4 centuries of progress in 20 short years
Imagine the year 2395. These are some of the benefits to humanity that could occur if current economic trends since the Industrial Revolution continue. Think about what our lives would be like if they were available in our lifetime. We believe that all of the knowledge already exists to achieve the objective of 20 times the normal rate of company progress over a 20 year period and the resulting benefits that occur.
- A best-practicing manufacturing company might now have current revenues of over $400,000 per employee per year. At a rate of real growth of 2-3% per year (a typical rate of expansion since the Industrial Revolution), that will grow in 2395 to over $1.5 billion in constant dollars per employee. Costs of operating should be much lower, as a result. This also implies much larger companies than currently exist.
- The lead-time to design and produce a new product or service is often 2-3 years now, for a wide variety of industries. At a rate of improvement of 2-3% per year, that time will shrink to less than a day by 2395. The potential for more rapid growth due to customer benefits of new products and services is obviously much greater. The need for more competitive insulation is obviously also much greater.
- Growing incomes will mean tremendous benefits and opportunities for families and individuals. Production in 2395 without the labor costs of 2395 would mean an enormously profitable company with an extraordinary stock-price valuation.
- Over the next 20 years, the cost of computing a constant task with new software and hardware will drop by over 99%. That change is similar to a 400 year change in most activities we do now at the normal rate of progress.
We feel that many of these benefits as well as others can be available in our lifetimes if we take charge today. We need to change the way we think about progress and act on it. A company that is aware of these and other projections about the future and uses them to plan ahead will make tremendous gains.
We will be using this project as a way to make measurements about what 400 years of progress will look like. We would like to hear your thoughts about this too. Are there any projections you can come up with that you can support by using numbers to back them up? If so, we would love to hear about them. E-mail us with your ideas.
We have mentioned just a few examples where things that have promoted economic and social progress were delayed or impeded because of the ways that humans behave and think about progress. Once we realize that humans can greatly affect the rate of economic and social progress, we can create enormous benefits for ourselves today and in the future. We need to be aware of our own power to make economic progress happen rapidly so that we can obtain greater benefits faster. In fact, we believe that humans can make 20 times faster economic progress.
In the past few decades, there have been many companies that have grown consistently at much more than 10 percent per year. A few notable examples include Hewlett-Packard, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Intel and Microsoft. In addition, the differences between the performance of the top companies like these and the average ones have been widening dramatically.
As one way to make enormous strides, however, the average can reach where the top is today by locating those elements that permit the highest performance today. This project will help identify these elements and teach us how to implement them. Through this project, the performance of the top performing companies can be expanded toward the theoretical limits of best practices.
If all companies could grow at 20 times their historical rate, this would produce many more goods and services for people, and employment and compensation in income could be a lot greater. By doing this we believe there will be an enormous explosion in the standard of living as well as economics that can be shared with people who can't be economically productive, including some people who are physically or mentally incapable. So, helping increase companies' performance helps society as well as the companies themselves.
We feel that many companies need to change some of their key beliefs about the world. Again, this is a matter of demonstrating ways that people can change the ways they think about progress. For instance, they need to change the idea that causes them to underestimate the size of potential markets and focus too narrowly on the potential scope of their products and services. They need to think in terms of much larger markets. As we mentioned, Henry Ford recognized this when he saw that it would be futile to produce many automobiles if few people could afford to purchase them. He thus increased his workers' wages to an amount which would make it possible for them own their own cars.
We plan to use the first 20 years to research these ideas and deploy them as rapidly as they are understood and then another 20 to fully implement them with a broader number of companies. During the research phase we will be formulating and testing our hypothesis. Our goal is to better understand change so that we can learn to speed up the time it takes for positive changes to be implemented.
These ideas are not only intriguing from a theoretical point of view but are mind-boggling when we think of the real possibilities for mankind. They provide a way of thinking that allows businesses to develop and implement successful new strategies, techniques and processes. As we move into the future, this will not only be a question of keeping up but of getting ahead. We hope to show how the learning and achievements of what might normally be expected to be accomplished over the next 400 can be realized in the next 20.
Learn the steps to making 20 times faster economic progress.
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