The Adaptation Advantage

1The World Is Fast: Technology Is Changing Everything and Planting Opportunity Everywhere

Key Ideas

1. We are in the midst of the greatest velocity of change in human history at the same time we are experiencing the greatest leaps in human longevity.
2. Three “climate changes” are happening all at once, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman tells us. These changes are happening to technology, the climate, and the market, and they are reshaping politics, geopolitics, community, ethics, and work and learning. This book focuses on work and learning.
3. When everything starts shifting so quickly, we have to become adept at adapting.

Wait a Second

Change is coming at us with the greatest velocity in human history.

In the single second it took you to read that sentence, an algorithm executed 1,000 trades. Computers at the credit card network Visa processed more than 1,700 transactions, no doubt a few of them providistockng payment for the 17 packages that robots helped pack and ship from Amazon warehouses. Right now, 76,000 Google searches are returning tens of billions of results links. Nearly 9,000 tweets and 930 Instagram photos have been added to an already overwhelming cloud of content. And at this very moment, more than 2.8 million emails are being sent, not all of them by actual humans.

Technology is accelerating the pace of business at unthinkable speeds, so much so that the job you have today, the workforce you currently manage, or perhaps the job you are training or studying ...