The Ultimate Survival Skill for the New Economy
We're living in incredibly turbulent times. In spite of newspaper headlines proclaiming growing employment and a slowly growing economy, many business people admit to a pervasive feeling of uncertainty and confusion about their
businesses.
The well-spring of this uncertainty lies in one of the characteristics of the newly-arrived information age. Business people are being buffeted by an increasingly rapid rate of change.
Consider
this. In 1900, the total amount of knowledge available to mankind was doubling about every 500 years. In the year 2000, it was doubling about every two years. Today, according to some, the rate of change is doubling every 30 days!
Imagine the implications of that kind of increase in the rate of change! It means new products, new regulations, new market
configurations, new customers, and new technology in almost every industry. It's no wonder that we're confused and uncertain about what to do.
And the growth of that knowledge continues at an expanding rate. One futurist predicts that today's high school students will have to absorb more information in their senior year alone than their grandparents did in their entire
lifetime.
That incredibly rapid pace of new knowledge is driving the forces of change at an unprecedented rate. That rate of change is continuing to accelerate. The effect of that
