“The future has its own form of gravity that pulls us toward it faster and faster: it’s called technology.” 100% agree. Technology has been the greatest catalyst to fundamentally changing how we live, work, and play. Technology is pulling us into the future at warp speed (whether we like it or not) and it’s rewriting the rules at every turn. Preparation for the ride is imperative.
The opening statement is a quote from Thomas Koulopoulos & Dan Keldsen’s book, “The Gen Z Effect: The Six Forces Shaping the Future of Business.” A book that provides a mind-bending view of why we will need to embrace Generation Z (the post-Millennial generation) as the last, best hope for taking on the world’s biggest challenges and opportunities, and how you can prepare yourself and your business for the greatest era of disruption, prosperity, and progress the world has ever experienced.
Related Read: Exponential Change Is Coming, Will You Be Ruler Of Your New Reality
Below are 21 statements from The Gen Z Effect that will have you convinced that we are living in the greatest era of disruption.
- Prestigious universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT are giving away their courses for free, disrupting the very foundation of higher education—a foundation that they built.
- A child in Kenya whose parents make less than $5 a day can now attend an open online course at MIT.
- Each [generation] is increasing its use of text messaging at roughly the rate of 30% each year.
- There are many more generations of technology in the century between you and your grandparents than there were in the two thousand years between Plato and Gutenberg.
- For every job the Internet eliminates due to new efficiencies, 2.6 new jobs are created.
- There are more cellular mobile devices in use today than there are people in the world.
- The number of online contacts in social media and e-mail doubles every nine months, on average, for 70% of online users.
- 2.7 billion humans now inhabit the Internet.
- We have arrived at a singular moment in history when we will observe the final connection of every last human to one global community.
- We are connected to 50 billion devices that are attached to the Internet, from surveillance cameras to wearable devices to smart cars.
- Each day 2.5 quintillion bytes (that’s a billion billion bytes) of data are created.
- The Internet has achieved adoption in excess of 30% of total global population, a number that eclipses any other human phenomenon in the same time frame, even if we include global pandemics.
- There are estimated to be 7.5x10e18 grains of sand on all the beaches in the world—that’s less than 1% of the devices we’re projecting by 2100.
- You likely interact with, on average, more than 200 devices on a daily basis, most of which you never actually see, such as those in appliances, automobiles, surveillance cameras, ATMs, traffic sensors, and possibly a personal wearable.
- The United States has 101% penetration of mobile devices, Western Europe has 129% penetration, South America has 126% penetration, Central and Eastern Europe has 151% penetration, and Russia a whopping 180% penetration, meaning that there are just under two phones for every person.
- During the next 3 decades, the number of graduates will exceed all of the graduates from every educational system since the beginning of recorded history.
- As of early 2014, more than 10 million students had enrolled in MOOCs, which collectively offered 1,200 courses, given by 1,300 instructors from 200 universities.
- According to Matt Ferguson, CEO of Career-Builder, technology skills depreciate at about the same rate as physical assets. Technology skills are likely the fastest-depreciating asset of any organization.
- Microsoft, through more than 100 million unit sales of its Xbox gaming systems, has calculated that the typical gamer spends about two and a half years of cumulative time gaming by the time he/she graduates from college.
- Small firms of less than 500 employees produce 16 times as many patents as firms with over 500 employees. But firms with 15 or less employees produce an astounding 134 times as many patents per employee as do the largest firms with more than 83,000 employees.
- 3D printing will be as commonplace to Generation Z as electronic publishing is to Generation X.
Related Read: The Mindset Required To Remain Relevant In Today's Fast World
Imagining the hyper-connected future can be challenging because we often try to force fit the future into the present. Using today’s behaviors to predict the future will always undermine our ability to image new possibilities and to arrive at a clear picture of what might be.
We must continue to stretch our thinking and challenge our existing skill-sets so that we can best meet the demands of tomorrow. Don't allow change to stagnant you, take it one step at a time and find peace in the following words...
“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” ~Abraham Lincoln
Question: Which statement do you find most ming-bending?
Consider Ryan Jenkins to be your next Millennial/Generation Y or Generation Z keynote speaker by clicking here...
