The 500-Year Delta by Jim Taylor, Watts Wacker, and Howard Means.

The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next. Jim Taylor, Watts Wacker, and Howard Means. 1998. ISBN-13: 978-0887309113

Excerpts

“freedom to know” – a world in which for the first time in human history caste or schooling or economic circumstance no longer limits access to knowledge, a world in which knowledge itself is less important than the skill to access it.

“freedom to go” – a world in which for the first time true global citizens will have true global mobility.

“freedom to do” in accord not with professional processes or bureaucratic structures but with one’s own intuition and entrepreneurial zeal.

“freedom to be” whatever one wants to be and the obligation to exercise that freedom.

If you are going to succeed in chaos, you must connect with chaos. You must act in concert with chaos. What does that mean? It means that you must trust in intuition, trust in self.

The media today is not only the message – it is the message discriminator. And increasingly it is around those finely discriminated messages that we organize our social lives.

Jacque’s theory … what really mattered in any organization was not how many people you managed, not how much money you had under your control, but how binding your decision was on the life span of the organization.

Rainmakers – individuals who simply by virtue of their existence, their contacts, and their reputations could cause large pieces of business to move with them.

The island-hopping executive. The professional who is most willing to make life changes not in pursuit of the group mission but in pursuit of his or her own ambition. The employee who recognizes that power in a chaos organization migrates to the greatest variable, that the new success paradigm frees the individual.

Because access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete. As borders disappear, the concept of taxation, which supports governments, becomes increasingly fragile.

Because leverage in a chaos world goes to the critical variables, the person able to cut the best deal in a corporation today is not the most loyal one, but the one willing to leave himself or herself the most outs.

… there is no surer way to lose customers – and lose them for good – than to sell them stone and flint when you are just about to introduce safety matches into the marketplace. That is another corollary of the acceleration of technological change. Quality may still be job one, but mediating a consumer’s risk of feeling like a fool is at least job two.

First, as new products arrive on the marketplace with ever greater rapidity, the products themselves lose value and the ideas that drive them gain value. Second, as consumers increasingly drive the economic relationships of the marketplace, the need to massively accumulate data on individual consumers increases proportionally.

Generation X has powerful subsidiary values. Its very uncertainty about its economic future is helping to turn the fear of downward mobility into the virtue of downward nobility, and the rise of downward nobility – the desire not for many things but a few good things – will drive consumerism in the years immediately ahead.

Flight impulse is building to critical mass. Undermined by the death of loyalty or liberated by the new freedoms to know, to go, to do, to be – it is all a matter of interpretation – forty-five to fifty-year-olds soon will be seeking en masse completely different lifestyles and actively plotting their flights.

As the marketplace drives toward a supersaturation of products, scarcity disappears, and with it status orientation. As mass culture breaks up into, in effect, hundreds of millions of individual realities, there can be no shared assumptions of what is enviable to own.

For most people in most industrialized nations, governments now exist as a mechanism for the transfer of payments and almost nothing more – save for their sheer entertainment value. For a radical theory, that one, in fact, is about as plain as the nose on your face. Why has the Washington intellerati failed to grasp it? Because the centrality of the political process is intimately tied to the intellerati’s own centrality – if government doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Like other communes, the political commune talks mainly to itself, and thus has its worldview both set and confirmed within the confines of its commune.

In the drive toward sameness, cultural discriminators are disappearing. It is in the interest of politicians to foster the impression of international business conflict, because conflict is drama, and politicians get to star in the playlets that ensue.

If nationalism no longer has meaning, if corporate identity can float away in an instant, if you are no longer identified by your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, by where you went to college or what clubs you belong to, you can choose to reinvent your life every single day.

One of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, the explosion in information has bred such widespread discontent is that too much information is chasing too few decision – and too little interest.

Every human life becomes, in effect, a data bank. And as that happens, everything about you – your habits, your preferences, your buying whims, your opinions – assumes a transaction worth. They become more than the sum total of your wants and needs; they become your intellectual property, to be valuated and protected as strongly as any other property you possess.

As privacy becomes rarer and rarer, it will assume greater and greater worth, and privacy management will become one of the great growth industries of the twenty-first century.

… as people become more and more aware of the economic worth of their own privately held information, they will come more and more to realize what a fortune about themselves they have absolutely pissed away. Therein lies the beginning of anger. And revenge.

