Jump The Curve Archives: 02/2009

Jump the Curve Strategy #4: Just Wiki It

The earlier point about how P&G has increased its productivity speaks to another new mechanism that can increase productivity: wikis. Established on the premise that all of us together are smarter than any of us individually, wikis provide a powerful tool for helping companies collaborate on projects, manage group information, and incubate ideas on an accelerated basis.

The concept has grown so popular that even the process of writing of books is being wiki-fied. In the fall of 2006, I accepted an invitation to participate in the writing of a book entitled We Are Smarter Than Me, which attempts to demonstrate that a community can write a more compelling book than an individual expert.

I can’t say I contributed anything terribly profound, but I did add the following example to the chapter on open-source ideas:

Scott Adams and Dilbert. In 1998, Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, became the first cartoonist to publish his e-mail address in his carton strip. Whether it was by strategic intent or dumb luck, Adams now regularly supplements his comic strip--which chronicles bureaucratic absurdities, management ineptitude, and bouts of corporate stupidity--with poignant insights and stories from his legions of fans who send him more than one thousand e-mails a day. From this pool of ideas, Adams has been able to augment his own extraordinary creativity to create more cartoons strips, and he also draws on the public’s input to provide better content for his books, Web site, and blog.

Whether it will be accepted, modified, or deleted is now in the hands of the community. The more intriguing result will be if the project works and the community creates a compelling book. My hunch is that it will because wikis offer an easy-to-use mechanism for tapping into a wider base of knowledge. Wikis also allow ideas to be shared, modified, amended, and otherwise improved on a faster basis than any conventional system.

One company that is employing a wiki with some success today is GlaxoSmithKline, which uses one to allow employees to share information during clinical trials for its new drugs. By providing people with the opportunity to supply their colleagues with more context, updated information, and even advice, the company’s management is using the wiki to help GlaxoSmithKline successfully avoid traps and pitfalls that have hindered it in the past. The net impact is that faulty drug candidates are being pulled quicker, and successful ones are reaching market sooner because regulators’ questions and concerns are being addressed in greater detail at an earlier stage. The former outcome saves the company money; the latter helps it make new money.

Exponential Insight

It is often hard for employees to be productive when coworkers constantly interrupt them with questions. A wiki can minimize such disruptions by allowing employees to create an ongoing database of common information. Questions and answers can be posted directly to the site where they can even be given more contextual depth. For instance, comments can be left and related Web sites and documents can be hyperlinked into a wiki. As more people begin contributing increasing amounts of information to the wiki, the utility and value of it will increase proportionately.

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Jump the Curve Strategy #1: Learn to Spell Zenzizenzizenzic
Introduction to Chapter Two: The Power of Zenzizenzizenzic
Welcome to the Exponential Economy: Prepare to Jump the Curve
Introduction to Jump the Curve

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Jump the Curve Strategy #3: Look to the Kindness of Strangers

The notion of building a better product--a better mousetrap, if you will--is a powerful one, and more often than not the central figure in the story has been the lone individual who is frequently portrayed as diligently laboring away in his basement or garage devising a new or improved product. The importance of individual skill, initiative, knowledge, and capability will always remain important, but a new dynamic is now growing in power and it lies outside of domain of the individual. If one replaces the term mousetrap with mountain bike, this idea becomes clearer.

It may surprise you to learn that the popular off-road mountain bike wasn’t invented by a single person toiling away in his garage. Rather the bike morphed over time as a variety of committed, dedicated, and passionate cyclists began tinkering with their bikes to help them better meet the stringent requirements of their off-road pursuits.

First someone decided that the bike should have large balloon tires to better withstand the rough terrain. This was followed by thumb-shifting derailleur gears to allow bikers to more easily navigate steep mountain slopes. Next came motorcycle lever-operated drum brakes (to better stop while moving downhill), and eventually flat handlebars and lightweight tubing were added to confer additional advantages.

The lesson in this story is twofold. First, products evolve. Secondly, evolutionary advances are often developed by the people who rely on the product and not employees of the company manufacturing the product. There is nothing new or radical in this idea, but today’s technology has now sufficiently advanced to the stage where businesses can do a much better job of reaching out to those users to harness their ideas and speed up the evolutionary progression of their products.

At the forefront of this trend is the open-source movement. To fully understand the potential of the open-source movement, however, we will focus on something tangible: gold.

In 2002 GoldCorp’s CEO, Rob McEwen, wasn’t fully convinced that, in spite of what his company’s experts were telling him, there wasn’t more gold to be mined in his company’s main Red Lake mine.

To test his hunch, he proposed to do something radical. He wanted to open up his company’s geological data--which in the gold industry is a closely held proprietary secret--to the world’s most knowledgeable mining experts and give them a chance to determine if there might be more gold in the mine. As an incentive, McEwen offered a sizeable financial prize to anyone who could make a compelling case as to why his company should look for gold in a particular location. If the person’s hypotheses proved correct, he or she would be awarded the money.

Over the objections of his board of directors, McEwen posted his company’s information on the Internet. Within days the Web site generated 500,000 hits, and 1,400 people from over fifty countries entered submissions. The company then selected the five best entries and began mining. Goldcorp struck gold on four of five selections. Today the company has increased its market capitalization almost fourfold, and Red Lake mine remains one of the world’s more profitable gold mines.

