What Kinds of Technologies Can We Not Live Without?

I was recently asked, for an interview in Correio Brazillense, the provocative question: What kind of technology can we not live without? What follows are my very brief thoughts on this:

A decade ago, we would ask ourselves “how did we ever live without our home fax machines?” Today, we have the answer, and we’re doing just fine. There is no technology that we will ever be unable to do without, as long as we support the continued evolution of new technological innovation. It is important to recognize that our allegiance to any technology is to the function that it performs, not to the form that it takes. I have long been addicted to taking images of memorable moments in our family’s life. At one point, I relied upon a simple Kodak Brownie camera, then I used my father's Stereo Realist 3D camera, then a Kodak disc camera, followed by a Canon 35 mm camera, and now a Casio digital camera. My reliance upon forms of image-gathering technologies has moved from one to another, as has my allegiance to the brands that produced these technologies. In truth, I have been chronically disloyal as an adopter of technologies and as a customer of brands, but what has never flagged has been my allegiance to the function of image-capturing. I can do without many different types of technologies, but I cannot imagine doing without my devotion to certain functions that are enabled by evolving technologies.
There is an additional point to make here. There are still some societies where access to information is imperfect. I cannot, personally, conceive of having my ability to gain information -- to hunt for ideas -- be constrained in any way by someone else. I can’t imagine living without free access to ideas!

The Demise of Polaroid Film

The recent announcement of Polaroid's decision to cease producing "instant film" is a stark reminder of the power of disruptive innovation. Digital photography is, of course, the ultimate "instant photography," but it is still somewhat sobering to see an icon such as Polaroid depart this market space. No matter that Tom Beaudoin, Polaroid's President, COO and CFO [& obviously a pretty busy guy], has said about the move that: "We're trying to reinvent Polaroid so it lives on for the next 30 to 40 years," it still is the demise of an innovation that we've always taken for granted that is a sobering wakeup call for the need to attend to innovation, and strategic revitalization.

Lessons from an Old War: the Battle of Leyte Gulf

Few things could be finer, than to be at the beach in Carolina, sitting by the surf and reading sea-books. Maybe it’s because I come from a Naval family [father, uncle, cousins – while I, ironically, wound-up in the Army], but I think that Evan Thomas’ new book Sea of Thunder, about the [23-26 October 1944] battle of Leyte Gulf, Philippines, is both a great read, and instructive about the art of leadership. At the core of much of the book is the amazing paradigm shift that was inherent in moving from naval warfare dominated by ever-larger battleships, to the domination by air-power, and those ships that were able to deploy them. Among the lessons I though worth noting were:

• The inability of so many bright and accomplished leaders, on both sides, to recognize that times had changed, and that new technologies, and new ways of employing them would have to be mastered.
• The clash between “hundreds of years of naval tradition that commanders at sea in the midst of battle must be allowed to decide for themselves what to do, without meddling from the admiralty on land,” (p. 297) and the dawning confluence of complex air and sea operations over multiple fronts, complimented by nearly instantaneous communications linkages. This is exactly the same situation as classical entrepreneurship and local market knowledge, being challenged by globalization and 21st century communications technology.
• The struggle over the value of assets in the Japanese Navy was an intriguing one. Admiral Yamamoto believed that the big battleships were to be used, while the preponderance of his colleagues, at least the beginning of the war, were hesitant to expose such prized assets to enemy fire, for fear of damaging or losing them. As a result, early in the war, Japan had the assets, but not the results that they promised.
• Admiral “Bull” Halsey, one of the great heroes of the U.S. Navy, created a group around him, called “the Department of Dirty Tricks,” which comes directly out of the Virtuoso Team themes, and which gave him the opportunity to be challenged in a way that more conventional leaders, both American and Japanese, were not. It is telling that Halsey’s big failure at Leyte Gulf came when the Dirty Tricks mechanism was not working, due to his and their fatigue.
• To compensate for the draining fatigue that his commanders were falling victim to, Admiral Nimitz, the most senior of U.S. Naval leader instituted a “two-platoon” system for the South Pacific, where Admiral Raymond Spruance, a disciplined, cautious leader, traded-off fleet command, every six months, with Bull Halsey, who was aggressive and “everybody’s friend.” This not only rewarded Halsey’s earlier loyalty to Nimitz when times were tough, but interposed Halsey’s ambition with Spruance’s complexity.
• The impulsiveness of Halsey’s leadership stands in stark contrast to other situations of leadership hesitancy that I’ve spoken in earlier reviews. Not surprisingly, while there were benefits from such inclination to action, there were also some very heavy costs, as well. Overall, however, my take is that the bias for action paid off more than did cautious hesitancy. Again!
• Finally, most of the leaders were in their early 60's. This was not easy duty; it was exhausting in the most severe physical and emotional terms, and the living and working accommodations were fairly primitive by today’s standards. Nonetheless, a group of leaders, who would have been deemed at “retirement age” today, led complex organizations through some of the greatest strategic tests of all time, despite their age.
  
