No Small Change

CHAPTER 11How Much Is Big Data Changing Your Business?

It's bad form for a book like this to draw too extensively on a single source. And worse than bad form, it's potentially bad business, too – you can use a small handful of short quotes free of charge, but as your level of borrowing starts creeping up from dozens to scores to many hundreds of words the question of payment becomes more and more likely to arise.

Still, we simply can't write a chapter about the hugely important, ever-increasing and totally transformative effects of the irresistible advance of big data without drawing right up to the limit of propriety on the book that first got us all thinking about the subject – Don Peppers' and Martha Rogers' The One-to-One Future, first published way back in 1993.

Re-reading the book today, it seems more than ever one of the very most extraordinary examples of prophecy since, well, John the Baptist or even Nostradamus, and even George Gendron is starting to appear a lot less ridiculous than he did at the time.

We have no idea who Gendron is, or was, but the one thing we know is that he's the chap who turned up on the front cover of the US edition of The One-To-One Future saying: ‘This is not the book of the year or the book of the decade. It's one of the two or three most important books ever written’. At the time, this caused a bit of a stir among fans of Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Proust. But all these years later, it looks as if Gendron may have had a point. The One-to-One ...