Happy Unofficial Start of Fall War & Peaceniks! Ready for Change?
Regardless of what business you’re in, it likely feels like the rate of change in recent years has accelerated. For many, the pace of change feels out of control - careening towards the cliffs of uncertainty with more speed every day.
I get that. My change tracker is this silly map of mine. Here’s the latest (updated today)…
Resizing every planet on a map, based on the myriad twists and turns of the marketplace gives a practical, tangible shape to the nature of change. It also offers a dispassionate remove from change, and allows for some perspective on the nature of change itself. For many, surfing the universe inside one of those planets, especially in the last two years, change can feel like tsunami-themed rollercoaster without barf bags (example: Warner Media has had three different owners in the last 48 months).
Incrementally tracking all the change across media over the last two years has formulated a central thesis about our global culture and the businesses that serve it:
The global pandemic crisis accelerated the various changes in our world by a decade. Just as the Great Depression and WW II did two generations ago, the shared worldwide calamity of COVID has reshaped the very nature of how we change.
CHANGE has CHANGED.
Most of what’s changed in the last few years was going to happen anyway; it simply happened much faster than it would have otherwise. From the accelerated maturation of businesses such as Meta, Netflix or Comcast; to the irrationally fast ramp-up and downfall of others such as Peloton or Zoom; to the intensified spread of cultural phenomena like Black Lives Matter and political populism; to the exponentially augmented awakening by the global workforce to the gross inequities of 20th Century Capitalism…
The emotional and physical intensity of the claustrophobic worldwide lockdown forced everyone on earth to take stock, of literally everything. It also allowed all of us to finally catch up to, and make more practical daily use of, the massively under-exploited technology that surrounded us.
Some contextual data (If you see the data, thanks for being a premium subscriber! If you don’t, consider taking the FREE TRIAL to keep reading, then churning out to teach me a lesson about economics):
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