It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself. Paul Saffo More Quotes by Paul Saffo More Quotes From Paul Saffo The Web is a compelling new medium being put to all kinds of uses, by everyone from banks to Cub Scouts to flying saucer cults. That said, it can also be a powerful folly amplifier. Paul Saffo flying powerful use Graphic designers are idea embalmers, loving undertakers preserving bits of data like to many butterflies pinned to felt in a jewel box. Paul Saffo butterfly data jewels The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded. Paul Saffo excluded social-network defined The difference between our collective generation and your generation (differentiating the reporters from the students) is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of your friends (nodding at the students) are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion. Paul Saffo class years ideas I'm not sure the notion of employee or job is going to survive the transition over the next couple of decades. The very notion of a fulltime job will seem as quaint in 20 years as the notion of someone getting a gold watch at their retirement in the 1950s. Paul Saffo couple gold retirement As Stewart Brand (co-founder of Emeryville's Global Business Network) likes to say, "Information lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first." There are examples everywhere. The tapes from the original Viking landers that went to Mars are at (NASA's) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but there is no machine that can read the tapes. Paul Saffo machines forever years Every day huge amounts of information break off like icebergs and melt away. What worries me is that much information in electronic form is never reduced to paper. Some people have described this as being on the edge of a digital Dark Age and fear we may commit a massive act of amnesia. Paul Saffo break-off dark worry If you look at the last 150 years, about every 30 years or so, a new scientific discipline emerges that starts spinning out technologies and capturing people's imaginations. Go back to 1900: That industry was chemistry. People had chemistry sets. In the 1930s, it was the rise of physics and physicists. They build on each other. Chemists laid the experimental understanding for the physicists to build their theories. It was three physicists who invented the transistor in 1947. That started the information revolution. Today, kids get computers. Paul Saffo technology kids years Google was the right set of people at the right time, and they ended up doing the right set of things. It's worth looking at how they are managed. They are network-oriented and allow a lot of flexibility and creativity. Paul Saffo google creativity people Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions. Paul Saffo glue digital technology There is reason to be scared. Look at what has happened with fundamentalism - this is a reaction against modernity. It happens to be cloaked in religion, but these are people saying enough is enough. It's happened again and again through history. The good news is that modernism has always won. Paul Saffo news people looks I think companies over the last 10 years have done a very bad job of explaining to their employees what the intrinsic risks are. All I know is, if you wait until you let the employee go to deal with the issue of how do you communicate to the employee about being let go, it's too late to do anything. Paul Saffo waiting letting-go thinking The best way to let people go is to let them know when they're hired that it's an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it's not that you don't love them. Paul Saffo environment risk people I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don't pretend that you're doing something that you can not do. There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, "It's not a bug. It's a feature." Paul Saffo honest important thinking When everybody else is in a down market is focusing on what they're doing wrong, instead focus on what you should be doing differently, it may be that what you did in the past was perfectly right. It is possible to do all the right things in business and still have a business crisis because of what's happening in the external environment. And if you start focusing on mistakes only, you're going to miss opportunities. Paul Saffo mistake opportunity past My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come. Paul Saffo touching technology advice Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way. Paul Saffo transformation technology different The most important thing that a company can do in the midst of this economic turmoil is to not lose sight of the long-term perspective. Don't confuse the short-term crises with the long-term trends. Amidst all of these short-term change are some fundamental structural transformations happening in the economy, and the best way to stay in business is to not allow the short-term distractions to cause you to ignore what is happening in the long term. Paul Saffo perspective important long Take cyberspace as an example. We had this wonderful utopian vision of a new home for the mind. What we've reaped isn't cyberspace. It's cyberbia. It's this vast, bland wasteland of vulgar people and trivial ideas and pictures of half-naked starlets. But despite all the uncertainty, has there ever been a more fascinating moment to be alive? Paul Saffo home people ideas Stock prices turn people's heads. When prices are high, we treat a company like gods, and if they drop, we treat them as fools. Paul Saffo treats fool people
