Ian Morrison Part 2 The Second Curve: How to Command New Technologies, New Consumers and New Markets

Aidan McCullen: Welcome back to part two of this brilliant episode on this book that released in nineteen ninety six, written as far back as nineteen ninety one when he wrote an article the curve problem this is absolutely gold going back into the stories looking at some of the organizations what organizations made it what didn't make it's a brilliant book the second curve how to command new technologies new consumers and new markets. The author is with us again Ian Morrison you're very welcome

back Ian Morrison: Thanks, Aidan. Great to be with you Aidan McCullen: Delighted to have you back to talk about part two and, we've had time both of us to let some of these ideas marinate for you there bubbling back to the surface again and some other stuff has connected so we're gonna share a couple of things today we didn't finish the diagram that i showed yesterday the changes from first curve to second curve we're gonna cover that and then we're gonna cover a few different organizations tha

t had emerged. Who were essentially surfing curves they were understanding where the next curve was going to didn't always get it right but they learned quickly they pivoted quickly and they managed to survive today and thrive in some of the cases as well so we're gonna cover, some organizations HR Block, SGI, which is Silicon Graphics, and then a company that Ian worked with for a very long time at the top level, which was Volvo. We have loads to get through today. Let's get stuck in Ian. I'm

going to share straight on the screen again, the diagram first curve to second curve. Ian Morrison: As we talked about before, this sort of brought it back because I actually remember vividly, writing this table sitting in my living room when one of my colleagues said we need a synthesis of what these changes really mean. And so in terms of the market It's a bit like, because remember, a lot of what we're talking about here is the sweeping change to a post industrial economy. My kind of Bible, i

f you like, in the work I've done over my entire career has been Daniel Bell's work, the coming of post industrial society. He was a sociologist at Harvard. Who founded the urban studies program, and my PhD is in urban studies. So it's really this grab bag of social science, if you like, and talking about transformation to a knowledge economy. And this is, the second curve is very much consistent with analyzing that shift. So moving from a world in which it's all about capital to a world where i

t's all about knowledge and the, the ability to generate new ideas and new thinking is really the cornerstone of a lot of second curve enterprises ironically. With the rise of venture capital over the last 30 years if you have the knowledge, if you have that breakthrough, you can very quickly attract the capital. And that's been, one of the hallmarks, I think, of disruptive innovation is the speed, velocity and amount of valuation you can generate off the strength of ideas and information and in

sight. But I think the second big shift is, a focus on the producer controlling everything, the brand to the control being in the hands of the consumer. And I think in retailing, we've seen that kind of middleman lose power the brands lose power and the final connector to the consumer being the one who actually has power. The cost goes in the Amazons of the world in terms of their ability to private label in terms of the Yeah. Geography of transformation. And I was originally trained as a geogra

pher. I think what was evident in the early nineties was this inevitable shift from a center of gravity for the planet moving from the Atlantic axis to the Pacific. And within that the dominance or not dominance, but the, as the ascendancy of China and some other emerging markets over the traditional kind of Asian stalwart being Japan in terms of economic power. And similarly we're seeing this sort of transformation from focus on international trade to global electronic commerce that we would im

agine happen over the next decade or two, which has come to pass. And, computers and computing being standalone items moving towards a world of connected Internet infrastructure. And that certainly has been the dominant theme in technology over the last 20 years. And perhaps tied to what we said about the rise of venture capital is this whole notion of it's not just about money, it's about people. And I've been struck by the degree to which having hung out with some of the venture capital folk t

hat in the final analysis, what they pick is not always ideas but people. And they're really backing entrepreneurs that they believe in and teams that they believe in regardless of what the idea is, quite honestly, and often that's why you see these serial entrepreneurs keep turning up over and over again. Aidan McCullen: The book goes into search depth in each of the markets as well covers at the time which were very much emerging markets china india is in there you also talk about russia, talk

about the power shifting from the U.S. etcetera so it's fascinating to read back and to see how they have played out just as you were predicting back then cuz you could see them coming on to the second curve. But this is also the case for the individual and you cover the individual in depth as well the shift in the workforce to shift in you as an individual and your mindset shift that needs to happen. A second curve mindset essentially. There's a lovely quote here that i just have to share with

