Lessons From The Future

Future Perfect

As Stan Davis maintained in his previous book, Future Perfect, published 10 years ago, the qualities of the universe determine business realities. Thus, your business can be described by the universal properties of time, space and mass. These ideas are now assumed factors in business strategy. For instance, planning requires consideration of speed and time. The speed at which an idea can move from concept to product and into the hands of consumers is a basic measure of success. The factor of time forces a business to question why it should mail information when an e-mail would do and to ask why it should build physical models when computer simulations would serve.

Cyberspace, a term coined by science-fiction writer William Gibson, wasn’t included among those original elements, but it certainly belongs on that list. Cyberspace is built upon data. It is the center of the information revolution, which is the keystone of the current great economic shift.

The core of today’s economy is information technology and, therefore, all businesses "informationalize," no matter what else they do. The information economy means two significant things. First, economic...