Disruption! Disruption!
Dis-Rup-Tion!
New! New! New!
Phew! Phew! Phew!
Hold Onto Your Hat!
Katy Bar the Door!

I admire—and have learned from—Clay Christensen. He brought us news of a constant state of “disruption.” We now live in a state of perpetual breathlessness. Every day brings news of a new disruption. Wow!

But something was nagging at the back of my mind, And I finally figured out what it is. Namely, constant disruption—at a fast clip—may not be new. What “big data analytics” did I use to figure this out? My Mom, Evelyn Snow Peters, was born in 1909 and died in the summer of 2005. Here, in a single paragraph, is a partial précis of the yawn-worthy, uneventful times she lived through:

The advent of mass market cars, commercial radio, routine long-distance phone calls, portable phones, cell phones, satellites, satellite phone call transmission, movies with sound, color movies, TV, TV dinners, microwave ovens, commercial use of aircraft, jets, extensive electrification, the Great Depression, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter, the West Coast Offense, the Civil Rights Movement, an African-American POTUS, Gay Pride, women win the right to vote, Gandhi, Churchill, WWI, WWII, the birth of the U.S. Navy Seabees, relativity, the A-bomb, the EEC, the EU, the Euro, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, 9/11, the 43-year Cold War, the disintegration of the USSR, the resurgence of China, the death and resurrection of Germany and Japan, Oklahoma & New Mexico & Arizona & Hawaii & Alaska become states, William Howard Taft* [*just missed Teddy Roosevelt], FDR, Ronald Reagan, Father Coughlin, Jim and Tammy Bakker, mainframe computers, PCs, hyperlinks, the iPod, DARPA-net, the Internet, air conditioning, weed whackers, Mickey Mouse, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna, the Model T, the Cadillac Escalade, Nancy Drew, the first four Harry Potter books, antibiotics, MRIs, polio vaccine, genetic mapping, WWII rockets, space flight, man-to-the-moon, more or less permanent space station.** [**But, to be sure, not long enough to see the Cubs win another World Series or to take a selfie.]

See, not much went down for her.

Whoops, gotta go, gotta deal with my DDD … daily dose of disruption.

Tom Peters posted this on June 5, 2014, in News.