our audience it goes as follows Ian writes:. "The nice thing about the first curve is that it feels fairly secure it's where you get your money it's what keeps you employed it's where your office is. It's the place, the people and the company you belong to. It's what you know. The second curve however is uncertain. It's not clear that what you are doing is right. The second curve is a little bit scary because it's not about an obvious transformation. It's a very difficult shift. Why would anyon

e move? Why would anyone leave the security of the first curve for the second? This is the core of the second curve dilemma. The reason is that the security of the first curve is a false security . It's a sense that just because it's working now does not mean that it will work forever. And then there's a killer line at the end you say here. "Build on what you have. It's nice to reinvent yourself but build your new career on existing interests and competencies connect your strengths." i love that

over to you Ian. Ian Morrison: Yeah, I think it is this tension and you really have to put yourself back to the early nineties where there was still a pervasive kind of social contract that was starting to unravel between corporations and workers, that if you were loyal and faithful and you hung around, you got retiree health benefits and pensions and all the rest of it. And that was starting to unravel in the eighties. But, it's really subsequent to that with the rise of second curve enterpr

ises that those loyalties, those traditional secure environments have come under assault one way or another. And it's partly because of the rise of opportunity on the second curve. And I just want to call out a couple of, I think it is very difficult for individuals because you're giving up that secure environment. I've been a freelancer basically for 25 years, and, what , that is, about Aiden, but the second curve enables that kind of independence. But it is scary to take the jump and I think w

hat I've learned actually, and again, this is something. That's really evident in Silicon Valley. I, in subsequent writing talked about in Silicon Valley, we don't have a safety net. We have a safety network where it's okay to fail. And people often the entrepreneurs getting funded are people who have tried other things that didn't work out but venture capitalists see the potential in them as leaders and as innovators and, they're allowed to come back, even though an enterprise may have gone sid

eways. And I think that's a very important dimension, certainly of the, I live in Menlo Park, ground zero of venture capital, it's part of the essence and the, DNA of this part of the world that it is okay to have had failures and falter but we'll give you another shot at it. If you believe, there's, a there there in terms of creating new technology and new wealth. I want to really focus on this issue of hyper effectiveness though, because I think this, and we're on the cusp of an exponential in

crease in this concept with the next generation of AI and machine learning and quantum computing, all of those things that way above my pay grade, but certainly if you were to write the second curve today would be the cornerstone driving technologies on the technology front. And let me just illustrate it with a story. Shortly after the book came out, I was invited , to a retreat for a company. I'll not name the company, but it was a middleware, successful middleware company And it was it was at

the Highlands in just south of Carmel, very lovely place. And the leader the CEO of the company was basically explaining to me, this is probably the late nineties. He said, there are two companies that are going to come out in the next few years that are going to be huge. One is Salesforce and the other is a little company called Google. And the thing that was interesting is we got into a discussion about how software companies are are created and this entrepreneur was explaining that if you loo

k underneath any great software product, there's probably a tiny team, maybe just one guy, and it's nearly always a male who writes the code. Now that was true, the Institute for the Future generated the first commercial email product CC Mail, and basically it was written by one guy, Hubert Lipinski who's this big, nerdy, PhD in astrophysics who, who wrote it at the machine code level literally so it was an act of sort of software genius. And I have a very close personal friend. Serial entrepren

eur. I call him big brain arthur is a big Dutch guy who trained at Strathclyde University in Scotland. And has, been chief technology officer and founder of multiple companies, but he was on the team that wrote Java at Sun. And there was five guys who wrote that whole programming language. And many of them have gone on to found other companies. So one of the hallmarks of software development and I'm no expert software development, but I think it's a perfect example of this notion of hyper effect

iveness. You don't need Huge plants or massive amounts of capital. You need five guys maximum who can write elegant code. And then with the advent of cloud based computing, you can make that massively scalable. And I think that Combination has been the source of enormous amounts of disruption successful disruption in the last 20 years, that is so relevant what you're talking about now Ian about the hyper effectiveness you were talking about leveraging technology then and we're seeing really the

fruits of that today where all these things you talk about here so you talk about the shift from first to the second curve from the market to the individual on the organization. Aidan McCullen: And they all affect each other so the market changes the organization has to change and then the individual has to be open to be able to. I'll be open to that change the mindset has to be open to forget what you've learned before it's no longer relevant but that's coupled with some of the things you tal

k about in the book like exponential change or moore's law, it's like there's a moore's law happening not just in technology but that moore's law is happening almost like a societal level and therefore we have to be this stem cell willing to be able to just readapt and re change and re engineer how we think. I'm leverage those tools and it's those people that seem to be the ones that are gonna be there not only the survivors but the ones that i should do well in this new world. , . Ian Morrison

