there’s something in the middle that is missing for me …. technological change is indeed at breakneck speed – let’s just choose a random topic …. virtual / augmented / mixed reality. We all know they are all coming. You cannot be even on the fringes of tech and not know what is occurring … BUT …. no organization can really implement that tech / thinking because there are other forces at work, technological readiness, organizational awareness, social acceptance, application availability, roll out scalability to rattle off five as I type.

Surely then there is a third curve that moves more in line with the organizational change curve – albeit still growing faster – I get that – but at the same time – seemingly more attainable?

“But if you can keep ahead of your competition that’s good enough.” … sad that this is so true for so many.

Hi, Pat.

For the exponential curve, I’m actually not even thinking of the marketing tech vendor landscape pe se, so much as Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns in the world at large.

This is what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, in their book “The Second Machine Age”, refer to as “the second half of the chessboard.” At some point, continuous exponential change has extremely disruptive effects. We’re living in that environment now.

For instance, how will self-driving cars and trucks disrupt businesses and industries? Not such a far-fetched, sci-fi scenario any more. Will be far more disruptive to businesses than their choice of a marketing automation platform.

I think the very definition of “marketing technology” is more likely to be disrupted as a result of other exponential technology changes than any one martech vendor category. But that’s a post for another day.

I do agree with you that service providers who can offer businesses more flexible adoption of technology should be very helpful in improving the coefficient of how much change a given business can adopt.

Interesting times. Interesting times.

Thanks, Steve!

You know that story about the two hikers in the woods who get surprised by the bear, and one of them stops to put on his sneakers? “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.”

No one can keep up with exponential technological change. But if you can keep ahead of your competition that’s good enough. Agile is the organizational equivalent of putting on sneakers.

First, Is the pace (line slope) of technology change perhaps also being exaggerated a bit by the many dozens of “look-alikes” in each tech category who launch with 1 or 2 small feature/function enhancements, $20M in venture funding, and new sales and marketing activity? In time, many will of course fail (your reference to creative disruption in action). They just haven’t run out of money yet. But how would the slope look if it was calibrated to the pace of truly new categories of technology over the past 5-10 years? Still pretty steeply upward I’m sure, but I suspect it could actually be measured.

Second, the remaining gap between the pace of technology change and the adoption by the user base is already giving rise to a revolution in another area – specialized martech services companies. These new firms are getting great traction acting as technology advisors and implementers for corporations who recognize the extent to which their internal decision-making processes move too slowly. Could this possibly presage the emergence of a martech “leasing” sector where the service providers license the tech, wrap it with services, integrate it, operate it on behalf of their clients, and then evolve the offerings as the tech landscape changes? It would certainly help close the gap between tech evolution and organizational capabilities more quickly than we might expect waiting for politics and decision-making processes to evolve.

Thanks again for sharing. Great work.