Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor and Schumpeter columnist for The Economist, has written a book entitled “The great disruption: How business is coping with turbulent times.” He gave a fascinating talk on this subject at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), Thursday 23rd April 2015, in London. Following are selected excerpts from his talk, some of which are paraphrased:
We live in a period of sustained disruption driven by technology. The pace of technological change has sped up, and it’s more pervasive than anything we’ve seen before. Television went from invention to common usage in about 70 years; electricity took about fifty years. The cell phone was used by relatively few people in the mid-nineties. Now most people on earth have a cell phone, including many poor people. The internet took less than ten years to gain wide usage, then began mutating at an extraordinary speed, evolving from something you look at for information to become social, mobile, and all pervasive.
Another disruption is the premium put on companies that are asset and people light. Companies driving the global economy today employ very few people. Contract based companies arrange transactions between someone who needs a service and someone who can provide it for a price. Uber exemplifies this trend, connecting people who need transportation with car owners. Companies are becoming intermediaries, facilitators of transactions. There is a spot market in talent, a spot market in opportunities, and no real organization, thus the virtualization of organizations. This trend goes beyond taxi services and includes professional services. In many ways this will become the employment model of the future.
Recorded highlights from Mr. Wooldridge’s talk are available in a program entitled “The Age of Disruption,” a segment on the program “Big Ideas” on RN, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast on 5/21/15.
Visit this URL to listen to this program, or download a podcast to listen to at your convenience:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/the-age-of-disruption/6467732
Bob's BlogCast 
Can’t get the audio to play for some reason, but it sounds like a great talk. There’s been a lot of talk out here in SF about the lifestyle effect of the company-as-facilitator model: people who “set their own hours” in reality often have wildly unpredictable work schedules, or are always at work. It’s great for people on the other side of the transaction – e.g. people who really want a taxi at 4 AM – but I don’t think a good model to expand into other industries.