Time Ain't Money: Stop Punching the Industrial Age Clock, and Start Embracing the Digital Now

"Living in the digital media environment changes a whole lot more than the technologies through which we do business. It has changed our relationship to time—and this is having profound effects on our businesses, our economy, and our customers. To put it most simply, the money we use has a built-in clock—an embedded relationship to time that informs how we obtain capital, how we pay it back, how we invest, how we sell, and how we communicate. That clock has run out. It has wound down, and been replaced with something else. I call it "presentism", or a focus on the now over the past or even the future. If we understand this shift—the only truly significant change wrought by the digital—we can thrive in the new landscape. If we can't—if we end up paralyzed in what I've come to call "present shock," then we may as well go down with the rest of the Industrial Age."