Talk to a Gen Y about privacy today, in almost any developed country, and you're likely to get the old raised eyebrow dismissal. Privacy? WTF? (Gen Y's are people who are a chronological age of between 10 and 30, or thereabouts - born after 1980.) Now I have thought long and hard about this reaction, which is near-universal among Gen Y folks. My conclusion is that the deep concern all of us in my own generation - the Baby Boom generation - have about protecting our personal privacy is likely to become less and less consequential as the population ages. In fact, I predict that the whole idea of protecting privacy, as a must-do activity, may actually fade out of public concern entirely once the older generation leaves the scene.

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Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's no secret that the pace of change is accelerating. The more innovations we create, the faster the next ones will come. And we're now even innovating the process of innovation itself, with companies doing "experiments" with small subsets of customers to test new ideas and bring things to market so much faster. Cycle times are accelerating, inventions get to market faster, and life continues to speed up.

Observing this from my own perspective as a man in his 50's, it occurs to me that as the pace of innovation has picked up, the distance between the generations has also increased. That is, our own children are much more different from their parents than we were from our parents. And I suspect, as the pace of change continues to increase, our children's children will be even more different from their parents.

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Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (9)