: And I think it's key, in the quote that you read earlier, that last line about do make that transformation, however, leveraging other Existing competencies and interests, right? It's, you've got to, there's got to be some logical connection because sometimes what happened both to individuals and corporations is they'd see this emerging opportunity. There was one example, I've forgotten it now, but it was a company that. Was in the fish business, like fish processing and they tried to get into

e commerce and it was like it was a bridge too far, right? It just there was no logical connection. They didn't bring anything to the party and you, you can say to yourself all day long, I'm going to reinvent myself as a, an AI expert, but if you don't have the competencies or an entry point in that. It's pretty difficult just through act of will to suddenly become expert in a completely different field. Aidan McCullen: In that jump from first to second curve as well you talk about so we get th

is now the jump from security to uncertainty and that's part of that mindset as well but in there i thought there is something that's really interesting cause you mentioned there about building on current capabilities, i know you're on a part one we talked about the difference between sony and apple for example. Or sony and disney where disney built on current capabilities they just went into or widened their net to go it's the entertainment business but sony tried to acquire into businesses lik

e you said that had nothing to do, where are existing competencies and that's a nice mental model to go well that goes for us to an individual level but there's a quote here that i thought was so important for both. On a personal level to understand that it's not gonna always work out and the way you put it is beautiful here i'll quote this, " definitions and measurements become incredibly important and incredibly difficult on the second curve what is the unit of analysis for the second curve?

You ask. The difficulty applies to technology especially but it's true of all second curve phenomena. In fact the second curve can be so fuzzy that it becomes a series of multiple curves a band of false starts, weird early signals and true pioneers but there are times and conditions when we as a society are prepared to jump to the next curve when the case is so compelling, when the infrastructure to support change reaches a critical mass." Absolutely love that because it has so much in there. Ab

out the difficulty of jumping to the new curve because you know what this is like in people will ask you when you are running workshops you're working as a consultant with organizations, when is the time to jump to the next curve. And, you're kinda goin' that's the real problem here nobody can actually tell you that! Ian Morrison: That's so right on. I was, just as you were, saying that I was thinking back to when I first joined the Institute, we had a group who were the world experts in evalua

ting video conferencing, right? That part of Bob Johansen's group at the Institute that, they were running. I think it was every year for five years. We did the same study for AT& T to say that, video conferencing will someday be a billion dollar market, right? And this is back in 1985. So it's not like we didn't know how to do this stuff. But it took 30 years and a pandemic to make it mainstream, right? And the technology was there. But the compelling application or need wasn't there. eventuall

y. Now, if that's what I mean about the metric. So there's a thing in economic sustains law, if something is unsustainable in the long run, it'll end. And my kind of corollary of that is, if something's going to be a big deal in the future, it's got to start sometime. So that's why when we talked before about it. Metrics. In a measurement, it's important to try and get those indicators and be disciplined about measuring whether you're seeing a hockey stick increase or whether it's all hype. And

that's incredibly difficult to discern sometimes. And that's why Ironically, if I'd been thinking about it when those, when we put up the two curves, the key thing is the tipping point, right? Malcolm Gladwell wrote that book five years later, but he really tried to dissect, what is it that causes things to go exponential? And, I think there's some real insights from his thinking and work on all of that. But quite frankly, it is very difficult to see when the, these shifts, I just was looking.

Back Google was founded in 1998. It was three or four years after the book came out. And we were still in that early stage of the Internet sorting out who was going to be, the browser of choice. Mosaic had just come out. Netscape was around. But it was still, and we were toying with the Alta Vista's and the, the early search engines, all that stuff's gone, right? And Google became, the default for the planet. And, we may be at the cusp of another jump ball in that regard with generative AI. Who

knows? That I think is why we're seeing, the battle between Microsoft, Apple. Google in terms of who gets the credit and who gets to be the big dog going into the next wave. Aidan McCullen: There was something you talking about there the jump from, hope to faith which is interesting as well but i come back to that one cuz why are on this thread there was a really interesting thing just to, really hammer home this point about how difficult it is when you're successful to be able to be even open t

o the fact that you might not always be successful. So this little quote here i'm just gonna say to our audience those of you who are CEOs of a successful business listen to this because put yourself Ian says in ibm's position in the late nineteen seventies and early, nineteen eighty nine when steve jobs and steve Wozniak we're building the apple computer .Apple was struggling to produce a product that would be scalable beyond the hobbyist market, ibm was making a ton of money from existing main

frame businesses. It would have had been incredibly difficult for senior IBM executives, not only to countenance the demise of their original source of revenue, but also to imagine that apple and the apple two computer could ever mature to a point where they would be a serious threat to the power of big blue it's reliability and performance in mainframe computers, you can certainly sympathize, Ian tells us ,with ibm top managers given such a dilemma. It is what he calls the tyranny of the instal

led base, Ian Morrison: Funnily enough, I've served on a board for 20 years and a lot of them were ex IBM executives, several of them. And they were around at the time and making there was a lot of internal skunk works around the development of the PC, the IBM PC, that was wrenching to the mainframe guys, on the one hand, and similarly the whole notion of of trying to respond to the upstart model and even though IBM responded, and the operating system for the work environment was pretty much on

IBM platforms through the nineties Apple did phenomenally well in terms Of consumer products, particularly beyond 2000. And of course, since with the iPhone, but I think, just to come back to an example of where the tyranny of the installed base can get you. Is even if you see the trajectory of technology and this relates to the silicon graphics example they were, disruptive to mainframe supercomputing, right? We, Bob Johansson and I did this thing with Ed McCracken where we had to go on an ai

rplane with a monitor and do a "show and tell" to various different industry groups around what the potential was of these high end workstations. And it was completely disruptive to the supercomputers, right? But ironically, what happened is that just as SGI was disruptive to supercomputing the PC got more and more powerful. And so you could cobble together a couple of Dell computers and some slick software and emulate that very high end Workstation that SGI had developed. And so by 2011 SGI was

out of business. It went bankrupt. Because it had been undercut by Moore's Law themselves, even though they were in that business. That's what's so poignant about it. That They understood supercomputing better than anyone, but yet the inevitability of the power of the lesser alternative, the almost good enough but cheaper, as Clay Christensen would talk about, it got them so that there was really no compelling difference between something that ran off a Dell computer versus an SGI computer in t

erms of graphic animations and all the rest. Aidan McCullen: i'd like to come back to Ed mccracken and SGI because of the culture that they had actually worked really hard on the culture. There was so much investment in the second curve by that business which is why i want to point this out that there's a lot of you can call it luck, but there's so many moving parts there's the market there's the consumer demands there's as you call the shorter moments in the sun so i was telling you off-air fri

end of the show and somebody hopefully we'll collaborate together with this paul nunes and he wrote a book called. " Jumping the S curve" and. He talked about the whole idea of the diffusion of innovation, Ev rogers diffusion of innovations becoming shorter and compressed and becoming what he called a shark fin, i actually put shark fin beside my notes here because you wrote, leading edge second curve companies are going to have shorter moments in the sun as the power of technology amplifies an

d is the connectivity of global wired world increases. These moments in the sun shorten for second curve pioneers and the speed with which new curves have to be built becomes even greater." this is difficult enough and rita mcgrath, friend of the shows what she calls this transient advantage vs competitive advantage of the old days, and what i loved about the case studies mentioned the book i hate your block guys and SGI graphics was actually that the cultures they had built for really fast de

cision making. Knowing that sometimes they're gonna be late to market but if the culture is good enough they'll catch up pretty quickly that's, that was really the essence of why i wanted to share those so maybe you do us the honor of sharing those Ian? ian-morrison_2_12-08-2023_090726: And, McCracken, actually, I think I wrote about it in the book. I've followed him once in, given a talk and, he said he didn't believe in forecasting and futures or strategic planning. He just wanted his processe

s to be fast enough that he could catch up, and stay ahead. And they were very diligent about doing that But as I said in the story in the final analysis, even though they had all of that it didn't pan out and, in working with some of the other I'm forgetting even the example, it was after I wrote the book, I did a retreat with one of the Silicon Valley company in the semiconductor space. And they talked about Formula one competition, meaning a sort of bumper to bumper at 200 miles an hour. You

