Revolutionary Wealth Quotes

“If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“real revolutions replace institutions as well as technologies. And they do more: They break down and reorganize what social psychologists call the role structure of society.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“narrowly focused specialists may be good at incremental innovation. But breakthrough innovation is often the product of temporary teams whose members cross disciplinary boundaries—at a time when breakthroughs in every field are, in fact, blurring those very boundaries. And this is not just a matter for scientists and researchers.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“Like the human heart, societies and economies, too, are subject to premature beats, local tachycardias, fibrillations and flutters, as well as “chaotic” irregularities and paroxysms. While this has long been true, the uneven, ever-accelerating pace of change and the continual de-synchronization that comes with it may now be pushing us toward temporal incoherence—without a defibrillator on board. What happens to us as individuals when our institutions, companies, industries and economy are out of sync with one another?”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“What most business, political and civil leaders have not yet clearly understood is a simple fact: An advanced economy needs an advanced society, for every economy is a product of the society in which it is embedded and is dependent on its key institutions.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“The truly big intellectual—and financial—payoffs occur when two or more breakthroughs converge or are plugged together.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“no wealth system exists in isolation. A wealth system is only one component, although a very powerful one, of a still larger macrosystem whose other components—social, cultural, religious, political—are in constant feedback with it and with one another. Together they form a civilization or way of life roughly compatible with the wealth system.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“The so-called Washington Consensus held that globalization plus liberalization in the form of privatization, deregulation and free trade would alleviate poverty and create democracy and a better world for all. Both pro- and anti-globalist ideologues typically lump globalization with liberalization, as though they were inseparable. Yet countries can integrate economies without liberalizing. Liberalizing countries, by contrast, can sell off their state enterprises, deregulate and privatize their economies, without necessarily globalizing. None of this guarantees that long-term benefits will flow from the macroeconomy to the microeconomy in which people actually live. And none of it guarantees democracy.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“Researchers today suggest that the spread of cell phones has been accompanied by a more relaxed attitude toward punctuality inasmuch as people can call ahead and apologize in advance for lateness. But the deeper reason is the decline of the assembly line. Assembly lines require synchronized work, so that if one worker is late it slows down all the others on the line. It requires a level of punctuality little known in agrarian societies. Today, with more free agents, more individuals working on all different schedules, time is more important, but exact punctuality matters less.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“Until recently, a mindless cult of acceleration led by numerous business “gurus” in the United States urged companies to “Be first! Be agile! Shoot now, aim later!” This simplistic advice led to the launch of many low-quality, poorly tested products; angry customers; unhappy investors; a loss of strategic focus; and a high turnover of CEOs. It ignored the problems of synchronization and de-synchronization. It was a superficial way of dealing with the deep fundamental of time.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“The current political system was never designed to deal with the high complexity and frenetic pace of a knowledge-based economy. Parties and elections may come and go. New methods for fund-raising and campaigning are emerging, but in the United States, where the knowledge economy is most advanced and the Internet allows new political constituencies to form almost instantly, significant change in political structure comes so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. One hardly needs to defend the economic and social importance of political stability. But immobility is another matter. The U.S. political system, two centuries old, changed fundamentally after the Civil War of 1861–1865 and again in the 1930s after the Great Depression, when it adapted itself more fully to the industrial era. Since then the government has certainly grown. But as far as basic, institutional reform is involved, the U.S. political structure will continue crawling along at three miles per hour, with frequent rest stops at the side of the road, until a constitutional crisis strikes.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“U.S. Senate, Connie Mack, once complained to us: We never have more than two and a half uninterrupted minutes for anything on Capitol Hill. There’s no time to stop and think or to have anything approaching an intellectual conversation.… We have to spend two thirds of our time doing public relations, campaigning or raising campaign funds. I’m on this committee, that task force, the other working group, and who knows what else. Do you think I can possibly know enough to make intelligent decisions about all the different things I’m supposed to know about? It’s impossible. There’s no time. So my staff makes more and more decisions.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

“Even who works for whom is becoming unclear. Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, points out that a significant part of the labor force consists of independent contractors, free agents and others who work in company A but are actually employees of company B. “In a few years,” says Reich, “a company may be best defined by who has access to what data and who gets what portion of a particular stream of revenues over what period of time. There may be no ‘employees’ at all, strictly speaking.”
― Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth