MGT 430 Mod 6 AVPTranscript
AVP Title:Technology
Title Slide
No narration with this slide
Slide 2
Slide Title: Marketing Class, 1999
images of students in a classroom, a record player, and a Princess phone
Narrator: It’s somewhere around 1999, and a college professor is teaching his entrepreneurship and marketing class.The topic is product life cycles, specifically, how various products come and go - and don’t last forever.He throws out the question: “When is the last time that any of you bought a record – you know, like the kind you play on a phonograph?”After a brief pause, one of the younger students, seated in the back of the room, inquired: “What’s a record?”Many of the older students turned their heads toward her, giving her a look, as if she had just flown in from Mars.After a couple of minutes had passed, the young student quipped: Oh, wait a minute, I think I know ….A record is one of those big, black CD-type things.The professor replies: “Yes, I guess that you could say that.”
Another student immediately shared: “Well, my daughter was roaming around the attic the other day and came across an old Princess phone that we used to have in the 1970s.Intrigued by its bright color, and citing how “cool” the phone looked overall, she asked if she could hook it up in her bedroom.” The father told her daughter: “Sure, and it probably still works.”After attaching the Princess phone to her wall jack, the daughter came to her father and said: “It really looks great in my room, and it has a dial tone, but there’s just one thing – I’m not able to call anybody on it.”“What?” the father asks.The daughter replies: There aren’t any buttons on it.”Of course not, the phone has rotary dial, and the daughter had never seen anything like that before.
Slide 3
Slide Title: Technology and Stage Theory
Slide Content:
•Technology – The practical application of science and knowledge to commercial and organizational activities
•Stage theory – People or things develop in a discontinuous process
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Graphic of Piaget’s stages (from left to right separated by arrows) Stage 1 Sensorimotor(birth-2 years) with an image of a baby; Stage 2 Preoperational (2-7 years) with an image of a young child; Stage 3 Concrete operational (7-11 years) with an image of an older child; Stage 4 Formal operational (11 years through adulthood) with an image of an adult
Narrator: How quickly technology can change – how quickly products and services become obsolete.But, this is all part of a greater issue.Not only do product lines and service evolve as time goes on, but so do overall technological stages. What do we mean by this?Well, let’s first define “technology,” then we’ll look at stages.Technology can be defined as: The practical application of science and knowledge to commercial and organizational activities.
Note that this definition doesn’t say anything about “high tech” electronics or computers.Technology, in broad terms, simply means: any application of tools and knowledge that we employ to complete a process or to solve a problem in our organization, that is, what resources do we use to get from point “A” topoint “B”?All right, now let’s get a handle on “stage or phase theory.”
Stage theory suggests that: People or things develop in a discontinuous process, that is, they evolve in distinct, identifiable stages which are characterized by distinct patterns of behavior.In other words, we can tell one stage from another, such as with human development: childhood, pre-teen, adolescent, adult, etc.
In theory, this all makes sense, but in reality, stages can blur together, and it may be difficult to determine in which stage something belongs.In fact, not everything or everybody progresses neatly through these stages in a predictable manner.In fact objects can take on the identity of more than one stage at a time.But, so we, as human beings, are able to digest events over a long period of time, stage theory helps us compartmentalize things – or to put them neatly into little, organized boxes or niches.It simply gives us a sense of order.
We’ve now looked at “technology,” as well as “stage theory.”Let’s put the two together.While all may not agree exactly what each technological stage has been – or even when it started or ended, we’ll take a look at just one model.Other models can differ.Note that years are not precise; they are approximate at best:
Slide4
Slide Title: Technological Stages
Slide Content:
Up to 1650, we were in the Nomadic-agrarian stage
From 1650 to 1900, the Agrarian stage,
From 1900 to 1960, the Industrial stage
From 1960 to 1975, the Service stage
From 1975 to 2000, the Information stage
And, from 2000 to the present, the Semantic stage
an arrow pointing down shows each of these stages on a continuum
Narrator: Up to 1650, we were in the Nomadic-agrarian stage, from 1650 to 1900, the Agrarian stage, from 1900 to 1960, the Industrial stage, from 1960 to 1975, the Service stage, from 1975 to 2000, the Information stage, and, from 2000 to the present, the Semantic stage.