There is no shortage of other companies tapping into the open source movement. Lego and iRobot, the maker of the robotic Roomba vacuum cleaner, are allowing their best customers to see and experiment with early beta versions of products, and they are listening to their suggestions about how to improve these products. IBM is opening up its patents to outside lawyers and even its competitors in an effort to speed up the patent-approval process, and Proctor & Gamble and a handful number of pharmaceutical companies are using a Web site called InnoCentive.com to post some of their more intractable problems in the hopes of tapping into the expertise that exists within the broader research community.

In fact, back in 2000, P&G, which has a large research and development staff of 8,000, announced an ambitious goal of having half of its new products and technologies come from outside the company. Seven years into the initiative, the company reports that 35 percent of all new products bear at least some input from outsiders. Moreover, it reports that productivity of its in-house staff has increased by 60 percent.

Exponential Insight

Right out of college I served as a naval intelligence officer and was privy to classified photos from supersecret satellites flying above the earth. Today anyone can go to Google Earth and download comparable photos.

What is more interesting is that with this information citizen-sleuths are now making discoveries that have eluded even the best intelligence analysts. In 2006 the Associated Press published a story about a man who had a passion for viewing Chinese landscape. One day he discovered a peculiar topographical feature in a remote corner of northwest China. Something looked familiar about it, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Eventually he realized the site was identical to a strategic piece of real estate along the Sino-Indian border. From this he correctly deduced that China had replicated the territory to better practice attacks against the target in India. In the exponential economy, secrets might actually yield more value by being declassified.

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Twitter is Exponential. What Does it Mean?

As you can see from the chart to the right, Twitter—like Google, Wikipedia and, most recently, FaceBook—is experiencing exponential growth. I have recently become enamored of Twitter and it is why I’m sponsoring this contest.

After reading this piece in Techcrunch the other day I have, however, begun wondering more about what direction(s) the platform and the technology will head. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts—and that’s regardless of whether you are a Twitter and think it is the best thing since sliced bread or a non-Twitter and believe it is just another over-hyped, unprofitable Web 2.0 wannabe that will soon be yesterday’s news. 

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Wrap Your Brain Around This Future iPhone

A Canadian movie firm has put together a short 50-second movie clip spoofing the future of “iPhone Everything” by suggesting it will have a neural interface and be able to control things by thought. It is a clever piece, but I recommend that you also watch the video directly below the first YouTube clip—making phone calls by thought alone is no joke. Seriously. My advice: People often have a way of under-anticipating the future, don’t be one of those people.

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Jump the Curve Strategy #2: Take a Bird’s Eye View of the World

Without question, one of the most extraordinary exponential thinkers the world has ever known was Leonardo da Vinci. In the early sixteenth century he was already envisioning helicopter-like contraptions, tanks, bicycles, calculators, and even the concentrated use of solar power.

Lesser known than many of his other works of art is a painting called The Bird’s Eye-View of a Landscape. In it da Vinci paints the Tuscan landscape as imagined from the perspective of a bird. The painting is remarkable because the viewpoint is far higher than any building in Florence could have afforded da Vinci at that time.

The painting required da Vinci to envision himself on a perch a few thousand feet high. Interestingly, if da Vinci were six feet in height, through the power of zenzizenzizenzic, he would have reached 1,536 feet--or about the perspective from which the landscape was painted. The challenge for the exponential executive is to do the same with tomorrow’s business landscape. If you do extrapolate out many of the technological advances mentioned in this blog over the next decade, the view is sure to astound you. (If you don’t believe me, I recommend this stimulating 18-minute talk by Juan Enriquez, which reiterates the theme of exponential evolution that I discussed in this recent post describing how the issue might be the next great political debate in this country.)

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Jump the Curve Strategy #1: Learn to Spell Zenzizenzizenzic

Jump the Curve Strategy #1: Learn to Spell Zenzizenzizenzic

It should be no surprise that both Google and Wikipedia, as exemplars of exponential growth themselves, have aided in the research of this book. (In 1998 Google’s search engines combed through 25 million Web pages. When this book went to print it was up to more than 25 billion Web pages, a thousandfold improvement, and the number of Wikipedia entries has increased from 100 in 2001 to more than 10 million today.)

To this end, I typed the term “exponential’ into Google, and the top entry I received back was from Wikipedia. After clicking on a related link called “list of exponential topics,” I stumbled upon a small entry at the bottom of one of the pages. It had the word zenzizenzizenzic listed.

Being curious, I decided to explore a little further. To my surprise, it brought up another Wikipedia entry. This one offered a definition of the word. Succinctly, zenzizenzizenzic is defined as the eighth power or exponent of a number. For instance, the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 is 256 or 28.

In addition to thinking it’s a cool, albeit weird, word, I realized that the concept of zenzizenzizenzic was precisely the parameter that I was hoping to put on this book.

Come with me now as we take a short walk into the future as viewed through the power of zenzizenzizenzic. (See tomorrow’s post for a number of different examples.)

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Intro to Chapter Two: The Power of Zenzizenzizenzic

”Small opportunities are often the beginning of great opportunities enterprises.”
--Demosthenes

”In periods of profound change, the most dangerous thing is to incrementalize yourself into the future.”
--Kurt Yeager

Knowledge, it has been said, is the key to success. It is a statement that is hard to disagree with unless you buy into that old adage that ignorance is bliss. Proceeding on the assumption that if you believed the latter you probably wouldn’t be reading this book, I will go farther out on a limb and state that for years one of the world’s better recognized fonts of knowledge has been the Encyclopedia Britannica--a reservoir of 30,000-plus pages of information replete with titillating tidbits of data about everything from atoms to zettabytes (a term I will introduce to you later).

