Two Speed World

What?s the next change round the corner? What if you were the first to equip yourself best to deal with it and get a head start over the next person? If that thought intrigues you, Two Speed World will not fail you.

Put quite simply, this book slots the nature of change as binary – incremental (low speed)
disruptive (high speed); and tracks how change can migrate from one state to the other. The key to maximizing the opportunities inherent in change, according to the authors, lies in identifying the nature of change correctly and tracking its transition from one state to the other. And more importantly, the book then goes on to arm you with a whole host of
tools you can easily leverage to not just successfully deal with turbulence but emerge enriched from it.

What really struck me about the point made by Two Speed World is that both types of change play different roles ? incremental change ensures survival, but disruptive change invites disruptive change is not the same as progress. While we may think otherwise, incremental change in overdrive, but something much more fundamental. While most decision makers tend to see issues in incremental terms they fail to grasp that disruptive changes demand a different analysis and approach.

Gerald Ashley and Terry Lloyd show us how people can deal with change by learning from stories from the past. ?We find that although circumstances may differ the basic characteristics of change do not.? – they explain. The authors go on to state that by looking back over the past 150 years, by taking a small sample size and studying how changes such as technical innovations, war and social upheavals affected the lives of earlier generations, we can derive an understanding of what to expect in the future.

Drawing deeply from their decades of experience in the world of finance and technology, as well as from major historical events, the authors create a simple construct to understand change better, and while not proposing a panacea, discuss how classical change management techniques may be applied in different contexts.

While the book may seem a tad academic but you will nevertheless come away better informed and quite certainly better prepared to handle the changes you encounter in the everyday business of life.