understand your teen’s a bit better or at least your future employees. That is unless you end up working for them!

Watch the first 12 minutes to see Tony’s presentation. The rest of the video is a presentation of the 100 top rated companies in digital media. There are some very valuable insights and innovative business models. The median age of these companies is 4 years since founding, with a median 45 employees, a median $19 million of total funding, and $3 billion in venture capital at stake.

Watch Tony Perkins' presentation and video of teenagers on technology

Video Link

Coping with the Flood of Online Information

A Simple Tool for Handling the Explosion

I agree. It’s overwhelming. I personally keep an eye on over 100 different sources of information on the internet. And as my list grew, so did the difficulty and time consumption of keeping up. Over a year ago, I began to use RSS, which allows you to have any new information from your favorite sites fed to you automatically every time you open your web browser. Now rather than taking a long walk around the internet to check what’s new, all that is new is pushed to you. It’s a great time saver. You can scan quickly what you want. It’s actually enabled me to expand the number of sources I track because of the ease of organization and use.

This video is a simple explanation of what RSS is and how to use it.

Watch RSS in Plain English on Common Craft