In the late 1990s the revered encyclopedia came under assault from a new form of media distribution--the CD-ROM. Able to store vast amounts of information in a more convenient, colorful, and vivid fashion, Encyclopedia Britannica was forced to deal with this new competitive threat and proceeded in good haste to provide its information in a similarly fresh, snappy, and visually pleasing format.

By 2001 the company was back on its feet and headed down the sweet path of profitability. No sooner, though, had that storm passed when another began forming on the horizon. But just as a hurricane begins with a single molecule and is not immediately discernible, so was this one.

The storm was called Wikipedia, and it started in 2001 with nothing more than 100 encyclopedia-like entries drafted by a few amateurs and posted to a Web site. It seemed innocent enough. After all, how likely was it that a bunch of strangers, working for free, could someday produce an encyclopedia that would rival the esteemed Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of depth, breadth, and accuracy. It sounded about as plausible as a few molecules in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean turning into a Category 5 hurricane.

Yet in late 2005 Wikipedia smashed into the Encyclopedia Britannica. That year the prestigious scientific journal Nature announced after a comprehensive study that the average entry in Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as the typical Encyclopedia Britannica entry.

The advantage is still in Encyclopedia Britannica’s favor, but how much longer will it be able to withstand the gale force winds? The answer: not much. That is because we are now living in a world of exponential advances, and the scales are tipped in Wikipedia’s favor.

To begin, the very subject matter of the encyclopedia, which is to say knowledge itself, is growing exponentially. It has been said that human knowledge is doubling roughly every seven years. If true--and given how the other forces that will be outlined later in this chapter are adding to the sum total of knowledge--it leads to the almost ridiculously sounding (but mathematically verifiable) conclusion that by 2050 everything we know today will represent less than 1 percent of the sum total of the world’s knowledge.

Even if one disagrees with this statement, it is difficult not to acknowledge that radical advances in medicine, physics, chemistry, and biotechnology are changing both the content and value of the material in encyclopedias and that the old print-and-publish method of storing and displaying such information is, if not obsolete, at least impractical.

Neither a printed encyclopedia nor even a CD-ROM can react to this volume of change. Only Wikipedia, by posting information directly to the Internet, can respond in a timely fashion.

Wikipedia also has the advantage in terms of human horsepower. Advances are happening so fast, in so many different fields, that it is virtually impossible for the staff at Encyclopedia Britannica to keep pace. The challenge is not nearly so great for Wikipedia because it doesn’t have a staff. Instead it relies on a self-selected universe of experts and enthusiasts to keep track of all of these developments.

Third, Wikipedia has a distinct economic advantage. Not only does it not need to print its material in either book or even CD-ROM format, it doesn’t need to pay an army of researchers and writers or underwrite the cost of housing any physical resources or employees.

The final kicker is this: Even if the Encyclopedia Britannica decides to put all of its content online for free, most people will still go to Wikipedia because its content consistently shows up near the top of most search engines. (A quick search on Google for the terms “atom” or “zettabyte” bears out this fact.)

What Encyclopedia Britannica is facing is a severe reaction to the exponential economy, but it is not alone. In fact, if history is any guide, a number of other companies, institutions, and organizations will soon be facing a comparable amount of change in the not-too-distant future.

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm

According to Thomas Kuhn, the famous American intellectual and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a paradigm is defined as a set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a paradigm as “a pattern or model.” In broader terms, in today’s vernacular it is often thought of as a specific way of viewing reality.

Using the example of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the company’s first paradigm was that knowledge was produced by experts, transcribed into books, and sold to customers. In the 1990s the paradigm shifted slightly. Information was still produced by credentialed experts, but it was distributed more regularly and in a digital format.

Sometime around 2005 the paradigm lurched more violently. Information was posted by amateurs to a Web site on a continuous basis and could be accessed by anybody and downloaded for free--in eight languages (and counting) no less.

The example highlights another extraordinary aspect of the exponential economy: The rate of paradigm changes is itself advancing exponentially. According to Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, paradigm shifts are doubling every ten years. To hammer home this point, Kurzweil provides a wonderfully simple way of thinking about these changes.

For starters, he assumes that a paradigm for a business can be said to have shifted when 25 percent of the population incorporates the new technology. By this measure, it took the telephone, from the time it was invented, thirty-five years to be adopted by one-quarter of society. The radio took thirty-one years, the television twenty-six years, the personal computer sixteen years, the Internet seven years, and Wikipedia just five years.

A slightly different prism through which to view this rate of change can be found in Standard & Poor’s rating of equity risks, which ranks companies on an alphabetical scale with A+ denoting the least risky and D signifying the most risky. In 1985, 41 percent of all companies earned an A+. By 2006 this figure plummeted to 13 percent. “The future,” as Yogi Berra once said, “ain’t what it used to be.” It is becoming far more risky.

The tangible evidence that paradigms are shifting ever faster is all around us. Since 2001, 50 million (and growing) mp3 players and iPods have changed the way people listen to music. YouTube and video-sharing sites have caused the major television networks to adjust their business models, and the Internet and blogs have changed the nature of the newspaper business and political campaigns.

Ask yourself this: Three years ago would you have been able to define the terms blog, wiki, and Wi-Fi or have been familiar with the terms RFID and Web 2.0? However, there is no time to even catch your breath because vlogs, mash-ups, WiMAX, Smart Dust, social networking, grid computing, and Web 3.0 are already looming on the horizon.

Now it is not my contention that exponential advances will change everything, but I do agree with Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, Charlie Munger, who once said that since it is impossible to know everything it is important to load up on a few key insights. The exponential growth of technology is one of those key insights.