A point of interest is that through time, each stage has become much shorter that those before, as technology has been changing at an ever-increasing rate of speed. Whereas the agrarian age lasted approximate 250 years, the service sector was on center stage for approximately fifteen years.Although, some may argue that a large part of our economy is still based on service sector to this day.For our discussion, let’s focus on the more recent stages – from the industrial age forward.Our aim here is not to necessarily describe each stage in depth but to highlight some distinct characteristics of each.
Slide5
Slide Title: Industrial Stage
Slide Content:
•Powered machinery
•Assembly lines
•Unionization
•More money spent on equipment, machinery, etc.
•Reasonable salaries
Image of an assembly line to the right of the bullet points
Narrator: The Industrial Age was all about powered machinery.Although most work still required manual labor of sort, much of it was being replaced by machines.We think of assembly lines where people and machines work robotically in tandem.Unionization pushed wages to unprecedented levels.But, so did something else.As the machine-to-people ratio increased, it resulted in people becoming a smaller portion of an organization’s total operating budget.That is to say, organizations were now spending more on equipment, machinery, and so forth, and less in proportion on people.So, they could afford to pay reasonable salaries to their people.This is not the case with the service sector.
Slide6
Slide Title: Service Stage
Slide Content:
•Industry on the move
•Service sector jobs exploded
–Retail, restaurants, real estate, hospitality, etc.
–Provide service(s) instead of product(s)
–Provider and client often meet face-to-face
–Labor intensive
–More money spent on people
Images of a waiter and car salesman to the right of the bullets
Narrator: First, industry started moving from the northeast and “Rust Belt” states to the more business friendly southern and even some western states.This happened for a few reasons, including lower taxes, less regulation, and the lack of unions.More recently, businesses have taken another step, but this time out of the country completely to such places as Mexico, Malaysia, or Hungary.While manufacturing was starting its decline in the United States, service sector jobs exploded.Service sector jobs differ from manufacturing in several ways.The service sector includes occupations in retail, restaurants, real estate,and hospitality, to name a few:any job where someone is providing a service, rather than making a product.Whereas the assembly line worker at the Ford plant will probably never meet the person who buys the finished car or truck, one of the characteristics of the service sector is that the provider and client most often meet face-to-face for the service to be provided. An example is the car salesperson.This is time consuming and translates into high costs for the organization.But, more importantly, service sector jobs are what we call “labor intensive,” meaning that it takes a disproportionate amount of human capital (people) to perform these jobs.So, whereas manufacturing firms may spend the majority of their operating budgets on plant, machinery, and raw materials, the service sector’s largest expense is people. Thus, it is a burden for places like Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, or Motel 6 to pay their people high wages.On to the Information Age:
Slide7
Slide Title: Information Stage
Slide Content:
Image of laptop computers
Narrator: When everything was starting to be computerized, many feared that computers would take jobs away from people.Well, in one sense, they have.The good news is that computers have replaced many menial, routine jobs that don’t require a lot of skills and are not very stimulating, or particularly well paid.But, in return, the computer age has created a need for other kinds of jobs: computers need to be programmed, networked, and repaired.These resulting jobs require specialized skills that are highly paid.So, this is certainly a step in the right direction.
Slide 8
Slide Title: Semantic Stage
Slide Content:
•Search engines
•Social networking
Image of a smartphone to the right of the bullet points
Narrator: And finally where we are today …. at least for now: the frosting on the Information age – connecting all of us with information and each other through search engines and social networking.What was it like before Google, Twitter, and Facebook?Can you remember?What’s next?
Slide 9
End of presentation