Sunday, February 26, 2017

Opportunities in the midst of accelerating change

Everything is getting faster.

Everything is getting crazier.

Many people say that everything in our lives needs to get radically reordered to keep up.

I don't think so.  I think that old school values matter increasingly.

In 1965 Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published an idea that has become know over the decades as Moore's law  Moore extrapolated that computing would dramatically increase in power, and decrease in relative cost, at an exponential pace.  

You can't match wits with Moore's law.  We can stay ahead of it by leveraging the oldest of pass times - conversation, unexpected collaborations, and building networks.

This is a good quote from Thomas L. Friedman's new book 'Thank You for Being Late':

"If you took Intel's first-generation microchip from 1971, the 4004, and the latest chip that Intel has on the market today, the sixth-generation Intel core processor, you will see that Intel's latest chip offers 3,500 times more performance, is 90,000 times more efficient, and is about 60,000 times lower in cost.

To put it more vividly, Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore's law.

These are the numbers:  Today, the Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour.  It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents!"

Our computational skills haven't matched Moore's law exponential growth for decades.

However, for those willing to ride the bronco, our people skills can.  And we can do it through the oldest of mediums.  Conversations. A willingness to understand and consider.  A penchant for building new networks.

Are things getting faster?  Yes.

Are things getting crazier?  Only if you let them.



Thomas Friedman's book 'Thank You for Being Late'.

Moore's law

Eastern Screech Owl.  Wisconsin, late winter, 2017,

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