Before going any further, let me also add that I agree with Kenneth Boulding, a brilliant Oxford-educated economist, who once said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go forever in a finite world is either a madman or economist.”

Exponential growth in almost every field does have limits. But--and this is an important but--society is nowhere near the outer limits of the growth that it will experience in computers, data storage, artificial intelligence, genomics, brain scanning, robotics, nanotechnology, and knowledge.

Still, in an effort to avoid long-term prognostications this book will keep the discussion within the realm of the practical by limiting most extrapolations to no more than eight iterations--or doublings--out. Considering that transistors, bandwidth, and the number of gene sequences are all doubling every eighteen months, the number of Internet nodes and brain-scanning capability is doubling every twelve months, and the number of robots is doubling every nine months, this will limit the scope of the discussion to between six and twelve years out. As luck would have it, Wikipedia has provided the perfect word by which to frame these discussions: zenzizenzizenzic.

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Welcome to the Exponential Economy: Prepare to Jump the Curve (February 17, 2009)

”Technology has always been important, but we are standing on the precipice of an inflection point in human history. Technology is reaching what I call the knee of the curve, a point in time in which its exponential growth is taking off at a nearly vertical slope . . . the pace of progress is itself accelerating.”
--Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

Someone once asked Albert Einstein what he considered mankind’s most powerful discovery. Without hesitation he replied, “Compound interest.” The world’s numerati have long been fascinated by the awesome power of geometrical growth, and to prosper in the economy of the future, or what I call the exponential economy, today’s leaders must go beyond simple fascination and embrace the extraordinary possibilities that exponential growth portends.

The distinction between linear growth and exponential growth is not merely a matter of degrees. It can literally be the difference between life and death, as the following story demonstrates.

According to legend, the emperor of China, after being presented with the game of chess, was so impressed with it that he offered the inventor--a seemingly humble man--a gift of his choosing. The inventor made a request that on the face of it seemed innocent enough. He requested that he be granted a single grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on until all the board’s squares were accounted for. The emperor glanced at the board, noted it had only sixty-four squares, and readily granted the man his request.

The story abruptly ends with the emperor severing the inventor’s head after only the thirty-second square. This is because, although only halfway through the deal, the emperor was already committed to providing the inventor the equivalent of forty acres worth of rice. Had he lived up to the terms of the agreement, the emperor would have been put in the untenable position of having to supply 18 million trillion grains of rice. To appreciate this predicament it helps to understand that it would take an area approximately twice the size of the earth, including all of the oceans, to produce that much rice.

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!

Like most fables, the story holds a powerful and valuable lesson and it is one that is especially relevant today: If you think change is happening fast today, you haven’t seen anything yet. Consider just the first of many such real-world equivalents of exponential growth: computer transistors. For the past forty years the number of transistors that could be placed on a computer chip has doubled every eighteen to twenty-four months. This development is widely known as Moore’s law and is named in honor of Gordon Moore, the former CEO of Intel, who in 1965 accurately predicted this progression.

For years so-called experts have been predicting the imminent demise of Moore’s law. Undeterred by such prophecies, talented engineers and technology geeks have ignored their warnings, andd some time in 2007 Intel Corporation and others will achieved the twenty-ninth iteration of this doubling. In so doing they will successfully squeezed between mreo than 500 million and 800 million transistors onto a single chip. This astonishing achievement has dropped the cost of one megahertz of computer processing power from $7,000 in 1970 to just fractions of a penny today.

According to the semiconductor industry, there is still clear sailing for Moore’s law for at least the next ten years. This means, among other things, that by 2018 computers will become a minimum of thirty-two times more powerful than those existing today.

Using the earlier analogy of the chessboard, with regard to the modern transistor era of computers we have not even approached the halfway point in the doubling game. To put it another way, this means that society is but a fraction of the way into the computer revolution. The really big changes are still before us.

The time to begin contemplating what computers thirty-two times more powerful will mean for your business is now. To do this you will need to learn to “jump the curve.”

To understand what I mean by this term, return for a moment to the example that I cited in the book’s introduction of a penny doubling every day for a single month. Up until day twenty-three it is difficult to notice any discernible movement. By day twenty-five you can begin to observe a slight inclination up the Y axis, but it hardly looks noteworthy because it appears linear in nature. Only between day twenty-six and day twenty-seven can you notice an inflection point. This is sometimes called the “knee of the curve,” and it represents a brief interlude between the more modest, linear-looking aspect of the curve and the much more radical part of the curve that shoots up in an almost vertical fashion.

To understand the true implications of the trend, it is necessary to jump the curve and look at how different things are from day twenty-seven--$671,088--to day thirty, when the total has reached $5.368 million. If the chart continued for just another five days, the total would leap to almost $172 million.

The challenge is that it is not just pennies or computer transistors that are growing exponentially, it is data storage, bandwidth, genomics, brain scanning, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, and knowledge. Only by jumping the curve can the exponential executive appreciate just how different the future will be from today.

Exponential Insight

In the game of football, to be an excellent passing quarterback it is not essential to know anything about the physical forces of speed or gravity that affect the ball’s movement as it makes its way to the receiver. Rather a good quarterback simply has to anticipate where the receiver will be at a certain time and throw the ball--not to where he is but to where he will be. The same principle is at work for the exponential executive. It is not essential to understand the underlying sciences of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and so forth in order to survive in tomorrow’s exponential economy. One must, though, grasp where these trends are headed because that will help gauge the distance one must jump the curve in order to effectively position his or her organization to prosper in the future.