just have to constantly innovate because you're going to be, if you don't keep up with Moore's law, if you don't meet that standard, you're just going to get sideswiped. Here's the, this Sharkfin thing I think is really interesting because it's compounded in difficulty by, and I don't even know if I wrote about this in the book or whether it was afterwards, I in other writing, talk about binary competition. You either get all of it or none of it, right? That it's a winner take all Potential. It

relates to this notion of hyper effectiveness. You think about search, right? We don't have 20 viable search engines. Most of us on the planet use Google, right? And now that may change with generative AI in winners there. But it's like once there's a winner, they get almost everything on that. makes these moments in the sun, even more difficult. At one point SGI was the whole enchilada on those high end workstations and yet by 2011 got disintermediated themselves. Aidan McCullen: i'll show you

Ian on the screen the shark fin just because i think you'll find it interesting and you just see that used to be like a nice bell curve and like this early point here the reason i'm showing here for those people are watching us in the early days. Paul called the singularity and the number one thing was to consult your truth sellers. I'm the truth tellers were people like institute of the future they were like you're in Morrisons there Bob Johansens of the team and i thought i just share that to

show you because, one of those things, And, i'm jumping ahead here i'm jumping all over the place but before we share those case studies at the end of the book you suggest some of the things that you can do. To understand and to manage the second curve. For example, you say you gotta have a long term view. You gotta anticipate different stage of developments. You gotta, and I love the language here. You gotta expect stuttering starts. You gotta lean into exponential the exponential of everythin

g so maybe you'll share some of those kind of triggers that you can look out for to understand that this change is coming quicker than has been the case before Ian Morrison: And I think it is the, and I love Paul's chart by the way. I think that really captures the role, the different roles that different advisors and thinkers have to play on that. We, at the Institute for the Future, the reason we were a nonprofit and we were doing all this corporate work. My board used to ask me. Why? You look

more like a consulting company. But what we thought was the social mission was to get organizations to look longer term than they would otherwise do in the interests of the, success of the economy and viability is trying to push that timeline out. But often you can be You know, the danger is you compress. I call it premature extrapolation, right? You get to carried away with yourself and imagine it's very close and Paul Saffo, a great line about never can confuse a clear view for a short distan

ce, right? That it may look close, but it isn't actually that close. So so there is a value in being able to discern a pattern of what drives the future. And that's why we focused in the book on those fundamental drivers of new consumers, new technology, and new geographic markets. We haven't talked much about the geography one because I think a good example is Volvo. I worked with Volvo while we were writing the book and then subsequently was involved in a couple, over, over the late nineties a

couple of, Their strategic planning retreats. The first one was interesting, probably 95 or 96. It was in Palm Springs and it was wintertime. It was right over New Year's. And of course, the Swedes coming from Gothenburg, Palm Springs was supposed to be balmy golf weather and actually was unseasonably cold, but they still thought it was brilliant, right? We're out playing golf and it was 40 degrees, Fahrenheit. And it was still a hell of a lot better than the weather in Gothenburg. But anyway,

we, so we had this great meeting and lots of data about driving forces for change. And I forget how we got to it, but I was trying to push. At the time, it was the rise of the minivan. And the, the bigger platform SUVs and we were saying you guys should really you ought to make one of those, and the people who are expert in the automotive industry. Experts are saying yeah, that's what the market signal is. Blah, blah, blah. And, I'm playing facilitator. You know what it's like. You're trying to

get them to, and the Swedes are lovely people. Once you got a few aquavits in them, you can't shut them up, but they're a wee bit, modest and quiet and nobody spoke, right? No, I'm going like it's not a great idea. Nobody spoke. And then eventually Søren Gill, the CEO turned to me and he said, Ian. We're not going to build a minivan because you can't build a safe one, right? And the message there is safety for Volvo wasn't just a slogan. It was like in their DNA, right? So that, that was like a

cultural phenomenon. And I think that's a good example of, shift based on culture and values. They eventually did build crossover vehicles because they figured out a way to jump. off a car platform and make it in their mind is safe as cars. So that's a good example of the safety thing. The second retreat is an example of The global change, which was we were using the second curve principles to discuss what was their second curve and Volvo was a relatively small player in the car business. 100,

