July 1996 € Volume 6 € Number 7

A 21st Century State of Mind

An interview with Daniel Burrus

By Gregory A. Farley

Daniel Burrus, well-respected technocrat and technology forecaster, will deliver the keynote address on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at the 1996 APICS International Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans. Burrus spoke at the 1994 APICS Conference in San Diego to great acclaim. He is the author (with Roger Gittines) of Technotrends, a 1993 book that goes a long way toward demystifying high tech systems and their application in business. Gregory A. Farley, editor of APICS--The Performance Advantage, recently spoke with Burrus on technology, the future, and the nature of business in the 21st Century.

Greg Farley: I understand that technology is your stock and trade, but I'm not certain that the business community will be able to identify and hire enough visionary, savvy people to remake industry through the intelligent application of technology.

Daniel Burrus: You don't have to be a visionary to be a 21st Century professional, but you do have to have a 21st Century perspective, and you have to understand 21st Century realities. By knowing about the 20 core technologies and the 30 tools, and understanding that all your competition has access to the same tools, you can stop being a crisis manager and become an opportunity manager. Knowing the core technologies and the tools enables you to adopt a 21st Century mind-set, to become strategic, and to develop specific goals and timelines for achieving them.

Here's an example of a 21st Century perspective. Time is more valuable than money, so time is a new form of wealth. Why? Because every single industry, every single company, is asking people to do more with less, and next year they'll ask those people to do even more with even less. I was sitting on an airplane not long ago that had been overbooked. The flight attendants tried to free up a seat by offering anyone who gave up their seat a ticket to any destination in the continental U.S. No takers. They added Alaska and Hawaii. Still no takers. Then they added $200 cash, and a student finally took the offer. But for everybody else on that plane, time was more valuable than money.
So let's apply this perspective on time to sales people. A salesperson goes into a customer's office and does what? They rob the customer of time. What if you were a salesperson and you could give your customers more time rather than stealing it? You could do amazing things. And the only way you can do that is with technology.

Even within a company, some people seem to rob time from others, by sending seven-page E-mail messages, leaving a voice mail message to let you know you have an E-mail message, and you were copied in the first place and didn't really need the memo in the first place. What these people are doing is misusing 21st Century tools. They're wasting your time instead of giving you more, and that's because they're 20th Century thinkers caught up in a 21st Century world.

GF: You write in your book that technology makes you an optimist. Are you convinced that the U.S. educational system will be able to provide a work force with the knowledge and skill necessary to compete in the 21st Century?

DB: Well, it will be an education system, but probably not the one we have now. The system in place now is going to go through massive changes because of crisis. Just as in business, most of us wait until something is terribly broken and performing poorly before we'll fix it. And when it comes to anything that costs lots of money-like healthcare or education-we wait until it is amazingly broken and terrible. But at some point, inevitably, we all get fed up and decide that we have to do something.

We can't neglect our children. We don't want the U.S. to become the equivalent to a third-world nation in terms of how we compete in a global marketplace. For us to prosper, we'll have to make education work. And not only for kids.

The adult work force, too, will have to be re-educated continually. That's something that many businesses don't do well.

I was talking recently with the CEO of a company about how important it is to upgrade his people's skills as much as he was upgrading his technology. He said, "I don't like to spend a lot of money on training, because they might leave my firm."

My response was, "What if you don't, and they stay?"

As we continue to move toward an information-based economy, we'll have to realize that the product of the office isn't papers-it is ideas. And as we begin to mine the resource of the mind, our workers' minds, we'll all be astounded by just how tremendous a resource that is. Then we'll jump into the 21st Century successfully.

GF: How can organizations such as APICS participate in this process?

DB: For associations, the Internet is an amazing tool. Most organizations look at the Internet and wonder, "How can we use this technology to sell our products and services?" That's the wrong question. It's a 20th Century question. If you ask the 21st Century question, which is probably something like, "How can I use the Internet to bring amazing new value to my customers?" you'll get a very different answer.