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Introduction to Jump the Curve

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Introduction to Jump the Curve (February 16, 2009)

”Never underestimate an exponential.”
--Carl Sagan

For reasons I can’t entirely recall now, my freshman year of high school began on Friday, September 1, 1978--the day before the Labor Day weekend, which is traditionally regarded as the last official weekend of summer. I will never forget the very first lesson of my first class--Social Studies I. It began promptly at 8:05 AM and was taught by Louie Senta. He was a gruff old man with a shock of silver hair and a gravelly voice. If I didn’t know better I would have thought he was delivered straight from central casting to play the role of an intimidating disciplinarian--a role, I might add, that he played with a persuasive amount of gusto.

After the bell rang signaling the start of class, Senta rested his steely blue eyes upon his new wide-eyed charges for what seemed like an eternity. He then posed this peculiar question: “If you had a choice between taking $100,000 a day for this entire month or accepting a single penny today and having the penny double every day for the remainder of the month, which would you select?

The class was silent, but I remember thinking, “What a stupid question.” Unbowed by the sea of incredulous, pimple-spotted faces staring back at him, Senta asked, “How many of you would choose $100,000 a day?” His face showed no emotion as he paused a moment to let us to ponder our answer.

At the time my only concern was whether the month of September had thirty or thirty-one days and, therefore, whether I would be entitled to the princely sum of $3 million or $3.1 million.

Senta called for a showing of hands. Without bothering to look around the room to seek the assurance of my peers, I shot my hand up. Only afterward did I glance around the room and note with mild satisfaction that my new classmates were just as bright as me.

To confirm what was already obvious, Senta then asked if anyone would choose the second option. No one raised their hand. Then, in a refrain that was to become all too familiar for the next four years of our lives, he ordered us, “Do the math. See how much richer you are because of your wisdom.”

Being good with numbers, I quickly doubled the penny ten times and calculated the sum to be $5.12. I continued on for another ten doublings. The figure after the twentieth iteration, I noted with a serene sense of satisfaction, was a scanty $5,242.88. Again, I pressed on in confidence. It was only after the twenty-eighth step--when the figure reached $1,342,177.28--that a sinking feeling came over me and I realized the error of my ways. After the thirtieth and final doubling I calculated I would have been entitled to $5,368,709.12--or almost $2.4 million more than if I had taken the “obvious” choice.

In retrospect I suspect that the purpose of Mr. Senta’s little exercise was twofold. For starters, the quiz was doubtlessly his way of humbling a bunch of cocky fourteen-year-old know-it-alls and demonstrating to us, in no uncertain terms, that we still had much to learn.

In a larger sense, though, I believe he was trying to teach us a more profound philosophical lesson: Things that might at first appear to be obvious are not always so. While he didn’t say it at the time, the implicit message was that it was important to understand the underlying forces that are at work in any given situation.

I tell this little story because, just as my classmates and I didn’t appreciate the power of exponential growth with regard to the penny, so many people these days also underestimate the power of exponential growth in other fields. Today there are no fewer than nine technological forces that have been and are continuing to grow at near exponential rates, and unless people begin to come to terms with the momentous changes that are afoot they are going to make some costly mistakes--mistakes that will make my hypothetical loss of $2.4 million look like child’s play.

The nine technological trends undergoing exponential advancement are computers/semiconductors, data storage, Internet bandwidth, the sequencing of the human genome, brain scanning, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, and the advancement of knowledge itself.

Jump the Curve is not, however, a book about technology--although it will document and explore how many of these technological trends will impact the world of commerce. Rather it is a book about change andt will lay out the case for why leaders must welcome change. More importantly, it will provide a number of tangible steps that will help people and organizations embrace radical change in order to tap into the amazing possibilities that these new and profound transformations will create.

Throughout the course of this book the reader will find that I rely on a number of stories and analogies to illustrate many of the points that I am seeking to make. The reason for this is because the majority of people--especially nontechnical people for whom this book is primarily intended--do a better job of absorbing and comprehending stories and analogies than they do complex and arcane lectures about technological trends.

To this end, one of my favorite stories about the power of exponential growth is a story about the pond and the water lily. It can help anyone who needs to be jolted out of his current--or what I called a linear--mode of thinking.

In a nutshell, here’s the story: Imagine a small pond that sprouts a single lily on June 1. The lily splits into equal-sized lilies every day for a month. Further assume that the lilies of are such a size that at the end of the month the entire pond is covered with the pesky aquatic plants.

Under such a scenario what percentage of the pond do you imagine would be covered on June 20--or two-thirds of the way into this exercise? One percent? Five percent? Ten percent? Perhaps higher?

I am sorry to say that not only are all of the above guesses wrong, they are, in the words of my old teacher, Mr. Senta, “dangerously wrong.” By day twenty lilies cover roughly 0.01one one-thousandth of the pond--a wee one-tenth of 1 percent.

What transpires in the next ten days, though, is nothing short of transformational. Here"s the math (some of the numbers have been rounded slightly):

Day 20: .01%
Day 21: .02%
Day 22: .04%
Day 23: .078%
Day 24: 1.56%
Day 25: 3.125%
Day 26: 6.25%
Day 27: 12.5%
Day 28: 25%
Day 29: 50%
Day 30: 100%

I recount this story because it reveals a common misunderstanding about exponential trends. In the beginning, most people don’t even recognize the trend as exponential. For instance, a single lily growing to cover one-tenth of one percent of a pond hardly seems noteworthy, let alone deserving of special attention.

