In the past the flow of information was physical. Checks, cash, business forms, personnel records, mail, all things we could touch and file, were right before our eyes. For the past one hundred and fifty years the world has been engaged in making Hawthorne's words come true. Networked Intelligence has arrived and its name is the Internet . In this digital networked economy everyone is talking about the most important element is time.
Time reaches critical mass quickly when products have a life span of only a few months.
A delay of a month, a week or even a few heartbeats can spell disaster. No one is immune to this fickle age, not you, not me or even the largest of the Fortune 500. In researching this statistic I may have found the reason for the demise of at least one of the companies on the 1955 list. I found the following passage in their 1954 annual report. We don't have any real competition.