Time really is money; so is attention.

For better or worse, study after study has shown that working women still can be broken into two groups: those who think that what they do is a career and those who think it is a job. Otherwise, the lives of women who work outside the house for money are virtually indistinguishable one from the other.

Like the lives they reflect, the new lifestyle discriminators are situational, deal-based. None of them relies on loyalty, because the future itself isn’t about loyalty – it’s about contracts.

“filocity” – the ability to adapt instantaneously to multiple relationships and move easily among multiple cultures.

Mass religion, we contend, is as doomed as mass culture, not because people will believe less, but because group reality is becoming particularlized and because loyalty to a single overriding interpretation of the divine is as dated as loyalty to family or to a corporation.

By definition, freedoms free, but they also sweep away excuses.

To be free to know whatever it is you need to know to pursue your destiny means that there will be little sympathy for those who fail to arm themselves with the essential knowledge to succeed. To be free to go wherever it is you need to do to pursue your destiny means that there will be little sympathy if you elect to go nowhere and suffer as a result. To be free to do whatever it is within you intellectual and physical capacity to do means that if you fail to make an attempt to do it and suffer as a result, there will be little sympathy. To be free to be whatever it is within your intellectual and physical capacity to be means that if you don’t pursue possibility and suffer as a result, there will be little sympathy.

True freedom … entails true responsibility. It is impossible to have one without the other, impossible to demand true individual rights on the one hand and claim group victimization or demand group redress on the other.

Like success, failure is a solo act; individuals alone are responsible for both.

… the only thing you can count on in your personal or professional life is that people and organizations will act irrationally.

The reality is that “families” are largely a status symbol today, a luxury for those who can afford to keep them intact.

The reality in a chaos world is that the greatest power belongs to the person who controls the most unstable variable.

The reality is that there are only two kinds of workers in any business organization: owners and employees. And the further reality is that there are only two kinds of employees: the 5 percent who would stay where they are if they were offered twice their salary to leave and the 95 percent who would be gone in a flash.

The myth of governments. the myth is that they matter. The reality is that they matter mostly to those who have an economic stake in their day-to-day operation – that is, to government employees and those who receive federal transfer payments.

The myth of action. The myth, made famous by the Nike sports-wear slogan, is just do it. The reality is that in a chaos world, you cannot “do” your way to anything. You can achieve an end only by focusing on outcome and letting each individual decision be dictated by your final goal. Don’t do it. Be it.

… the myth that reality is real. The reality is that each individual edits reality for himself. The reality is that the combinations and permutations of media choices allow each person to have an entirely idiosyncratic view of reality. The reality is that today reality is constructed.

In a chaos world … the only way to manage a life is from the edge, and the only thing you can depend on is you.

… when you can’t depend on institutions as you have known them, when you can’t depend on relationships, when converging rivers of change are rushing forward into a new world, and when uneasiness, chaos, and disharmonious conjunctions have become the organizing principles driving those rivers of change, anxiety is simply unavoidable. And we further argue that the largest part of our cultural schizophrenia – of this disconnection between attitudes and behaviors – comes not from the onrush of change, but from the fact that we are being programmed to avoid anxiety as the same time we are coming to intuitively understand that we must embrace anxiety to survive.

What do you find when you embrace anxiety? That it turns to enlightenment.

Enlightened anxiety doesn’t mean that you ignore problems or that you worry over them at random. It means that you allow problems to take their course and do the best that you can within them. It means that you recognize that there are enormous numbers of things in your personal and professional life over which you have not control, no ability to effect an outcome, and that you recognize further that there is great liberation in having no control over them. It means that you stay permanently flexible, because it is only by being so that you can achieve synchronicity with a world that has itself entered into a state of permanent flexibility, a world that is being subtly and meaningfully altered every day. Here’s the real secret of successful people and businesses: They are different every day of their existence.

Fusion creates energy. Energy feeds values. Energy plus values creates wealth.

Corporations frustrate the four freedoms by their very nature. No matter how deftly they are handled, they limit the right to know, to go, to do, and to be.

It is only by giving loyalty to your customers that you can get loyalty back in return, and it is only by recognizing that customers are under no obligation to give their loyalty that you can hold on to it day by day.
How do you prove your loyalty to customers? Not by pursuing customer loyalty, but by being loyal to your customers. In a customer-loyal world, your first concern is someone who purchased your product, not someone who might do so, because that customer with the product is now your best and cheapest billboard. In a customer-loyal world, you thank your customers, not in expectation of what they might do in the future, but for what they have done in the past. And in a customer-loyal world, you make your own value structure isomorphic with the value structure of your customer base.

