Change - Ever increasing, never changing?
Change is moving faster. People are having to be more flexible than they have ever been before and businesses are facing challenges which the sleepy businesses of yester-year never had to worry about in their happy, stable existences. Is this true?
A classically uninspired thought for the day:
Read any business book of the past hundred years and they will all discuss the unrivalled rate of change at the time the book was published and the step change in difficulty between the last five years and the current one. My brain rejects this hypothesis as being far too simple, if we really were on the global CAGR [1] that this kind of change would represent then our collective economies would be signficiantly larger.
Is it an effect similar to the accoustical shepherd effect[2]? It sounds like it is continually rising as your brain first focusses on one band of noise increasing and then subtly switches and focusses on another band of noise increasing. In fact the shepherd tone is simply an unchanging and cyclical tone which just sounds as it is ever increasing/decreasing.
In a similar way, each rapid area of change in business appears to become less important with time, but a new area of change appears each time the brain adjusts to the old change, with that change increasing until it too is superseeded.
Listen to the shepherd tone and consider the effect. An identical cyclical tone sounding each time like it is (in this example) lower than the time you heard it before.
Perhaps, it is the same for business, and although we are learning from the latest new discovery, in fact there are a number of sound principles which are proved true every iteration around the cycle.
[1] CAGR - Compound Annual Growth Rate: the % rate at which something is increasing each year in comparison to its previous years. A CAGR of 10% on an initial size of 100 would = 133.1 after 3 years... (100 + 10% = 110 in the first year. 110 + 10% = 121 in the second year. 121 + 10% = 133.1 in the third year)
[2] For more information on the Shepherd tone see Wikipedia's article.
A classically uninspired thought for the day:
Read any business book of the past hundred years and they will all discuss the unrivalled rate of change at the time the book was published and the step change in difficulty between the last five years and the current one. My brain rejects this hypothesis as being far too simple, if we really were on the global CAGR [1] that this kind of change would represent then our collective economies would be signficiantly larger.
Is it an effect similar to the accoustical shepherd effect[2]? It sounds like it is continually rising as your brain first focusses on one band of noise increasing and then subtly switches and focusses on another band of noise increasing. In fact the shepherd tone is simply an unchanging and cyclical tone which just sounds as it is ever increasing/decreasing.
In a similar way, each rapid area of change in business appears to become less important with time, but a new area of change appears each time the brain adjusts to the old change, with that change increasing until it too is superseeded.
Listen to the shepherd tone and consider the effect. An identical cyclical tone sounding each time like it is (in this example) lower than the time you heard it before.
Perhaps, it is the same for business, and although we are learning from the latest new discovery, in fact there are a number of sound principles which are proved true every iteration around the cycle.
[1] CAGR - Compound Annual Growth Rate: the % rate at which something is increasing each year in comparison to its previous years. A CAGR of 10% on an initial size of 100 would = 133.1 after 3 years... (100 + 10% = 110 in the first year. 110 + 10% = 121 in the second year. 121 + 10% = 133.1 in the third year)
[2] For more information on the Shepherd tone see Wikipedia's article.
posted by Liam G | 7:59 am
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