000 cars a year. Maybe 8 10 percent a Market position in the luxury market. But that's under scale, right? But they were the second largest producer of heavy trucks and buses globally behind Daimler Benz and at that meeting, they decided that the logical second curve was to double down on the truck business rather than the car business. And so they ended up selling the car company and now they subsequently try to get it back under the Volvo brand. But it was gut wrenching for them because they

had a very emotional attachment, but it was part of this. They could see the inevitability of the disproportionate growth that was going to take place in emerging markets in particular with heavy trucks and buses. Aidan McCullen: it's interesting i couldn't help but think of that allegiance to safety. While it was good in that instance if you thought about say for example the psychological attachment many organizations have to their. Original product say that they cling to the first curve or tha

t they feel defined by that first curve because. This is where i was so impressed by both what SGI silicone graphics tried to do what actually what HR block did do because it was their persistent investment in the next curve despite how. Sometimes immature that second curve was and they didn't always get it right but they were willing to actually put their literally put their money where their mouth was or their thinking was on that's why i was so impressed by that company and was so happy to go

and check their stock price and see when you are writing about them where they were now that they're riding really high compared to the stock price of those early days maybe you'll tell us about this company with any comments you have to add to it. Ian Morrison: Yeah, no, a really interesting company. I first met H and R block. The H is Henry block. And I write about the book when they invited me. I was on advisory board for One of their subsidiary companies, and they asked me to be on the boar

d of that subsidiary company. And when I went to meet the Henry Block in Kansas City at the headquarters, he came to the lobby. And it wasn't because it was me, because he did this with everybody that came to see him. It was just the way he was. He's just incredibly generous and modest man and kind. Aidan McCullen: You say this in the book and i think this is so important and to keep the frugality of a start up alive because i felt that was the case as well i was trying to you know you mentioned

as well in that intro, that the ea or the receptionist knew your name as well just by you coming on all you must be Ian and that was like wow and then such a large company that's humility and that, in a way frugality was still there. Ian Morrison: Absolutely. . And in fact, Jerry Grossman who was vice chair of H& R Block, who I sat on a board with for many years, Jerry taught me a lot about business. And in fact when I went out on my own, he said, keep your prices high and your costs low. And i

t was good counsel. R Block story. So when I, was involved with them. They had three businesses. They had the tax business, and this is maybe a peculiar U. S. phenomenon. Australia and Canada, I forget how we did taxes in Britain, but, we in the U. S. have to file taxes every year. And for the low, rich people have fancy accountants, but, most of us struggle. And so you need help in tax preparation. And so they had built this business, which was essentially helping working class people fill out

their tax returns. And that ended up being a once a year business. So you ended up having to hire a bunch of people and they franchised these accounting offices, and so it was a retail operation. So they got expertise in, . Managing temporary help, which led them to invest in this temporary help company a staffing agency basically for both health care and commercial. So that was an interim services. That was a second business. And then they bought a fledgling consumer facing and business facing

software company, CompuServe, which was one of the original platform technologies that subsequently led to dial up service on the internet. So they had those three businesses. And what they, which speaks to your willing to experiment. But over time, What happened was my first board meeting, they said, we're going to spin off the temporary help company. They essentially got out of the CompuServe business because they could see, I think the writing on the wall and over the last 20 odd years have b

rought second curve thinking to the core business, which is that tax business, because at the core of the tax business is people using things like debit cards. And other forms of financial software to give people their rebate is the word I was struggling to get. They're going to get a rebate so they can provide the rebate upfront, but charge interest rates that are very high on that rebate. So it's a sort of financial model. Some people might pejoratively call low rollers, right? You know that

you actually, there, there's businesses where you focus on not rich consumers, but relatively low income consumers, but there's a high relative stream of financial reward for servicing that group. But, I think the overall story is a willingness to experiment and a willingness to bring second curve principles to your first curve business. Aidan McCullen: i'm so struck by so many of the ways that you were on the money with a lot of this stuff and as you call out you can't you cannot know when the

y'll land sometimes they'll land quicker sometimes they take the 30 years that you mentioned in the book to diffuse into society sometimes it takes a pandemic for these things to happen that was the way for example with video technology like this that we're using. But it was also in a way the push towards flexible workforces or the flexible office that now many people who own commercial property are actually struggling from but there was a quote here that i thought was so interesting and maybe y

ou'll riff on this one and because. This was beautifully written but also came true for so many people listening to this show right now because they'll be listening to it in their home office you write and don't forget. By the way this is written early nineties early to mid nineties "the home environment will change as much in the next ten years as the office has changed in the past ten. Television will become digital and interactive, with a panoply of information services for consumers, customi

