English Audio Request

A New Yorker cartoon shows a tiny newsstand with a big sign. “Fred’s
Newsstand—,” it reads, “Forefront of the New Post-Industrial Information
Society.”
We’re all Fred, of course. The information society is a fact, and it
affects the work every one of us does, from building cars to selling newspapers.
As futurist John Naisbitt wrote, “The information society is an
economic reality, not an intellectual abstraction.” Yet most of us haven’t
learned the skills we need to survive and thrive in this new knowledge
economy.
This fact is particularly important because more and more of us—me
included—are entrepreneurs and “intrapreneurs.” For the small business
owner—or for the owner of “You, Inc.,” within a large business—the upside of the knowledge economy is the fact that the creation or communication
of knowledge does not require a large organization; the lone
David can compete effectively with the Goliath. For example, some of the
computer programming for a London cab company was done by a solo
entrepreneur working from his Indiana farmhouse. The downside, however,
is that the same standard of communication excellence is expected
from a one- or two-person operation as from a giant corporation with its
own communication department.
As revolutionary marketer Seth Godin has pointed out, much writing
now goes to its readers “unfiltered,” without an editor working on it first.
He continued, “The thing most people miss most is that they no longer
have an excuse. Without a publisher/editor/boss to blame, your writing is
your writing.”
So how do you compete? By being your own communication
department.
Begin by understanding the times we live in. One of the most perceptive
commentators on the knowledge economy is Alvin Toffler, whose
book The Third Wave outlines three times of major change in human
activity:
1. The first of these “waves,” said Toffler, came several thousand
years ago when hunting and fishing were replaced by farming
as humanity’s main work. In the resulting agricultural economy,
wealth consisted chiefly of the ownership of land.
2. The second wave happened only about 150 to 200 years ago,
when farming was replaced by manufacturing as our major economic
activity, at least in the Western world. (That revolution—
the industrial revolution—was not a bloodless one: the U.S. Civil
War was, to some extent, a conflict between a largely agricultural
South and an increasingly industrialized North.) In the resulting
industrial economy, wealth consisted chiefly of the ownership of
factories.
3. Now, said Toffler, a third wave is sweeping over us. Manufacturing
has been giving way rapidly to the processing of information as humanity’s major economic activity. As we have entered the
information or knowledge economy, wealth has come to consist
of the ownership of information—or rather, the ability to collect
and communicate information. James Champy was right when
he wrote in his book Reengineering Management, “Knowledge
is power, as the cliché has it. But knowledge is not easy to come
by. You earn it by thinking. And all we have to think about is
information. So make sure that the information ‘gets around.’”