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Ian Morrison
[00:00:00] Aidan McCullen: Stay on the first curve may be a mistake but jumping too soon to a premature second curve can also get you in trouble. You have to balance the risks and rewards with the pace of change. Do you go the Steve Jobs route to next computer when he leaves Apple? What about when he goes on to Pixar NeXt stumbles despite Ross Perot's help Pixar makes Jobs a billionaire i'll be it briefly all over again be ready to jump but don't jump too soon today's book was written from 1993 until 1995 and published in 1996.
[00:00:39] Aidan McCullen: And it was way ahead of its time it is a pleasure to welcome the author of that book The Second Curve how to command new technologies new consumers and new markets, Ian Morrison welcome to the show.
[00:00:53] Ian Morrison: Thanks for having me it's great to be here
[00:00:55] Aidan McCullen: it's great to have you on the show Ian. I was looking forward to having you on for such a [00:01:00] long time i thought we'd share maybe your origin story how you end up with that Scottish accent over that side of the Atlantic.
[00:01:09] Aidan McCullen: Doing the work you're doing including the work that you did with Institute of the Future and of course our mutual friend Bob Johansson maybe you'll share all the mixing bowl of that experience and how you got to the book in the first place.
[00:01:21] Ian Morrison: I was joking earlier we were saying that I was destined to be a futurist because my undergraduate major at Edinburgh University was geographic and economic change in Scotland, 1580 to 1830, which is incredibly useful. But really a useful training because I've been kind of a student of structural change and.
[00:01:42] Ian Morrison: society for, 50 years, I guess. And, I did a graduate degree in urban planning emigrated to Canada in the mid seventies on stumbled into health care. I, they hired me. To work for a consulting group, internal consulting group for the [00:02:00] teaching hospitals, because I had a planning degree, but I never really did planning.
[00:02:04] Ian Morrison: I ended up getting into sort of health policy and health economics and coincidentally was working on a project. with a guy John Tideman, who was on sabbatical at the Institute for the Future. People often ask, how did you get where you are? It was complete happenstance. And I met the folks at the Institute probably in 1979 and kept in touch with them.
[00:02:29] Ian Morrison: When I finished my doctorate, I came down to work. On a grant, actually, that John Tideman had gotten and then he went off to work with Rupert Murdoch in Europe, setting up satellites, and they had nobody on the health side to help them, and I ended up working and starting foundationally, the health program at the Institute, and then worked with Bob through that time and was president from 90 to 96.
[00:02:53] Ian Morrison: And then Bob took over and he's been, really the stalwart at the Institute through a long period of time, [00:03:00] a great contributor, keeping what is an important organization still relevant, vibrant and productive and Bob's amazing and generating books every year. It's just incredible.
[00:03:12] Ian Morrison: But yeah, no. So I was there in the early nineties and mid eighties to mid nineties, a really fascinating time, Aidan, because if you think about it and it's tough to, you were probably in kindergarten then, but they it was just the beginning of the commercialization of the internet and, we were in the epicenter of it.
[00:03:35] Ian Morrison: We had a number of people, Bob's group was looking at it people like you, clients like Apple and so forth. So it, it was a fascinating time, but we also had. Many other Fortune 500 clients who were going through their kind of struggles with globalization, with NAFTA, with the rise of Asia with emerging economies and a lot of clients who are [00:04:00] struggling with consumer changes and shifts and attitude and behavior.
[00:04:05] Ian Morrison: Really, what the book was a confluence of those three forces of changing demographics, changing geographic markets and changing technologies, conspiring to challenge conventional business. And most of our clients were kind of fortune 50 or 100 companies trying to look over their shoulder and our clients tended to be people who were strategic planners within those environments trying to look over their shoulder at what's next.
[00:04:36] Ian Morrison: So that was really the Genesis of how we got there. And, Probably the cornerstone of the book is Amara's Law, my colleague and mentor, Roy Amara, who was president through most of the 80s and 90s Roy, wonderful guy passed away several years ago, but Roy kind of codified this [00:05:00] mantra of change that there's a tendency to overestimate the impact of phenomena in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.
[00:05:10] Ian Morrison: And in some senses that is It is the genesis of the S curves. It is the basic truth behind forecasting, but that's how I came to it. Sorry, a little long winded, but that's how I came to be at the institute and to. work on these ideas. And really it was, the book was really a group effort of a lot of research, including Bob's group that was going on at the time at the Institute.
[00:05:34] Ian Morrison: And it was synthesis of these big forces and how they were challenging American and other global
[00:05:41] Aidan McCullen: corporations. By the way in nineteen ninety five i was just finishing my secondary school so i was eighteen so i remember it was a computer room and none of us knew what it was like we're it was just these fans it was apples actually there was apples in there, and we didn't really know what they were really know how to use them and then over [00:06:00] the next few years it emerged in the slowly as what are the things i just want to mention as well because.
[00:06:05] Aidan McCullen: You were connected to so many of the people that we that created a lot of these models including for example ever rogers as well maybe it will mention him as well because his models of diffusion of innovation were obviously a foundation to your work as well understanding first and second curves.
[00:06:24] Ian Morrison: Absolutely. And in fact, some of our colleagues at the Institute were graduate students of F Rogers. We the Institute is in Palo Alto now, but was up, up the hill from where I am right now in Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. And literally up the hill from Stanford. And so many of our colleagues were Stanford graduate students at one time or Berkeley.
[00:06:47] Ian Morrison: Yeah. And yeah, no, Jeff Charles in particular studied with Ev Rogers and and I think, what's interesting about that time is there were a number of research initiatives and [00:07:00] popular books. If you think about Jeff Moore did a wonderful book about crossing the chasm.
[00:07:05] Ian Morrison: It was more focused on just the marketing dimensions of high tech Andy Grove, the paranoid survive book. Of course the great Clayton Christensen and everybody was observing the same thing. I think at the same time, it's not like we're all copying each other. It's just that I think it was a realization that this set of tensions were challenging.
[00:07:28] Ian Morrison: The conventional business models and, a lot of it had to do with the diffusion of innovation. And that, that was kind of the core principle that we were trying to manage our way through.
[00:07:40] Aidan McCullen: One of the things I thought was really fascinating is I love looking back at old interviews with, for example, Isaac Asimov, the great futurist or the great sci fi writer and stuff he said.
[00:07:54] Aidan McCullen: On for example the letterman show in the seventies and eighties and how [00:08:00] most of a panda understanding when it would happen was the difficult thing as you know from being a futurist but understanding the trends and generally where things were going was really interesting and before we get into this book i thought we'd share maybe.
[00:08:14] Aidan McCullen: What you have found interesting because i just want our audience to imagine that the books you read today that are similar to in spoke the books that are kind of, trying to decipher where things will go in the future maybe even bobby lance's book because they're there he's prolific as an author putting stuff out.
[00:08:31] Aidan McCullen: Many future star and how things panned out and what surprised you from the time you published your book and all the understanding you had back then because. Knowing that a new sharing that is so useful because there's some stuff that you just dismiss and you can go i had that will happen but it won't happen quickly.
[00:08:50] Aidan McCullen: So i'm sure some stuff happened quicker than they thought and some stuff didn't happen at all and some stuff is still struggling to be born and i'd love you to share your [00:09:00]observations on that before we get into the book i think
[00:09:02] Ian Morrison: that's a really good question and let me just riff on a couple of thoughts in that regard the i think One of the great insights comes from our colleague Paul Saffo's sort of 30 years in of change idea that it takes a lot longer than you think for an innovation to actually fully map through.