"There is nothing permanent except change."
- Heraclitus, sixth century B.C.
That, at least, has not changed. But if Alvin Toffler, analyst of social change and author of several best-selling books, is to be believed, we haven't seen anything yet.
"All industries are entering a period of intense change," he told journalists and business leaders gathered at the Food Marketing Institute convention held in Chicago earlier this year.
Life may seem busy now, he said, but "we will look back on this as a relaxed time. Rates of change are accelerating. We are entering a period of revolutionary upheaval where people will have to live with high degrees of unpredictability."
Not only, he said, has our economic balance been thrown out of whack, but so has our political and military thinking. But even that is not the cause of the turbulence. "Something far deeper is hap-pen-ing."
We are entering, he says, the third wave of change.
The first wave came thousands of years ago, when people first invented agriculture.
The second wave occurred 300 years ago with the industrial revolution.
The third wave will be a total transformation in the nature of business and economics.
There are 10 reasons, says Toffler, why this is all happening:
1. Knowledge is becoming the central factor of economic development and production. "We are inventing new ways of creating wealth, where the basic factors of productivity, land, capital and raw materials, can't be factored in the same way."
2. A change in operating speed. The metabolism of the system has speeded up. Electronics have brought instant means of communication. And the old adage "time is money" is truer than ever.
3. A change in capital. Land used to be the only capital that meant anything. After the industrial revolution, capital was ownership of shares of stock. Paper was a symbol, but it still represented physical assets. Today paper is a symbol for knowledge in that organization. Capital is based on intangibles. These intangibles can all be used at the same time, and if used together and used wisely can create more.
4. A change in money. The first money had some uses other than just trade: salt, rice, calico. Then came paper money, which was a symbol of how much salt, rice or calico you had. "Today, the real money is plastic, or electronic blips. We have video money." And, says Toffler, it changes the rules and laws that govern how money is used.
5. A change in the structure of the economy. The industrial revolution was based on mass production, which created mass societies. Today the computer has reduced the costs of diversity, and we are moving to demassified production. Flexible technology is allowing infinite variety. They no longer have to shut down production lines to make changes, and this in turn changes everything we've been taught since Henry Ford.
"This is why a thousand new products enter the supermarket every month. Everywhere at the consumer level we see more variety, an explosion of diversity. We have foods for small groups. We used to have baby food and adult food. Now we have teen food and geriatric food, health food, ethnic food and more. In the next decade, we could see custom sales, electronic catalogs, more home shopping on TV."
6. A new kind of infrastructure. We are creating an electronic infrastructure, which will be the basis for the 21st century. As more information is needed for decisionmaking, we create ways to pass that information back and forth quickly. And this leads to diversity; the more homogenous you are, the less information you need.
"The future lies with the electronic nervous system. But one consequence of that is a subtle shift in power."
For example, bar codes give retailers more power in dealing with wholesalers. Retailers are able to track exactly how and when a product moves.
7. A change in accounting. This hasn't happened yet, says Toffler, but it will. Our accounting system is based on the old manufacturing system. We don't have a way to measure service and knowledge. And this holds back growth. "Our accounting system is obsolete and has to change."
8. A change in the nature of work. More people are handling symbols; fewer are handling physical goods. There has been a shift from muscle work to mind work. Employees will be classified into those who export information and those who import information. The process of creativity - creating new ideas, new ways of doing things - becomes essential. Mental activity will be a fundamental part of the new system; people will employed to simply filter out bad ideas. "There is nothing in our conventional economy that recognizes these kinds of activities," says Toffler.
9. A change in the nature of organization. We may see a revolt against bureaucracy and the traditional pyramid form where everything comes from the top down. The way information comes into an organization means it has to be chopped up and sent to various cubbyholes in departments and then synthesized back into the top hierarchy. There is so much information moving around, you don't have time to let it move up one step at a time. You have to give more power to people down below to make decisions. So we may see big companies divided into lots of small units that don't look like each others. We are demassifying corporate structure.
10. Changes in size. Bigger is not always better, but neither is smaller, says Toffler. We will see more of all sizes - a complex mosaic corporate structure and many more small businesses.
Put these 10 changes together, says Toffler, and you have a revolution. We will have new ways of making wealth, of producing and distributing goods and products, an increase in variety, increased speed of transactions, a shift of buying decisions into homes, development of new packaging, more ways to use and reuse materials.
And as technology changes, society will change. "They interact with each other."
The place of the home in the social structure will change. "In an agrarian society, the family was everything. In the industrial revolution, education comes out of the home and goes to the schools, health care comes out of the home and moves to hospitals."
But we are starting to move more work back to the home - 50 million Americans are now doing work at home. Health care is moving back. The home is a place for electronic shopping; we see more home delivery and pick-up services.
But, says Toffler, all this is not going to come without adjustments. "We must prepare for all these changes. We are going to need workers with different skills; we have to make diversity pro-duc-tive."
There is no question, he says, that we are entering the greatest wave of change since the industrial revolution.
But, at the same time, he says, he is not making predictions. "Nobody knows the future and exactly what will happen." But, he stresses, if all this doesn't happen, other things equally revolutionary will. "We are entering a new zone of history, economically, geopolitically, electronically. It is a time for sober reflection."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Coping with the new
The world is changing, but that doesn't mean we like it. In fact, we all have difficulty with change from time to time. But change is also something we need to learn to accept.
A first step, says Hap LeCrone, a psychologist who writes a column for the Cox News Service, is understanding why we don't like change.
Too often, he says, we see change as a threat instead of an opportunity. The people who have the most trouble with change tend to be:
- Those who fear the unknown, those who fear loss of control, the oppositional, the overwhelmed, the unmotivated and the tunnel-visioned.
But since change is inevitable, you will be better off if you can adapt rather than resist. How? Here are some tips that might help:
- Be flexible. Don't lock yourself into a rigid course of action. Always have a Plan B.
- Anticipate. If you look ahead to what changes are coming, and plan how they will affect you, you can do a lot to reduce the chaos.
- Practice optimism. Embrace the ideas of self-actualization and self-enhancement. Look for opportunities.
- Make conscious, thoughtful decisions. There is some change you can control. You don't have to buy every new piece of equipment that comes along. You may turn down a job because you don't want to change. You don't need to accept all change simply because everyone else is doing it.
- Associate with successful risk takers. Watch people around you to see how they accept change. Try to learn from those who do well.