zed programming, video on demand, home banking, information services, interactive games, telephones, cable television and computers will converge to create a multipurpose multimedia information, and entertainment capability, smartphone anybody? One consequence of this development will be an acceleration of telework. As the home office becomes a completely functional extension of the corporate office. Overwork at home has become one of the killer applications of the nineteen nineties beautiful Ia

n, over to you. Ian Morrison: I read that recently again, and I thought, wow, we did get it right. And it really speaks to the value, I think, of the methodology. At the institute that we, I remember, the genesis of this was a big whiteboarding exercise where we, we and our colleagues and some outside experts sat around with a bunch of our clients including cutting edge vendors and users, and we were using a brainstorming tool, which is, Starting on the home, it's saying home as hospital, home

as office, home as entertainment center, home as, and using that to riff on ideas and, many of these things came out of that kind of ideal, ideation type exercise that, that, often product development companies and product development teams get into. But no, we were convinced of that conversion of media and technology. I, there was a lot of talk in the early nineties about personal digital assistance. We didn't quite crystallize it that the phone would be the platform. The way the iPhone. Became

because many of us were using brick phones. ian-morrison_2_12-08-2023_090726: And I remember one of my colleagues saying, now I had, I probably got them in my, behind me and here in my offices, every cell phone I've ever had. I keep thinking I'm going to mount them one day, and one of them is like, when it looks like something out of world war two, yeah, there you go. Yeah. And I've got one of those. I love those little tiny ones. Aidan McCullen: I'm on the i'm holding up here for those of you

listen to an old ipod cuz i hold the i. I do the same i gather this stuff i'm like you is like on it look great in a frame one day almost like you know the dawn of mankind you know that type of idea, Ian Morrison: yeah, yeah. It's stuff like a museum exhibit. Yeah. Aidan McCullen: you can sell them by the way these days people will pay good money if they're still working Ian Morrison: Wow. Maybe that might be my next job is clean up my closet, Aidan McCullen: One man's junk is another man's gold

. Ian Morrison: yeah, yeah, exactly. This issue of homework, cause it's really fascinating. I've been. So there's a group at Stanford actually tracks this stuff pretty closely and we're, I don't know about in the UK, but in the U. S. the numbers are about half of people want to work about half the time at home. So it, it nets out that about 30 percent of jobs. Are virtualized to some degree. And, somewhere between 20 and 30%. So we've seen, as you said, commercial real estate occupancy drop dram

atically. And, a lot of talk about conversion to to housing and so forth. Just because the relative demand for housing versus office spaces has shifted, but yeah, no, I think that the platform of homework it was also consistent with the outsourcing movement that happened through the 90s. So it was compounding, I, I always used to say a lot of people work at Google, not a lot of people work for Google. Google and Microsoft, all these guys have badge colors, the people are with the program and the

people are not with the program. And there's a lot of 1099, as we call them in the U. S., contractors who never make it to the A team. You're a permanent reserve for those of us who play sports. You never got to be on the big team, but Aidan McCullen: Don't mention the war man. Don't mention the war. ian-morrison_2_12-08-2023_090726: yeah. But yeah, no, I, and I think the fluidity of enterprises is such that we are going to see that, I think, continue. And the potent, you put this together, if

I was going to write it all over again today, going forward, I would really pick on this hyper effectiveness issue. What does it mean? I have a friend who is an advisor to the defense department who's a very sophisticated technology entrepreneurs helping the defense department incorporate new technologies and their planning and thinking. And he basically said to me. I can do my job with chat GPT is my assistant. I don't need people anymore. No, that might be an overstatement. But I think that di

rectionally is where a lot of people are headed with this notion of hyper effectiveness with these emerging tools. And what does that mean? What does that mean for organizations? What does that create? In terms of a challenge for disruption, and, that's the work you're on, and I'll look forward to hearing how it all plays out. Aidan McCullen: Well, it's funny. You said I think the, I always have this model in my head that you have, so you have technology on the exponential route where I don't th

ink everybody understands how powerful each jump when it comes to AI. Is because it's no longer that we have to wait for coders to make it stronger it's actually improving itself at an exponential rate so that those jumps are so dramatically better each time so you have that on a dramatically improving rate but then you have. What a lot of people are finding their struggle to be like you call the hyper effectiveness but even to be focused to be able to have the attention to even read, add an art

