Day 2 of my guest blog series on WIRED Magazine’s Change Accelerators Blog sponsored by BMW.
Talking with IBM executives recently, and they said something fascinating: 40 percent of their profitability today comes from products that were impossible four years ago. And that percentage is going up.
At Apple it already has: As of third quarter 2011, 70 percent of their revenue derives from two products that were impossible four years ago. (70 percent and climbing.)
Yesterday I wrote about the power of certainty. Here is something we can know with certainty: Most of the best, most productive, most effective, most profitable stuff we’ll be buying, selling, and using in 2015 is impossible today. (That is exactly the stuff you need to be focusing on today.)
What makes this a certainty is three hard (i.e., factual, not just possible) trends of digital acceleration. These three trends are driving such a profound acceleration of change that change itself has changed and become a rushing current of transformation.
Transformation is more than simply faster change. Change is doing something in an incrementally different way. Transformation is doing something so drastically different that it becomes a qualitative shift, and not just quantitative. The move from wax cylinders, to acetate discs, to LPs, to CDs…these were all change. CDs to MP3s? Suddenly I can carry my entire music library in my shirt pocket, and my digital music player (which also happens to be my smartphone) has no moving parts, unless you count electrons. That’s a transformation.
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