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Homepage / Publications & Opinion / Archive / Articles, Lectures, Preprints & Reprints![]() "From Hero to Zero in a millisecond" Telecoms guru Peter Cochrane on meeting the challenge of change Elspeth Hyams, Director, Institute of Information Scientists "Large corporations appreciate their agents of change until they succeed," according to Peter Cochrane, speaking as the guest of LASER (the networking development agency) at an end-of-the-century review of the state of the communications revolution in London in December. "You can go from hero to zero in a millisecond and it takes about three years to get back to where you were" This was a fairly broad, free-ranging overview of what the information society would mean for human economic and social activity. It touched on subjects from the implications for governments of international 'virtual' companies, that do not 'sell' anything and do barter - to the implications in human terms of so many current companies' rapid rise and demise. Peter Cochrane is renowned in Britain for his expertise in effecting radical organizational change, but he hinted that the stresses of being that agent of change are great. His own organization, British Telecom, had downsized from 242,000 to 110,000 in only seven years, and aimed for drastic further reductions in order to survive. It was easy, in circumstances like that, to fall out of favour ("You can go from hero to zero in a millisecond and it takes about three years to get back to where you were") but this was, he said, a time of breathtaking opportunity and dizzying possibilities for those who embrace technology and are prepared to be flexible in how they work. As well as his work running BT's research laboratories, and managing change, Peter Cochrane is the current Chair of CoPUS (the Public Committee for the Promotion of the Understanding of Science) as a physicist, a technologist and an entrepreneur in his own right. In a talk peppered with memorable aphorisms he gave a highly personal view of the significant features of the change currently riding roughshod over existing business assumptions, economic models and patterns of social organization. The problem today was one, he said, of changing paradigms that have become so established that to change them is to destroy them. However, in technology and innovation terms, it was getting more difficult to make erroneous predictions because the time between concept and delivery of final product was getting shorter, down from ten years to about two. Primitive understanding of machines
Our current level of sophistication in understanding the capabilities of machines is primitive, he said: "the equivalent of being able to recognise an animal on the horizon and club it to death." The days of the lone inventor, moreover, were gone - it was more or less impossible to make significant breakthroughs without working in multi-disciplinary teams, to cater for human diversity and get close to the 'complete' human being'. In an online world, different mathematical laws came into play. In the past, the telephone network had worked because people made few calls, and made them in a random way. The aggregation of all these random actions allowed the sharing of resources. But in the internet world, there is no aggregation in the random sense. Everything was causal and correlated, which created huge engineering challenges. Company lifetimes "It is weird to write a book as if we did not have multimedia" A short article cannot do justice to the range of this talk, which also covered the impact on logistics of creating a .com world, the dangers of making economic decisions without having any viable economic or social models on which to base the decisions, social exclusion through information deprivation, the challenges of adapting economic activity at a time of break-neck economic change, life choices in the learning environment, the dangers to public health from failing to bring information together, work patterns in the global economic community and many more. In response to a question from the floor, Mr Cochrane admitted there was a possibility that data mining could wipe out libraries. But information professionals would emerge in new roles. In keeping with his own eclectic, open-minded approach, Peter Cochrane called for more holistic thinkers, but expressed his fundamental optimism. "When there is a collective threat, you find humanity comes together to solve problems," he said. The message was clear: get out there and start team working, networking and sharing! |
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