The 500 Year Delta

"Cause has come unhinged from effect."

"We live increasingly in a world where the givens not only don't hold, but can be impossible to determine."

"The more you search for causality, the further behind you will fall."

"If you are going to succeed in chaos, you must connect with chaos. You must act in concert with chaos."

"Like viruses, we live off organizations without particularly respecting them or even believing in them."

"The only way to survive and prosper in this chaos is not to pursue mass consumer markets, but to satisfy individual consumer demands."

"No mountain of data about the mass market can predict how one customer will act, because once you parse her at this individual level, you come to understand that she acts out of entirely individual motives."

"How do you avoid growing old?"

"One size doesn't fit all."

"In a world freed from reason, the biological model takes over."

"Only by operating at the edge of the extremes, by courting provocation, can a manager can inject the information that challenges people to keep thinking about the business in a different way."

"Until consumers are involved directly in the communication transaction, one-to-many advertisers are shouting, very expensively, into the wind."

"Perhaps the chief reason that the explosion in information has bred such widespread discontent is that too much information is chasing too few decisions"

"Products have to fit the situational needs of consumers; transactions must be tailored to the particular situation at hand."

"The job of any business today is fusion itself."

"If you were to be given the choice of being presented with all the assets of the Coca-Cola Company, including the formulas for the drinks but not including the name, or only the name, which would you take?"

"How do you build scarcity into the products for a marketplace controlled by consumer demand?"

"The business itself becomes the captive of the collective tribes that make up its workforce."

"You manage your risk not by pretending it doesn't exist, but by offering authenticity."

"Learning to swim with chaos requires the recognition that in the Chaos Age you have to operate from self-interest."

"Think clearly about the skills that are necessary to get you across the delta, the skills that will help you survive and thrive on the delta's far side."