Honestly, being a Gen X guy who began using record players when I was 4 or 5 years old, about 1971-72, it's hilarious that there are actually how-to videos on using one. That said, I can barely operate a cell phone, which most of today's 3-year-olds have mastered. Times change, and that's the whole point of this post. So, thank God for YouTube how-to videos, for the young, the old, and everyone in between.
In the last post, I explained that my concept, The Big Freakin' Transition, is that we are in an 80 to 90 year transition period between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. That's one half of the idea. The other half of the idea is that during this long, increasingly chaotic transition period, EVERY business, every industry, and every human institution, will have the old business or social model disrupted, and a new model will emerge. So those two ideas are the core of The Big Freakin' Transition. Again, this whole idea is basically a continuation of The Third Wave * concept that futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler discovered, and Alvin wrote about in his 1980 book by that name.
My favorite model for disruption is the music industry. The older generations of people, and the older Millennials, can remember when the file sharing service Napster exploded onto the scene in 1999. Before that, the music industry was well entrenched in a stable business model. Record label company executives looked for talented bands and singers. They offered their favorite ones a "record contract." The record label paid for the studio time while a band created an "album," usually of fifteen songs. Then the band was sent out on tour to promote the album, and build a following of people to hopefully buy millions of those record albums, usually for about $15 each. The record label paid for the tours, where tickets were fairly cheap. They also promoted the new record with single songs on FM radio, with coverage in music magazines like Rolling Stone, and with music videos on MTV, after it came out in 1981. When the albums sold a lot, the record label made back their money, and tens of millions of dollars more, and the singer or band made a small percentage of that, sometimes millions of dollars.
So the record labels put out money to find bands, record the albums, and promote them with tours, radio, magazines, and MTV. All of that was promotion to sell millions of physical records. That was the money maker, those big, black, "vinyl" discs. They also sold audio cassettes, and in the 90's, CD's became the new albums. But selling lots of the albums was the business model.
Then, on June 1st, 1999, two guys none of us had ever heard of, uploaded a new piece of software on the fledgling internet. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created a file sharing software called Napster, which allowed people worldwide to share Mp3 music files with each other. With a single click of a computer mouse in 1999, the music industry was doomed. That's what I mean by "Disrupted." There was an old business model that was working just fine... for the record companies and a small number of hit artists and bands. But new technology had been evolving, and some unknown guys had a cool idea to use that new technology. "Hey, what if we could design software so we could all share our music with other people?" Napster Disrupted the old business model with one click.
Now, the music industry didn't collapse overnight. But in the next few months, 80 million users (myself included), started looking for music files on other people's hard drives, and downloading them, often burning our own CD's of personal mix tapes. Suddenly music was free, and the traditional music industry went berserk. They even sued their own customers for a while. Teenage kids were getting multi-million dollar lawsuits filed against them for downloading 100 songs.
You can argue for the rights of the old music industry. You can argue about intellectual property until you're blue in the face, you can say this was piracy, theft, or just plain stealing. The reality is, everyday people LOVED the free music file sharing idea, and it was simply going to happen, eventually, no matter what. Napster, as a free service, lasted about two years, then became a paid service after being shut down by court order. But the Information Age music revolution had begun, and other tech people, notably Steve Jobs and the Apple posse, created new business models.
Now, 22 years later, we have far more music available to us far cheaper. Hundreds of thousands of bands and independent musicians and singers find followings, and sell some music to their fans. Concerts and box sets of physical CD's or vinyl LP's cost a lot. Most people don't buy albums, they buy single songs or rent music from streaming services. Nearly every consumer of music would say they like this system better than paying $15 for an album that had three songs they liked, back in the 1980's or 1990's. The music industry is still evolving, but it has made the transition into an Information Age business model.
The Big Freakin' Transition idea is that every single business, every industry, and every human institution (religion, law, education, non-profits, membership organizations, political parties, etc), EVERY organization, will be Disrupted by a new model, using new technology, and new social norms made possible by that new technology.
When this idea was really coming together in my head, 4-5 years ago, I tried to think of some business or industry that would not be affected. "What everyday item WILL NOT be completely redesigned or disrupted," I asked myself. Of all things, toilets came to mind. The toilet in my grandma's 1920's built house as a kid looked pretty much like the ones today, and I imagine the toilets in 20-30 years will still look pretty much the same. Yes, there will be some weird, high tech versions as outliers, but the basic design probably won't change all that much. So did that make the toilet industry immune to Disruption? I thought about the business. Even if the basic item, like a typical toilet, doesn't change much, the materials, the raw material sourcing, the manufacturing process, the factory location, the price, the marketing, and the distribution that got the toilets from a factory to a new house, that WILL all change due to new technology.
Ultimately, I could not think of one product or industry that will not be Disrupted by all of our new and evolving technology, and our new social norms and lifestyles made possible by the new technology. This is why The Big Freakin' Transition is an 80 or 90 year period. Humans, by nature, don't like change. We like to think we do, but we don't like very much change at all. The initial high tech change started slow, then one new product here, one there. They began to gain a synergy with each other, and more new technologies were developed, and as they came in to everyday life for regular people, our lifestyles began to change. Other new changes came along, more new technologies, and our lives transformed more and more, faster and faster.
But there are still many industries that are running on old, Industrial Age mindsets, even if they use many new forms of tech. Banking, for example, uses more high technology than most industries. But the whole idea of putting your money in a bank, in a physical building, so they can loan money out at interest to someone else, goes back to the Medici's, in 15th centuryItaly. Even then, banks had been around for centuries, but that model has not really changed. We all know now that all kinds of other options are now available, Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Facebook pay, cryptos, wiring money across the globe, even old Western Union. But the banks, as fancy buildings, each with a huge safe (which doesn't contain digital money, obviously), still exist. So banking, and many other industries still using Industrial Age business models, will face their "Napster moment" at some point. The 2020's, seem to be shaping up as the decade when all the lagging business and social models (like churches, political parties, membership organizations, etc.) that haven't changed yet, will be forced to change. One one hand they need to catch up, and the other hand, we are in a deep financial crisis, which will drive more change, and drive lots of old models businesses out of business.
To repeat, at it's core, my concept of The Big Freakin' Transition" is two basic things. We are in an 80-90 year transition period (from 1956 to about 2035-2045), between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. Two, EVERY business, industry, and institution will have to figure out a new business/social model, and put into action, to survive. That's the basic idea.
As a business owner, or a leader of some kind of organization, you need to ask yourself, "What is the Information Age version of my business or organization? What is the role of this kind of business in light of all the changes in new technology, and in how we actually live, day to day? If you don't adapt, someone else will figure out the new model, and Disrupt your business. So that's the Disruption that every business or institution will have to deal with.
*not a paid link
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