The problem with this negligence is that it can cause people to ignore or dismiss some very big and significant trends. All the while exponential math continues to weave its inextricable magic. Unfortunately, all too often, by the time people finally grasp how fast things are progressing--say on day twenty-eight of the pond example--and hope to either capitalize on its explosive growth or, alternatively, avoid being overwhelmed by its growing power, it is too late.

Here’s the point: The forces that I mentioned earlier--computers, data storage, Internet bandwidth, the sequencing of the human genome, brain scanning, artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms, robotics, nanotechnology, and knowledge--have been and are all continuing to advance at astounding rates. Yet today they cover only one-tenth of one percent of the proverbial pond.

It is essential, therefore, that the forward-thinking executive, whom I’ve chosen to call the exponential executive, think of today as being the metaphorical equivalent of day twenty in the pond analogy. The really big developments are still a few years off in the future, but they are coming fast and the time to begin preparing yourself and your organization for this is now. To survive you will need to learn how to jump the curve.

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Google’s Big Idea

One way to embrace the future is to allow your employees the freedom to pursue big, hairy audacious—and sometimes crazy—ideas. 3M has been doing this for years and, more recently, Google has taken up the mantle. More specifically, the two companies allows many of its engineers and employees to spend anywhere between 20-50% of their time during on ideas outside their official areas of responsibility.

Recently I stumbled upon this article describing a Google patent for creating a massive floating data center that could use wave power to power the center and ocean water to help keep the many computers cool. It is an idea that is obviously years away from reality, but I still applaud the people who came up with the idea—and Google for giving them the freedom to pursue the idea.

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Walk the Escalator with IBM

If you’ve read my book, Jump the Curve, you’re familiar with the phrase “walk the escalator” which, succinctly defined, means “using existing technology to improve an existing product or process.” Late last week, IBM announced the creation of a new “strategic carbon management” consulting service. Among many other things, the service will help companies reduce energy and water costs. IBM has used the services on itself and, last year, cut costs by $310 million!

Obviously, not many companies are as large as Big Blue, nevertheless it is obvious to me that just as companies can save big money from supercomputers, they can also save big money by using IBM’s services. According to this article, for an average cost of $300,000 to $500,000, IBM can cut a company’s over all energy usage by 30 to 50 percent.

To date only one company, UK-based construction group Morgan Sindall, has signed up for the service.

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What Corporate America is Reading

What good is a blog if you can’t engage in a little shameless self-promotion from time-to-time, right? I recently came across this article alerting me to the fact that my book, Jump the Curve, is now #22 on the “What Corporate America is Reading” list.

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Jump the Curve: February 13, 2009

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On Darwin & Lincoln: The Next Great Debate?

In one of those wonderful historical anomalies, February 12, 2009 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Lincoln is recognized as one of the greatest American presidents for helping end slavery. Darwin, of course, is the father of evolutionary biology.

It might appear these two historical giants have little else in common except the same birthday, but Darwin’s theory of evolution will soon call forth a new political debate which could, if not peacefully resolved, rip this country apart as surely as slavery did.

In today’s Wall Street Journal there is an article describing how advances in genetic technology are ushering in a new era of “designer babies” and how some parents are pre-selecting embryos based on cosmetic characteristics such as eye and hair color.

As the genomics revolution progresses, though, eager parents may soon be able to select their offspring using even more distinguished genetic characteristics. For example, a combination of genes may soon be found to enhance athletic ability or intelligence. From this perspective, advances in genomics can be seen as co-mingling with and accelerating evolution.

Alas, the race won’t stop with our genes. In today’s New York Times there is an article of a woman controlling a robotic prosthetic arm with the aid of a computer chip in her brain. Soon, it may be possible for otherwise healthy people to augment their intelligence by virtue of brain-neural technology.

Regardless of one’s moral perspective on the wisdom of pursuing these technologies, it is naive to assume either genomics or brain-computer interface technology won’t continue to improve.

And as they do, a huge schism will form between those who believe that humans were meant to evolve in a technologically-enhanced fashion and those, who for religious, moral or ethical reasons, view such acts as either an affront to their God or their conception of what it means to be human.

This issue will make current political debates over abortion and gay rights seem like child’s play—and as big as those debates over slavery 150 years ago where society was discussing who was human. (Recall, at one time, it was deemed politically acceptable in this country to view a black man as equal to only three-fifths of a white man.)

Only through a long and hard-fought campaign (which, unfortunately, still isn’t over in the minds of a few), society has now come to agree that all races are human.

The issue of genetically-enhanced and machine-merged humans may not, however, be so easily resolved. Why? Because, at its heart, the debate it is not about who is human, but rather what constitutes a human being.

For example, is a child, who was genetically-enhanced for intelligence and augmented with brain-neural prosthetics, really the same as a child who was provided with neither advantage?

This then begs the following questions: Is it fair for one class of society—mostly likely the wealthy—to have access to such enhancements which will provide them with an inherent advantage over non-enhanced people? Alternatively, in a free society, does one group have a right to restrict or impose limits on people who wish to exploit such enhancements?

One camp may take a more Darwinian view and embrace genomics and brain-computer interfaces as an inevitable tools—similar to fire or the wheel—which humans are meant to not only use but embrace on our evolutionary path toward a better tomorrow. The other camp may take a more Lincolnian view that all humans are created equal and that a necessary condition of this state is that we must all remain forever equal—even if that requires limiting the actions of some.

