revolutionary wealth[1]

8/2/2019 Revolutionary Wealth[1]

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REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH

Alvin and Heidi Toffler

by


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chief


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Wealth Systems

1. Wealth is anything that fulfills needs or wants

2. A wealth system is the way wealth is created

3. True wealth occurs when man is able to create aneconomic surplus


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Three Wealth Systems

1. Agriculture

a. Ten millennia ago, a woman planted the first seedin what is now known as Turkeyb. Instead of waiting for nature to provide, man could

make nature do what he wished

c. Agriculture allowed man to settle into communitiesd. Agriculture created trade, barter, buying and sellinge. In some years, there was an excess of foodf. War lords, nobles and kings were able to become

rich by stealing the excess wealth created byagriculture


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2. Industrialism

a. This second wave of wealth creation brought mass

production, mass education, mass media and massculture

3. Knowledge

a. This third wave substitutes knowledge for thetraditional factors of industrial production land,labor and capital

b. This third wave de-massifies production, markets

and society

Three Wealth Systems

* The first wave was based on growing things, thesecond was based on making things and the third is

based on serving, thinking, knowing and experiencing

*


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Changes in Deep Fundamentals

1. Worka. Until field labor was replaced by factory work, few

people ever held a job

b. A job in todays sense of formally committed work

in return for pay is a recent innovationc. For centuries, most labor was forced labor

(slavery for example)

d. Work has moved from outdoors to indoorse. More people will work in the future but there will befewer jobs


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2. Time

a. Never have the pressures been greater fororganizations to speed up their operations

Quality

CostTime



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2. Timeb. Relative speed of current organizations

100 mph American business90 mph Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)60 mph American family -- Fewer than 25% of

American families have a working father,stay-at-home mom and two children under

the age of eighteen30 mph Labor unions25 mph Government bureaucracies10 mph American school system

5 mph Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)such as the United Nations, IMF and WTO

3 mph US Congress and White House1 mph The Law



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2. Time

a. Never have the pressures been greater fororganizations to speed up their operations

Quality

CostTime


Ideas?


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3. Placea. Wealth creation in the world continues to

move westb. Detroit & Cleveland, both second wave

cities, are listed as the poorest large citiesin the US*

* per US Census Bureau, 2008



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Unique Characteristics of Knowledge

1. Knowledge is inherently non-rivala. Millions of people can use the same chunk

of knowledge without diminishing it

b. The more knowledge is used, the moreknowledge is created. This is not true offood or things

2. Knowledge is intangible

a. We cant touch, fondle or slap it, but we

can (and do) manipulate it


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3. Knowledge is non-linear

a. Tiny insights can yield huge outputs

b. Yahoo was started when two college studentssimply categorized their three favorite websites

4. Knowledge is relational

a. Any individual piece of knowledge attains

meaning only when juxtaposed with otherpieces that provide its context


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5. Knowledge mates with other knowledge

a. The more there is, the more promiscuous and themore numerous and varied the possible usefulcombinations

b. Giving rise to Meta-solutions

6. Knowledge is more portable than any other product

a. It can be distributed for a very small price

7. Knowledge can be compressed into symbols andabstractions

a. Try compressing a toaster


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8. Knowledge can be stored in smaller andsmaller spaces

9. Knowledge can be explicit or implicit,expressed or not expressed, shared or tacit

10. Knowledge is hard to contain -- it wants tobe free of boundaries


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The Information/Knowledge System is

Unique

1. The information/knowledge wealth system is thefirst system to be driven by an inexhaustible andunlimited resource

a. All other wealth systems were based on scarceresources such as food and raw materials


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Services Become Products

c. In the United States, bank customers in 2002executed nearly 14 billion ATM transactions

(1) Assume that, on average, a simple face-to-facetransaction at the bank might have taken twominutes

(2) That means customers performed 28 billionminutes of unpaid work that would otherwisehave required banks to hire more than 200,000additional full-time tellers

(3) Banks frequently charge customers an extrafee for the privilege of doing the extraunpaid work


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Observations

Businesses confined to tangible products

are limited by scarcity of people, propertyand capital


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Observations

Businesses confined to tangible products

are limited by scarcity of people, propertyand capital

Knowledge-based businesses are built onan inexhaustible and unlimited resource

Which are likely to grow faster?


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Questions

What are the knowledge components of

my business vs. the tangible components? What can I do to move my business to a

richer mix of knowledge vs. tangible?

How can I protect and leverage mycompanys knowledge base?

What can I do to reduce cycle times of bothlearning and doing in my company?


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REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH

Alvin and Heidi Toffler

by

revolutionary wealth[1]

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