The world’s largest sailing ship, the Thomas W. Lawson, built in 1902, long after steam power dominate shipping.Â
Mary Tripsas, a professor at Harvard Business School wrote a fascinating piece for The New York Times this morning about technological change and business.
The essence of the piece is that while technology changes all businesses, that change takes time. Â Incremental change might be better with respect to customers than a too-rapid embrace of the new.
She uses the Mavica camera as an example.
The Mavica was the very first generation of digital photography, and it was expensive and it did take time for digital to kill film, but kill it it did, in the end.
The Thomas W. Lawson, pictured above, was the largest sailing ship built in the world for commercial use. By 1902, there was no doubt but that steam and coal fired ships (later oil) had killed off sailing ships, a technology in use since the ancient Greeks first affixed sails to their triremes. Â The Lawson was probably not the best nor the wisest investment in the world.
One paragraph from Tripsas’ piece struck me above all others. It is written with respect to cold type replacing linotype machines at newspapers, but it applies very well to the transition we are encountering today:
But the mechanical technology “was well known by the people who were using it,†Carl Schlesinger, a former typesetter operator for The New York Times and author of two books on the history of printing, said in a recent interview. The new technology required customers, particularly unionized newspapers, to make huge investments in retraining.
I was taken by the reference to ‘huge investments in retraining’.
There is no question, at least from our experience, that this is the case.
And, I have every expectation, based on what we are seeing now, that the demand for retooling and retraining is only going to grow.
When we go into a newspaper or a TV station to train the staff to work in video and upload that video, there has to be as well a concurrent training of management to begin to work and think in radically different ways. Â Otherwise, much of the potential of that new technology is dissapated.
By the same token, as more and more people begin to take up digital tools, training them, once a small niche for hobbyists, has in itself become a very fast growing industry in its own right.
When the California Gold Rush came in 1849, many hundreds of thousands flocked to the West Coast to stake their claim. Some hit gold, some did not.
I, for one, prefer to be Levi Strauss. Happy to sell the jeans to the new arrivals and wish them the best of luck.
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