I can’t say if one view or the other is correct, but historical fate brought Darwin and Lincoln into this world 200 years ago today and, ironically, the future may see to it that they and the broad philosophies with which they are both associated with remain entwined until the next great debate—over what it means to be human—is resolved.

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The Power Suit of the Future

The “power” tie is so 1990’s. What we need to bring us into the 21st century is a “power” suit. Thanks to the fine folks at Georgia Tech we now may just be a few years away from the development of a fabric that can harvest biomechanical energy.

Every time you move an arm or a leg or even lift a finger you are releasing energy. Researchers at Georgia Tech are now experimenting with how to weave nanowires directly into flexible fabrics which could then convert the energy you release and channel it back to more productive uses—such as powering your cellphone or iPod.

Longer term it is even feasible that the technology could be used to power nanoscale devices that stream through your body looking for cancer cells. The obvious advantage of this technology is that it reduces and, quite possibly, eliminates the need for batteries.

P.S. To all of the attendees of my keynote presentation at the First Annual Technology Conference in Atlanta this past Tuesday, here are links to the two articles on the future of Atlanta and Georgia Tech that I promised. Also, below is the video of a technology that may help the region better recycle waste water:

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Downloadable Lighters Offer a Key to the Future

What can downloaded lighters tell us about the future? Perhaps a little more than you might expect.

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Re-"Kindle”: The Future?

In late 2007, I wrote this piece about the future of education being “rekindled.” In it, I advised readers to expect further advances.

Yesterday’s introduction of the latest Kindle device has borne out this advise. The new electronic book is twice as thin; has a 7.5X increase in memory capacity (meaning it can now store 1500 books versus only 200 for the first device); has a 25% improvement in battery life; has 16 shades of gray (versus 4); is easier to navigate; and comes with a cheesy, robotic speech recognition device that can read aloud the text of the book.

Many of the reviews have been overly critical of the latter tool, but it is important to remember that speech/voice recognition technology—like almost everything else in Kindle (except the price)—is only going to get better with time. In fact, within a few years, I envision electronic books will serve as substitute reading tutors in public schools. (Note: I’m not predicting that Amazon’s Kindle will necessarily be the de facto device to play this role. Google and others will soon develop similar devices that may be even easier to use and come with a more attractive price.)

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The Future of Atlanta

(Editor’s Note: Tomorrow, I will be giving the keynote presentation at the Atlanta Regional Commission’s First Annual Technology Conference. Below is an article I wrote for the region’s leading newspaper, The Atlanta Constitution.)

Fifty years ago, in 1959, the Atlanta region surpassed the 1 million population mark. In an act of notable foresight, the following year, the Metropolitan Regional Planning Commission—the predecessor to today’s Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC)—published a report entitled “What You Should Know About Rapid Transit.” It set the stage for the development of MARTA.

Fast forward to today and ARC is now engaged in Fifty Forward, an equally farsighted strategic planning venture designed to envision what the future holds for the region over the next half century. While such exercises are always fraught with danger, two large trends—demography and technology—are well established and should be used to frame the process.

Ironically, the two trends share a common theme: both are experiencing extraordinary growth. Whereas, it took the region 50 years to add 3 million citizens, it will take less than two decades to add the next 3 million—and grow the region from today’s population base of 4 million to 7 million.

As fast as this growth has been, it pales in comparison to the exponential growth of a number of technologies. Consider, for example, that data storage, Internet bandwidth, and gene sequencing technology are doubling incapacity every six months. Brain scanning technology and the number of robots deployed in homes and businesses is doubling approximately every 12 months; while computers continue to double in processing power every 18-24 months—a trend expected to progress unabated for the next 10 to 15 years.

It is impossible to predict precisely how all of these technologies will unfold but it is worth keeping this nugget in mind: anything that doubles just ten times—as all of the aforementioned technologies are expected to do—experiences a 1000-fold increase.

Let us now return to the first trend: demographics. It is not hard to imagine how an additional three million people might put an inordinate amount of strain on everything from the environment and education to the area’s transportation and public health systems.

Alas within each challenge lies an immense opportunity to position the Atlanta region for extraordinary growth. One direct implication of continued advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology and regenerative medicine is that the region’s already rapidly aging population will grow more disproportionately older.

One opportunity that can emerge from this seemingly serious situation is the development of new robotic technologies to help senior citizens lead more independent lives. Innovative researchers at Georgia Tech are doing exactly this and their technology may not only alleviate potential nursing shortages, it could also lead to new companies which can help grow and expand the region’s economic base.

As the population skyrockets it is also easy to envision how traffic, water and pollution problems will all just grow worse. With farsighted leadership, none of this need be true. In fact, each problem can again be turned into an opportunity.

As a result of continued advances in GPS, sensors, advanced algorithms, and social networking tools, people and vehicles will soon be able to communicate with one another in order to make better use of today’s roads and transportation system. In other words rather than focus on building more roads, the region should embrace technology to make smarter use of its existing systems and modes of transportation.

In a related vein, as a result of promising nanotechnology research being conducted at institutions and companies throughout the region, it may soon be possible to inexpensively desalinate ocean water using massive solar farms as well as reclaim, recycle and reuse polluted water and air. With regard to the latter, area researchers are, in fact, actively exploring how they might capture the carbon dioxide emissions directly from automobiles and recycle it—thus making oil a sustainable energy source.

Such visions may be hard to believe but recall that just 50 years ago IBM was selling a 5 megabit storage device, which was about the size of a large filing cabinet, for $2.5 million. Today, you can purchase a thumb-sized memory stick with a million times more capacity for about $19.95, and then send that file wirelessly to a colleague on the other side of the world in a blink of an eye.

