Nine Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Centrury by William A. Draves and Julie Coates highlights nine societal “shifts� that will complete our move from the Industrial Age into the Innovation Age by the year 2020. According to the authors, 75% of our lives will change between 2000 and 2020. A change that parallels what happened when we moved from an agrarian society to the Industrial Age between 1900 and 1920. Thanks to Topshelf reader Michael Arbow for recommending this book!
There’s so much in here that I’ve had to break this review up into three sections. But, first let’s list out the nine “shifts:�
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1. Many more people will work at home
2. The intranet will replace physical offices
3. Networks will replace pyramid (hierarchical) structures
4. Trains will replace cars
5. Communities will become dense
6. New societal infrastructures will evolve
7. Cheating becomes collaboration
8. Half of all learning will be online
9. Education will be web-based
I’ll address those issues individually in later posts, but I want to note that the book was published in 2003, which means probably researched and written in 2001/2002. While some of the shifts listed above have already started happening, we should credit the authors with the fact that they weren’t at all prevalent five years ago.
I wanted to first focus on what I liked best about the book: their comparison to life at the last turn of the century and the analogy to the auto industry. Before discussing the nine shifts, the authors give you some background about how the world was in the period 1900-1920, using examples of rural farm life in Kansas and how the automobile came into existence and completely destroyed the world as they knew it.
Originally, the car was first thought to be a “play toy� for the rich and not a “necessity.� People even thought they were a “fad.� Flash forward a few decades, and the automobile can be directly tied to the creation of factories and even our entire way of suburban life. I’d seen the comparison of the auto industry to the internet before, but never in this much detail. Here’s a brief summary:
- The auto completely destroyed agrarian life (they were built in new factories, tractors led to the demise of the family farms; displaced farmers went to the cities/factories)
- When a family could afford a car, they could afford to move back out of the city, hence the creation of suburbs. Yet work, still remained downtown, requiring the need for more cars.
- Since 1903, we’ve had over 2,200 car companies making cars, and now we’re down to a select few.
- The internet is completely destroying our industrial life (technology has displaced factory workers, outsourcing and virtual work is becoming more and more of a reality).
- As commutes from suburbs become longer, more people will consider working at home; as a result we will see a change in suburbs (more on that later).
- Despite the dot com bubble bursting, there are some big survivors in the various categories of internet/technology.
Want more parallels?
Biggest issues facing the US 100 years ago:
- 60+ hour workweeks
- Poverty and the extreme inequitable distribution of wealth
- Healthcare
Also, check out this post of mine from back in March sparked by a New York Times article paralleling current economic conditions with 1928. Yep, that’s right, we’re looking at the same economy our grandparents did one year before the Great Depression.
The Bottom Line: Before we attempt to predict the future, we should take some time to understand our past. This book does both.
**It also couldn’t hurt to read (or re-read) Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (the Nine Shift authors draw from it) and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
More thoughts on the Nine Shifts coming later this week … Part II – The demise of companies and suburbia as we know it; Part III – Good news (for women); bad news (for Boomers).
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 5:24 am and is filed under Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.2 Responses to “Is your business ready for the year 2020? Part I”
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September 3rd, 2007 at 10:22 am
The future will mirror the past as education increases on line. The semantics of “I went to Yale,” as opposed to “I took course through Yale” will have unequal merit on a resume. The concern that the mass marketing of on-line classes will reduce the acceptance standards at better universities. While this may cut down on competition it could devalue a university education. More than likely, greater emphasis will be put on elementry and pre-K education because that is where children are taught to socialize and having little one underfoot makes it harder to work from home. As in the past, high schools will suffer, maybe not from a drop out rate but from the convenience of virtual school. The older kids can fend for themselves once they are computer savy and paernts will probably believe that if they are working at home they’ll keep their kids on task. New statistics will emerge on “virtual hookie.”
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:41 am
Very intersting comment. One point the authors didn’t discuss was the fact that our schools are still running on hours set back when we were an Agrarian society and the kids had to work on the farms. Not sure what online learning would do for this, but longer school hours would make life easier for single parents and dual earning couples.