The end of better, faster, and cheaper

Have you noticed that the world is getting faster and faster? Exponential growth keeps me up at night, with terrifying night sweats. Unlike regular linear growth, where each year we see the same change, exponential growth accelerates.

Take the recent Apple presentation on CPU performance increases. I owned the original iPhone when it first released in 2007. A year later, the 3G came out and I skipped it because there wasn’t much increase. I then upgraded to the 3GS and saw a bump in speed. Today, just six years after the original iPhone was released, my new iPhone 5s has 40 times the processing speed. I can store 64GB of data vs. my original 8GB.

Go back a further and data storage was measured in kilobytes. Today, we measure data in megabytes and gigabytes. Hard drives are sold in terabyte increments.

Using the iPhone example above, more than half of the speed increase came within the past year. At that inflection point, more progress came during that one year than the previous five years combined.

My sense is that the number of email messages, tweets, Facebook postings is also increasing in that similar exponential fashion. There’s a reason why we are starting to feel overwhelmed with the shear volume of data come across.

Yet, the way we work continues to evolve at a much slower pace. We still cling onto email like its the only way to communicate. Google Wave failed when it first came out because it evolved faster than people could adopt. Today, the simple act of getting people together to make a decision or take an action results in countless emails, meetings, and calls. As the to-do list gets bigger, the number of communication points will increase exponentially as well.

If we continue to cling onto emails, meetings, and calls, in the very near future, we will consume the full 24 hours in a day, or 168 hours in a week and still not be able to keep up with the ever increasing data streams.

The tools we used in work the past five years won’t keep up with the doubling of work in the next year. The era of better, faster, and cheaper is rapidly coming to an end. Anyone that thinks they can better, faster, and cheaper an exponential curve is going to quickly get crushed by the mathematical inevitability.

What we need is to be smarter, network, and scale. More to come on what the future will hold for us.

Published by Daniel Hoang

Daniel Hoang is a visual leader, storyteller, and creative thinker. As an experienced management consultant, he believes in a big picture approach that includes strong project leadership, creative methods, change management, and strategic visioning. He uses a range of visual tools to communicate business challenges, solutions, and goals. His change strategy is to build "tribes" of supporters and evangelists to drive change in culture and organization. Daniel is an avid technologist and futurist and early adopter.