icle like you're two curve article back in nineteen ninety one or HBR article whatever it might be. People are struggling to sit down and read one of those. And i think it's that collision course of there are these two curves that are going the opposite ways that's for me a human superpower is to actually be able to be focused to do the work to do it effectively to also then invest time in your health and yourself in your relationships etc and to be able to not reach for that alcohol beverage fo

r that substance of choice that's where this becomes interesting that you're seeing this kind of coming together of both the human physiology, and neurobiology and then actually the technology world as well i think that's an interesting Venn diagram overlap, , , Ian Morrison: and it's why I think you're seeing particularly younger generations reappraising What life priorities look like. It's, I always joke that, people often ask me about how do you deal with generation Z or X or whatever? How i

s it different from the baby boom? And I'm, I'm the father of two millennials. And I always point out that they're looking for In terms of their work life, they're looking for a cross between the Peace Corps and Morgan Stanley, they're looking to save the world and make a difference on the one hand, be well compensated, and they'd like to live in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Thank you very much. And only work three days a week. But I think you're pointing to, in all seriousness, a very, Important an

d difficult dilemma, which will be on the one hand, this potential for technology enabled hyper effectiveness. And on the other, how healthy is that as a human being to be in that kind of turbo charged, , rat race if you want to use the negative and that that's scary going forwards. And I think we, we all have to find a balance in all of that in our own personal and family lives. You're absolutely right. Aidan McCullen: i have one last quote that i absolutely love and i'm gonna share that but as

i'm doing this. I'd love you to have your final thought for audience maybe your final kind of call clarion call for audience and before i even give that quote and then throw it over to you is where can people find you where's the best place to reach out and find you Ian Morrison: Well, I'm still active on the web at ianMorrison. com and most of my writing in the last 20 years has been around, around healthcare, as I think you know. But certainly I'm reachable through my website, ianMorrison. co

m. Aidan McCullen: and i'll link to that in as well a link to the website this is my quote . I love this and i want our audience those of you are still with us who joined us cause again attention spans are short these days this is a lovely quote and it goes for both the corporation and the individual that's what i really like about this use the word corporation interchangeable you the person the individual this. As in this whole change their first second curve phenomena "means that corporations

have to adjust to a world where new products and services will be a reality even though we cannot conceive of exactly what those products and services will be. We have to prepare for a world where they will exist. In other words. Using current products and services as a benchmark is inadequate. We need to stop benchmarking against each other and start benchmarking against this uncertain but powerful future. Otherwise, we're all going to be left behind." Absolutely love that Ian Morrison, "the se

cond curve". Ian over you what's your final message. Ian Morrison: Think that's a sort of a restatement of Steve Jobs, a manifesto, which was, the consumer doesn't know what they want. But they'll tell us eventually when they see and are delighted by something like the iPhone. And I think that did come to pass. I would just say having, really been in the forecasting and looking ahead business for almost 50 years. You can't predict the future precisely. I have come to it. this with some humility

over the time. I think we've done a pretty good job at the Institute and my colleagues there continue to do that fine work about looking ahead. I don't think you can predict precisely, but I do think you can think systematically about the future. And, I am still a great believer in dissecting Those big driving forces of change around consumers, geography and technology that you can update and continuously monitor those shifts and then use creative planning and creative ideation processes to say,

so what does that mean if something happens? And, dealing with uncertainty is just part of what. Looking ahead involves and I still believe that there is value in, exploring these kind of diffusion models as a platform for understanding change. That's a very helpful. body of work that you've put together, Aidan, so I support you in continuing that work. And I think it's out of that kind of thinking that people can get an appreciation of how to tackle what is essentially uncertain and ambiguous

going forward. Aidan McCullen: Beautiful and it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. This is not his only book by the way as well so you'll find his other books on, Ian Morrison dot com and also Ian has two versions of this book as well so i have the nineteen ninety six version as well so the updated version, add a business week bestseller book back when it came out as well. Author of "the second curve, how to command new technologies new consumers and new markets." Ian Morrison, thank

you for joining us, Ian Morrison: Thank you, Aidan. Aidan McCullen: Mic drop. Well done, man. ian-morrison_2_12-08-2023_090726: That's great. That was fun. That was fun.