To structure a business so that it meets its customers’ real lives, make the ownership of a customer relationship a fundamental part of the creation of the business itself.

Best of all, maybe, you build scarcity into products by individualizing them for the individual realities that collectively compose today’s marketplace. By becoming, in effect, a component editor for your customers, you allow them to create their own individual realities instead of imposing a collective reality on them. Nothing, finally, could be more scarce than that.

Instead of the old rules of social behavior that required us to build relationships based on a reciprocal self-disclosure of information, we build them instead on a systematic sharing of information in the service of the deal at hand. And when the deal is done, we all walk away.

… pseudo-intellectuals actively pursue an entry in Who’s Who, while real intellectuals flee from such exposure. Why? Because it is in the culture of the tribe of pseudo-intellectuals to want recognition – recognition is the validation of their pursuit – while it is in the tribal culture of real intellectuals to be eternal outsiders.

The rules of such exceptional intelligence are very simple for children: Never acknowledge it, not even to yourself, and never flaunt it in from of others. Yet very smart children almost inevitably know they are very smart, and from an early age. They understand things before other children even begin to grasp the question, and they are too smart to miss that fact. Other children see it too, and being to organize their own tribes in defense against such intelligence.
Thus is born what is known as the “dilemma of the genuinely talented individual”. And thus, too, arises the fundamental ethic of the tribe of true intellectuals: never pursue celebrity and never care what others think about you.

… “privilege” implies conspicuous consumption when it is inconspicuous consumption, stealth wealth, and downward nobility that are helping to drive the dynamic of the marketplace today.

Avoid the activity trap. Manage choices out of your life, not into it. In the storm of information washing over you, realize that only a tiny fraction of it is germane to your own goals and that it is that tiny fraction on which you absolutely have to concentrate. Take a nap, catch an afternoon matinee. Conserve energy and you’ll have more of it for the things that really matter. You’re the boss; you’ll make sure you get the job done on time. That’s freedom, too.

… the ones most likely to have achieved satisfaction – the ones most likely to have internalized that they don’t have to overspend their capability in order to achieve very high levels of social and self-esteem – are people who are living ordinary lives extraordinarily.

Stop thinking of your customers as a mass market and start thinking of them as a mass of individual collectors.

In an age in which raw intelligence is the most prized commodity, being thought stupid is the greatest fear. Making customers feel stupid is the worst sin a business can commit.

What does risk management mean at a personal level? That the only way to manage risk is to embrace it. That the only way to cope with risk is to swim in it, dance with it, let it happen. A victim says that the world is at fault for exposing me to this risk. A thrivalist – a person who not just survives but thrives – says that every risk is an opportunity.

… even if you are not robbed or shot or bombed or vandalized during your adult life, even if you somehow escape the mortal lock, the only way to survive in a chaos-based world is to be 100 percent prepared for all those things to happen. Ducking for cover and planning for disaster aren’t just exercises for the nuclear generation. Today they are exercises for sustained reality – and for corporations more so than any other single entity.

Take out a sheet of paper. Write down the ten worst things that could happen to your business in the next five hundred days, the next five hundred weeks, and then start acting as if they will happen, because in a chaos world they or something very similar will.

Write down where your own business’s moats are, where and how fortified your castle walls are, where the intellectual property of your company – its secrets, its private systems – is stored, who has the key, and how many keys there are.

The best thing to do when you are lost is wait to be found.

Our advice: Find your own sacred site, not ours, a place where you can sit on the edge and look back to the center. There is no greater clarity to be found anywhere.

Listen, escape your own white noise, and you’ll be astounded by what you will hear.

It is only by concentrating on the inevitability of disaster that you can free yourself to pursue the fruits of possibility.

The critical issue in planning today is not how to get there. The critical issue is where you want to be.

It is not products per se that consumers want. Products are everywhere, generally at deep discounts. In a world starved for scarcity, uniqueness gains value. And it is only by focusing on points of distinction that you can produce uniqueness within your category.

Nothing holds you back but the reluctance to exercise your own Freedom to do, and beyond that, there can be no asking for more.