jazz aficionados and acolytes alike, which is particularly funny, as “pure” jazz has stayed somewhat stagnant in recent decades. Do you think any of those detractors bother him at all? Of course not—Kenny G has sold over 75 million records.15
When he first found commercial success in the 1980s, Kenny G was interviewed by the LA Times, and he explained that even back then, he wasn’t trying to relive the jazz of the past. “It’s been done,” he explained. “I’m into new ideas and experimentation, so it doesn’t bother me if the purists don’t like my music.”16 These new ideas and experimentation have led him to become the highest-selling instrumental musician in modern times. He’s happy to be considered “commercial” and likes creating music similar to some of his favorite sax players of all time, including David Sanborn and Grover Washington Jr. Of the musicians, Kenny G said, “I like them because they’re always innovative. You can’t criticize people for having different and new ideas.”17 Disparage him as much as you want, and jazz dogmatists be damned, but innovation is at the center of Kenny G’s approach to writing and playing music, and he is great at it.
The third common (and also incorrect) response to change is to try to protect the status quo through regulation, something I’ve experienced firsthand. While working for Napster, I witnessed the company become so disruptive that it threatened the entire recording industry—an industry, by the way, that refused to believe in the concept of digital music when it first came onto the scene (see the first response, “ignore it”). Once the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) noticed the impact, it took legal action. In its attempts to fight the inevitable digital disruption onslaught, the RIAA did not stop at Napster; it also went after the consumers themselves, suing them for illegal downloading and file sharing. Yet these attempts proved feeble in stemming consumers from welcoming and adopting digital music. Yes, Napster never survived the litigation, but ironically, the music industry did not survive Napster either and had to adapt—the digital music revolution was unstoppable, no matter the amount of regulation.18
All three of these responses—ignoring, shaming, and regulating—are dangerous to the future of any organization, because they distract us from understanding and embracing change. To stay relevant, we must meet challenges, trends, and new realities head on, no matter how uncomfortable they might make us or how skeptical of or shocked by them we are. Who would have guessed, for example, that “online sports” (what is that anyway?) would be competing with traditional sports for people’s attention? According to SB Nation, the sports blogging network owned by Vox Media (another unicorn company), in 2018, during the Overwatch League’s opening weekend, their games had an average of 280,000 viewers per minute, beating out the NFL’s Thursday Night Football’s average viewers on streaming services.19
SB Nation further reported, “At its peak, the Overwatch League had 437,000 concurrent viewers, averaging 408,000 on its opening day, according to Overwatch creators Blizzard Entertainment. In comparison the NFL had an average of 372,000 viewers on Amazon in 2017 and 243,000 on Twitter.”20 Research from 2019 actually found that come 2021, US esports will beat out every other professional sports league, aside from the NFL, in regard to viewership.21 (A number of companies are wisely catching on, and have begun marketing in the area, including Cox Communications, Coca-Cola, and KitKat.22)
And did you know that the highest-earning channel on YouTube in 2018 was essentially run by a seven-year-old child? (Talk about shock and surprise!) With clever orchestration from his parents, Ryan, of Ryan ToysReview, makes millions of dollars reviewing toys in online videos. That year he jumped from number 8 to number 1 on Forbes’s list of the highest-paid YouTube stars, earning $22 million, thanks to his 17 million followers.23 When Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, sold the company to Google in 2005, he didn’t see a long-term strategy for the video streaming service, stating, “There’s just not that many videos I want to watch.”24 He could have never predicted Ryan, or 1.8 billion monthly users.25
Sports and toys—surely these aren’t the great examples that embody the Fourth Industrial Revolution, right? Not so fast. Within these two areas alone, we’re talking significant technological innovation, new business models, and a relentless desire to do things differently, not to mention rapid growth. Note that even though the NFL was founded in 1920 and the Overwatch League was founded almost one hundred years later in 2016, within a few years the two were already competing over viewers. Change happens in all sorts of unlikely places, whether or not we want it to or expect it to. We must avoid tunnel vision and pay attention to more than just our immediate surroundings, so we can understand and determine how to adjust to change in the most thoughtful and pragmatic manner. To do so, however, we must first get to know the factors driving change today and the new opportunities and challenges in front of us.
Work with Change, Not Against It
The rate of acceleration in the Fourth Industrial Revolution cannot be stressed enough. Customer expectations are rapidly changing; businesses and organizations are suddenly evolving; new products and services are conquering industries practically overnight; and real-time hyper-collaboration across time zones, countries, and industries has become the norm. If we don’t accept and understand these influences, we’ll never be able to work with them, so it’s important to identify the key drivers that are enabling the world around us. These are, of course, subject to change at nearly any time, but there are a few mainstays that have proven their longevity and look to be integral going forward into the future as well.
First, the world is becoming truly digital. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2022 there will be so many connected devices in the world that they’ll number more than three times the global population. With 3.6 networked devices per capita, this adds up to an astonishing 28.5 billion networked devices, up from 18 billion only five years prior in 2017.26 Of course, all of these connected devices are contributing to the increase in global Internet traffic. Starting at only 100 gigabytes per day in 1992, in 2017 this traffic was up to 46,600 gigabytes per second and is expected to reach 150,700 gigabytes per second by 2022.27 In simple terms, here’s what happens in one minute on the Internet: 1 million people log in to Facebook, 4.5 million YouTube videos are viewed, 87,500 tweets are sent, 1.4 million pictures are swiped on Tinder, 3.8 million Google searches occur, and nearly $1 billion is spent on products and services.28
When looking at customer value, market valuation, and revenue growth rates, digital platforms are the most successful business models of our time, which include 70 percent of the top ten most valuable companies worldwide.29 As the world is becoming more connected, it’s been found that fewer than 10 percent of companies’ business models will be economically viable in such a climate—and private surveys show that CEOs know this.30
The second key driver of change is that technology is becoming radically more affordable, delivering greater capabilities while requiring less space. Take data storage, for example. As a student, I remember saving for months to buy a hard drive. Today, storage is nearly free, dropping from an estimated $500,000 per gigabyte to three cents per gigabyte, from around 1982 to 2017.31 There is a famous picture of an IBM 350 hard drive being loaded onto an airplane in 1956—the 5-megabyte hard drive weighed more than 2,000 pounds and was available at a rental price of a mere $3,200 per month. To put that in context, Apple’s most popular iPhone products 6 and 6 Plus, which sold over 130 million units, were priced at $200, weighed less than one-third of a pound, and had over 3,000 times the capacity of the IBM 350.
Thanks to technology, another major influence on how we live and work today comes from a changing economic landscape. There are significantly lower barriers to entering into almost any business than there were just a few decades ago. In today’s society, entrepreneurs can start their business and launch products or services seemingly instantaneously. Many no longer have to rent office space, buy assets, or even hire
