Key Point: “Are things just getting too damned fast and complex?” That’s a question I hear from people everywhere. Combined with the supernova of exploding technology (underpinned by Moore’s Law), increasingly fast-paced globalization (financial goods and services, information, ideas, innovation) and the unprecedented tremors in our planet’s natural system (climate change, bio-diversity loss, deforestation, geochemical flows), we’ve entered into what Pulitzer Prize winner and NYT best selling author, Thomas Friedman, describes as an “age of accelerations.”
These conditions are transforming every aspect of modern life. We all know this to be true at some level, yet to get a comprehensive, systemic overview, I urge all of our readers to read or listen to Friedman’s latest book: Thank You For Being Late. When you read about the transformative examples in each area, it kind of blows your mind.
Additionally, let’s throw the following important and evolving principle into the mix: Once any object is connected, it fundamentally changes the very nature of that object. In 2016, one of the most widely read books by CEO’s was The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper Ramo. After reading it, I understand why. This book argues the premise that the spread of networks and constant, ever-faster connections, is creating a new kind of order everywhere. Today, power includes the paradox of being both more concentrated AND distributed than ever before (for example; Google, Facebook, Twitter). He contends that individuals, organizations, and nations that can appreciate and master the new-networked order will flourish; those that can’t will flounder. This author, who is on the Board of Amazon, FedEx, etc. is a highly respected advisor to elite leaders around the world, and he underscores that this is a time calling for “seventh sense” thinking—the ability to discern how things connect to other things in nodes and networks, “to look at any object and see the way in which it is changed by connection forever.”
Character Moves:
- Join me on a journey to better understand the implications of leading others and ourselves in this environment of transformative accelerants AND disruptive network connectivity. It requires fundamentally reimagined leadership models, new ways of working/living, and different thinking/acting. The traditional ideas of “change leadership” are outmoded! Throughout 2017 we will explore and together be pioneers of the “new way.”
- If leading CEOs are reading Friedman and Ramo, you may want to as well. I certainly am.
A changed “object” in The Triangle
Lorne
One Millennial View: We Millennials are lucky that we’ve never really existed in a time that wasn’t rapidly changing, and we’ve constantly been adapting to new transformative accelerants as they’ve been introduced to us over the past couple decades. This should make “change” a lot more interesting than intimidating. The principle of connectivity, however, is going to turn things on their head for Millennials as well.
– Garrett
Edited and published by Garrett Rubis