What’s the big deal with 2007?

Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone. A whole group of companies emerged in and around that year. Together, these new companies and innovations have reshaped how people and machines communicate, create, collaborate, and think.

This, among many other fascinating things is what Thomas Friedman says in his brand new book entitled: “Thank You for Being Late-An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.” This book was officially launched Nov. 22 of this year. I have no doubt that this book is a must read for 2016.

And here are some more interesting facts he presents:

In 2007, storage capacity for computing exploded thanks to the emergence that year of a company called Hadoop, making “big data” possible for all.

In 2007, development began on an open-source platform for writing and collaborating on software, called GitHub.

In 2007, Facebook went global.

In 2007, Twitter went global.

In 2007, Google bought YouTube.

In 2007, Google launched Android.

In 2007, Airbnb started.

In 2007, Amazon released Kindle.

In late 2007, the Internet crossed one billion users worldwide, which seems to have been a tipping point.

In 2007, Palantir Technologies, the leading company using big data analytics and augmented intelligence to, among other things, help the intelligence community find needles in haystacks, launched its first platform. “Computing power and storage reached a level that made it possible for us to create an algorithm that could make a lot of sense out of things we could not make sense of before,” explained Palantir’s cofounder Alexander Karp.

In 2007, Michael Dell realized he retired too early and returned.

In 2007, IBM introduced Watsons – a cognitive computer for artificial intelligence.

In 2007, Intel introduced non-silicon materials – known as high-k/ metal gates (the term refers to the transistor gate electrode and transistor gate dielectric) – into microchips for the first time.

In 2007, was also “the beginning of the clean power revolution,” solar power and clean energy and LED lighting entered the picture.

In 2007, the cost of DNA sequencing began to fall dramatically.

2007 is a key inflection in the area of technology and nobody paid any attention to it because of 2008.

It’s a very good book and I learned a lot from it. Culture has changed and so as the workplace. The shift of immigration has changed. The economic landscape continues to change and continues to be challenged. Demographics keep on changing even traditional values have been challenged and changed.

People today run the risk of losing their jobs to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence empowered robots and machines. And all of these changes are accelerating and guess what? They are all changing and happening at the same time.

Today, I speak to more millennials than people of other generations. A decade ago manufacturing companies would comprise the majority of my clientele; today it’s BPO’s.

I would present principles on leadership values and virtues that would power up and enable people to achieve success and their wide-eyed attention would be fixed on me eagerly awaiting to learn more lessons on how they could cope with the challenges of the changing times as many of them struggle with “Quarter Life Crisis” which is a term that was unheard of in the previous generations.

The year 2007 is so significant in the realm of technology but Friedman argues that this is only the tip of the iceberg. But he offers hope and I will leave you to explore what it is when you pick up that book and read it.

Thomas Friedman wrote a very popular book entitled “The World is Flat” a couple of years ago and it was a best seller. As a columnist for the New York Times he says, “The job of a newspaper reporter is to present facts. But the job of a columnist is to provoke.”

The columnist is either presenting something that would provide illumination so people would see and know or the columnist is provoking people to action so that the reader may stand up and do something. In other words, the columnist is the light and heat business and I totally agree.

Friedman certainly has provoked us with his thoughts and provided illumination to things that have happened yet we have missed. The year 2007 was merely an inflection year for massive things to happen.

Authors Brynjolfsson and McAfee argues that the “rate of change and the acceleration of the rate of change both increase at the same time,” prompting McAfee to say, “We haven’t seen anything yet!”

Be hopeful and excited with the future. I certainly am and so are my kids. We have to become perpetual learners in order to adapt to the changing world.

Get a copy, read it, be illumined by it and then perhaps to be heatedly provoked by it that it would spur you to positive actions to thrive in this age of acceleration. It certainly has that effect on me.

(Start the next year strong and start the next year right. Rizza Mantaring, Hidilyn Diaz, Jodi Sta. Maria, Carlo Ople, Randell Tiongson and Francis Kong will share lessons on how to achieve peak performance. Attend this one-day seminar entitled Power Up for Peak Performance! on January 20, 2017 at Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premier. For tickets reservation contact April at +63928-559-1798 or Michael +63916-187-1506)