The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next - Hardcover

Every 500 years, history has shown, civilization reaches a watershed, a period of change so vast and sweeping that nothing remains the same as before. In The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next (HarperBusiness; May 8, 1997), Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker with Howard Means demonstrate that we are now at a turning point in history as significant, as disruptive, and as potentially exhilarating as the birth of Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the collapse of feudalism, and the rise of the Renaissance.

Citing hard statistics as well as anecdotal evidence, they argue that the changes in values, motives, perspective, communications, and lifestyle causing our current anxieties reflect the simultaneous collapse of the logical, social, and economic assumptions we have lived by for the past 500 years. The belief that reason guides our professional and personal activities has lost its potency as the number of incompatible variables affecting decisions increases and the compression of time narrows the period in which to make them. The reality of business today belies a host of myths: power no longer belongs to the person on top, but to the person who controls the most variables; loyalty to employers-and employees-has given way to a deal-based world which puts both at risk; and managers, no longer able in this fast-changing world to reason sequentially and draw on past experiences, make arbitrary choices, relying heavily on "what feels right." In the marketplace, the base-line assumption that consumers will buy what manufacturers have to sell is vanishing as choices burgeon and consumers exercise the power to command the production of goods by delaying their purchases until the solution they seek is available. Governments and national identity have lost their significance, and their influence decreases as the impact of multi-national corporations and the immediacy of instant world-wide communications erases historical borders.

How do you survive and prosper in a world in which the underpinnings of life have become entirely unfamiliar? Drawing on the strategies and actions of forward-looking individuals and companies today, The 500-Year Delta pinpoints the fundamental principles people will need to survive the current chaos and prosper in the coming age of possibility, including:

¥ Stop planning around chains of causality and start planning around the certainty of uncertainty-beginning with making a list of the five worst things that could happen to your company and career and developing a scenario to deal with each one.

¥ Forget process and focus on outcome, because in a world of increasing complexities, the critical issue is where you want to be, not how you get there.

¥ Expunge the givens that have guided you-the infallibility of reason, loyalty, working the chain of command, relying on precedents, career-building tactics-and embrace irrationality, self-interest, and entrepreneurial impulses.

-- Gather information constantly to prepare for decision-making at a moment's notice.

-- Institutionalize diversity, not because it is "politically correct," but because greater diversity brings the multiple perspectives necessary for responding instantaneously to chaotic circumstances.

-- Treat each customer as an individual market and constantly reinforce the unique value of your product or service in meeting his or her needs.

-- Own ideas, not property, and concentrate on hiring (and paying for) individuals who have the power to process information, analyze the interests of consumers, and come up with the innovations that create new revenue.

-- Stick to your core business and your core values-especially when considering the acquisition of other companies or exploring ways to increase market share.

The steady disintegration of the familiar social, political, business, and cultural landscape has thrust many into despair. The authors of The 500-Year Delta look at that same landscape and rejoice. In the expansion of the Internet and other electronic communication systems, they see not a rising tide of "white noise," but the development of a new "Freedom to Know" unlimited by position, education, or economic circumstances. In the dissolution of borders and the declining power of governments, they see a "Freedom to Go" that will create a genuine world citizenry. Amidst the ruins of corporate structures and of lifetime careers, they discern the "Freedom to Do," the opening of unprecedented opportunities for those driven by intuition and entrepreneurial zeal. And, with the disappearance of a centuries-old reality, they welcome the exciting possibility of creating individual realities-the "Freedom to Be" whatever one wants to be. In The 500-Year Delta, they provide both the perspective and the practical tools for exercising those freedoms in the new millennium.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Jim Taylor directs global marketing for Gateway 2000 and was a former managing director of Hill & Knowlton, one of the most important public relations firms in the U.S. He lives in North Sioux City, South Dakota.

Watts Wacker is the resident futurist at SRI Consulting, one of the nation's foremost think tanks. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

Howard Means is a senior editor of the Washingtonian and resides in the Washington, D.C. area.