  

From iPods to Nespresso pods

Do you remember sitting on swings on porches and radios playing from open windows on a balmy summer evening? Do you recall going to movies on Saturday afternoon with a group of friends, to catch a show? Or perhaps, just sitting around a common table at the cafeteria at work, trading stories with colleagues over a pot of coffee? If you savor any of such memories, you're at risk of being obsolete. We lost porches to air-conditioning, and the night streets became unsafe. When I grew up in Brooklyn, you could walk the length of 101st St. and listen to the Dodgers play, without having a radio. Today, listening is done individually through headphones or ear-buds; no longer the sounds of baseball running up and down "the block." Going to the movies with friends: why? Why not stay home by ourselves and watch another DVD? In today's Financial Times, Stefan Stern tells us that coffee clatches are the next tradition to fall to the march of technology, as the Nespresso pod has made it easier to sit in your cubicle and drink solo, than to spend time in a group. Stern is concerned about the erosion of "culture" as a result of these technological advances, and I think that he is right. This is not a neo-Luddite reaction, but rather a concern for how and where we get together and what the implications are for the flow of ideas, and the bonding of friends. In fact, if the "soloization of the individual" can be considered a "technological trajectory," then each of these "transformations" mentioned above might well be considered S curves underlying the overall "envelope" of progress that is isolating each from the other.

Jumping the S Curves in Music

I'm old enough to remember the 45 rpm vinyl record as the dominant "package paradigm" for the popular music industry [I actually remember 78 rpms, as well]. That was a long time ago. Since then, we've been through 33 rpm "albums," 8-track tape, tape cartridges, CDs, minidiscs, and now, apparently, downloadable single tracks, courtesy of mp3; all in about 45 years! Entertainment, after all, is a "fast clockspeed" industry. Tastes change, popular acts come and go [except for the Rolling Stones, who seem to go on forever]. The technology, as evidenced by these package changes, is also in flux. So, too, is the rest of the value-chain: the people who produce the physical, plastic package; the ultimate distributers of the product; and the equipment producers on whose products the package is played.
All of this was brought to mind by an article in today's New York Times, which reports that buyers of digital downloaded music selected single tracks over albums, 19 to 1. If this continues, it will represent a significant S-curve dislocation for many parts of the popular music value-chain. This will not only affect "products" but also business models and artistic statements, as well. Already, some record labels are beginning to view themselves as "fan clubs," selling access to artists' works by subscriptions, rather than by product. One wonders, as well, if anything like the message contained by the entirety of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, can ever be achieved through the distribution of downloadable singles?
In most discussions of the S-curve phenomenon, we tend to concentrate almost entirely upon the industry at risk. What a bit of reflection reveals, however, is that you can't change any one part of an industry's value-chain without affecting the rest.