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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. I'm

talking today with John Cotter whose latest book is Accelerate. John thanks much for talking with us today. My pleasure. So I think that, you know, I'm certainly guilty of this, but I think a lot of us complain nowadays that the world is moving faster, things are complicated and I just I know you've been

doing this for a while do you think things really are moving faster or we just

started to complain about it more what's the sort of context shift that you've seen

you know over the last 10, 20 years?

The complaint is legitimate.

Driven mostly by technological evolution and globalization,

everything is changing faster and we can

literally graph it with all kinds of data from about all kinds of things and

the graphs look exponential and it's hitting virtually all

industries all countries and it simply means there are more things not

just in getting the work done today, but in reconfiguring

things to put up with rapid fire, you know, strategic challenges and technological discontinuities and everything else, which have to be handled faster or you lose.

So you're getting hit with both, you know, thinking about tomorrow's coming at you

faster and you still got to get your job done today faster than the guy next door and

it's a lot. Well and so what are businesses doing to respond to this that is

actually working? Well they're struggling. I mean that's the honest answer I

mean anybody that's trying to run a business is confronted with this rather

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