The future has a funny way of arriving sooner than expected. The key to ensuring the region’s continued prosperity resides in citizens and scientists; researchers and retirees; and public, private and non-profit leaders getting engaged in ARC’s Fifty Forward Project. Why? Because, at the end of the day, as the region’s forefathers proved a half century, the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.

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Jump the Curve: February 6, 2009

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Your Robotic Future?

The other day I wrote about how robots were a ”major game changer.” Yesterday, I came across a fascinating article explaining how advances in algorithms are helping robots teach themselves; and today I bring you this short video on how advanced personal robots have become (see below). The robots are still a little bulky, slow and inflexible; but I think you’ll agree that they are dramatic improvement over what was available just last year. As robots continue to improve, I expect nursing homes, hospitals and other aging-related facilities to embrace the technology.

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Robots: A Major Game Changer?Our Robotic Future
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A New Pharmaceutical Future

Here’s novel idea. Rather than treating disease, health care professionals should treat patients. Thanks to advances in nanotechnology this might soon be possible.

It is a fact that different drugs work differently on different people. New imaging probes now portend the day when doctors will be able to predict the effectiveness of a particular drug—before it is prescribed!

In other words, instead of giving the same chemo drug to every breast cancer patient, we will soon be able prescribe the drug which works best for a specific individual.

If one combines this technological advance with advances in genomics, it points a new different future for the pharmaceutical industry as well as the millions of people who now rely on their products.

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The Future of Paper

Want to know why future paper might be colored yellow and why we may not have to cut down as many trees or pay obscene prices for ink toner? Check out this informative 3 minute video from ZDNet:

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It Only Seems Like Yesterday

Today (February 5, 2009) is the fifth anniversary of Facebook. This past January 19th was the 8th anniversary of Wikipedia and it was only last fall that Google celebrated its 10th anniversary. To put these milestones in perspective, let me share a few numbers with you. If Facebook were a country it would today be the fifth largest country in the world with a population of 150 million. At the end of 2008, Wikipedia—using only free labor—had 75,000 “editors” who had, together, written 10 million entries in 264 different languages. And Google, from its humble origins in a Stanford University dorm room in 1998, now employs 20,000 people; has a market capitalization of $110 billion; performs over 25 billion searches a day; and has transformed everything from the advertising and newspaper industries to health care. In order to become an Exponential Executive and “jump the curve” 5, 8 and 10 years into the future, it will help to keep these impressive numbers in mind because the future has a surprising way of arriving sooner than expected.

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The Future of Sticky Notes

Thanks to the fine folks at ZDNet and the MIT Media Lab for putting together this informative video on the future of sticky notes. It is very cool:

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The Future of Music is Interchangeable

To understand the future of music, it helps to understand the role material sciences plays in the sound of music:

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Is a $20 Laptop Computer Really Impossible?

Without wanting to sound like a broken record, I am continually amazed at many people’s inability to understand how certain technological advances will make some things that sound “impossible” today imminently possible tomorrow. A case in point is this article from today’s Technology Review which has many computer and educational professional questioning the feasibility of a $20 laptop. According to the article, the idea has met with “widespread skepticism” and one official is quoted as saying “I don’t understand how anyone can build anything for real at that price.”

I understand completely that the vision of a $20 laptop may not be achievable today but, as Moore’s Law continues to progress and as software development continues to be improved through open-source mechanisms, does that mean the vision will never be achieved? Of course not.

When reading the words of such naysayers I am reminded of that old quote: “Those who say it is impossible should just get the hell out of the way of those who are making it possible.” Or another quote, which my good friend Mark jenkins recently brought to my attention:

”It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”—Robert Goddard, Space Pioneer

Interested in other “impossible” thoughts by America’s leading futurist, Jack Uldrich? Check out these past posts:

A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible
What’s Impossible?

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Oops! I Was Off By 10 Quadrillion

Last month, I released a short two-minute ”Future Flash” video on the growing power of supercomputers (posted below). In it, I said that IBM was expected to release a supercomputer capable of 10 quadrillion calculations in 2010. Well, I have now come to learn that the company will double that capacity to 20 petaflops -- or 20 qaudrillion calculations—by 2012. In other words, I was off by sixteen zeros or 10,000,000,000,000,000. For those of you counting at home, it would take you roughly 16 billion years to perform 20 quadrillion calculations with a calculator—and that’s assuming you could work 365/24/7.

Interested in other supercomputer-related madness by America’s leading futurist, Jack Uldrich? Check out these past posts:

Supercomputers; Solving Problems Big and Small
Future Flash with Jack Uldrich: SuperComputers

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Robots: A Major Game Changer

I have written about the growing sophistication of robots on numerous occasions (see related articles below) and I have even blogged about Kiva warehouse robots before, however, if you’re in the retail industry or are interested in the future of supply chain management, I’d encourage you to watch the first 3 minutes of the YouTube video below. If you don’t have the time, here are the key take-a-ways: 1) Kiva robots are increasing productivity by 2X to 4X; 2) shipping errors and defects are non-existent; 3) worker safety is improving; and 4) companies are reducing energy costs (and thus saving money) by not having to heat those areas of the warehouse where only robots are working.

All of this is a reminder that if you want to “jump the curve” you had better start investigating how robots can increase your profitability.

Related robotic posts by America’s leading futurist, Jack Uldrich:

Our Robotic Future
The Future of Hospitals (Robotics)
The Robot Will See You Now

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