One tremendously useful aspect of the Internet is its ability to create virtual communities around a company or an organization-a community of users, or students, or buyers. The goal of these communities is to share knowledge. The Internet, right now, offers access to information. In the future it will offer knowledge, and knowledge sharing, which is a key point because knowledge increases in value when it is shared.

Creating these communities and using them not to provide access to information, but to share knowledge -- creating "knowledgebases" rather than databases -- will provide users with a new level of communication and a 21st Century organization.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are 21st Century communication tools. Using these tools we can find out what others in our own field, or in related fields, are doing. We can more rapidly share our knowledge and take action on it. All of a sudden you're in the communication age and, through knowledge sharing, you can apply new techniques to what you're doing already. You can start doing it yourself.

GF: What did you hope to accomplish with Technotrends?

DB: There are two points central to the book. First, I wanted to give business leaders a look at, long range, where technology was heading, so in 1983 I put together a list of 20 "core technologies" that wouldn't change for about 20 years. These technologies give you about a 20-year look into the future.

The second point is that if you want to know what technology tools are available now and that will become more powerful, look in the toolbox. And in the book I listed 24 tools already available that the 20 core technologies had given birth to. Since then I've added six more tools to the toolbox, so now there are 30.

I wrote Technotrends because, in an era of knowledge, we'll need knowledge workers. For most companies, that means substantial changes to the processes of business and changes to the technologies that they apply to those processes. I don't want us to have to make these changes in crisis mode. I want to inspire people to make these changes now while they can do it in an opportunity mode. If it happens later, in crisis mode, it'll be far more painful.

A lot of people, when they grow into their 40s and 50s and 60s, start thinking that they can't handle all this new technology, that it's best left for the kids coming out of college. But really, age doesn't mean anything. The barriers to success are internal, we carry them with us.

Only 4 percent of the surgeons in the U.S. know how to use a laser in the operating room. Is that because the rest of them are stupid? Of course not. It's because 4 percent have decided to become 21st Century professionals. If you needed brain surgery and the only tool for the job was a laser, would you want the young surgeon coming right out of medical school looking for his first patient to do the job? Or would you rather have a 55-year-old surgeon who's been operating on humans for 20 years and was open-minded enough to learn how to use a new tool?

To succeed, to become 21st Century professionals, we have to grow beyond our self-imposed mental limitations.

GF: That's not as easy as it sounds.

DB: That's because we, as a society, do not put a lot of value in creativity. We are all born as creative beings, but our organizations, governments and schools have never taught people how to maximize their true creative potential, which is the machine that drives problem solving. As a matter of fact, we've done just the opposite. We've learned how to hold it back.

Let's face it. In many companies, very creative employees are often transferred or let go. All the people that are left then learn how not to be creative employees. If you're a very creative student, the teacher often calls your parents and reports that you're breaking out of the norm and not following all the rules.

Creativity and innovation are the keys to building a positive future. Fortunately, those are elements of our nature. Since human beings have been on planet Earth we have been doing impossible things. Our ancestors couldn't count on always being able to find a rock to sit on, so they invented the chair. Glass, electricity, flight: At one time each of these was totally impossible, existing only within the realm of imagination. And yet, we keep doing these impossible things.

We take a new tool and we change the world. Imagine the world before the axe or the wheel. Well, now we have 30 new tools, and there will be more. These tools will help us do the same old thing, only more efficiently and with fewer people, which we call downsizing, or we can use these new tools to create the new products and the new services and new careers. It's up to us, and I think that we're up to the challenge. We'll use these tools to create opportunities. And if you don't, then your competition will, because these tools are real and they're here today.

Twenty Core Technologies Shaping the Future
Genetic Engineering	Advanced Biochemistry
Digital Electronics	Optical Data Storage
Advanced Video Displays	Advanced Computers
Distributed Computing	Artificial Intelligence
Lasers	Fiber Optics
Microwaves	Advanced Satellites
Photovoltaic Cells	Micromechanics
New Polymers	High-Tech Ceramics
Fiber-Reinforced Composites	Superconductors
Thin-Film Deposition	Molecular Designing
From Technotrends, By Daniel Burrus and Roger Gittines, Harper Business, 1993

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