Читать книгу The Exponential Era - David Espindola - Страница 22

According to Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”¹² In March 1996, Nicholas Negroponte, head of MIT's Media Lab and author of Being Digital expressed the same sentiment less eloquently but in a very straightforward manner: “People don't get exponential.”¹³ More than 20 years have passed since Negroponte's pronouncement, but that reality still holds true today. To this date, people still do not understand the power of the exponential curve. Perhaps this is a reflection of its deceiving nature, and how the exponential curve manifests itself in a way similar to a line in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Or perhaps it is a reflection of the fact that exponential is simply too difficult a concept to grasp for brains evolved to work efficiently based on the timing of circadian rhythms that function best with emotive images, and that prefer to think linearly.¹⁴

Our continued use of agrarian words to describe business activities, like “seed” (as in seed money in the venture world), “plant” (as in initiate a foothold in a market), “cultivate” (business development of a new market), “harvest” (sell), and “cash cows” (usually revenue streams that are being “milked” for remaining profits before the market collapses or is disrupted) has locked our thinking into a pattern of behaviors completely out of sync with our era. In the Exponential Era, we don't operate on circadian rhythms or agrarian time scales.

This is an era marked by the confluence of fast‐changing technologies that converge to create new ecosystems, resulting in digital disruptions at a rapid velocity. It ignores our hard‐wired primal core, leaving us slow to adapt to changes that are happening in new time scales. The technology growth that we are experiencing today does not follow linear progressions like animal migrations, growing seasons, and calculated production runs.

In the Exponential Era, having access to data and having the ability to understand the information the data is telling us is on every individual's and organization's critical path for survival. It is an era where “knowing” is becoming paramount to surviving. The traditional “have's and have not's,” which referred to one's means, have accelerated, transformed, and become “those who know and those who don't.”¹⁵ This is an era that runs on creating, harnessing, intercepting, and integrating technologies at speeds and scales never before experienced in human history.