Figure 3.2: The share of Americans living without a partner has increased, especially among young adults — Figure 3.2 The share of Americans living without a partner has increased, especially among young adults

Why does any of this matter? Surely, if we’re impatient, then we’re ‘go-getters’ and ‘high-flyers’? Certainly, that’s the case, but this is a trend that cannot withstand much more linear extrapolation. When employee turnover reaches a certain level, the jobs become ‘gigs’ with little or no predictability or stability. Of course, this is fine, if you are in your first job, but for those with dependants, stability in all types of relationships is long-term efficient.³ The standard 30-year US mortgage was designed around the average length of lifetime employment.⁴ They were extended in length to allow middle-income earners to own property. The ability to plan and manage to a budget are linear relationships. Communities are built on patience. They look after the sick, elderly and infirm. So, any failure in an efficient short-term private sector relationship results in an inefficient, long-term relationship with the public sector. This creates the illusion of speed and efficiency, but often the actuality is the opposite.

QUICK TIP Leaders should recognize that part of their role is protection of their teams and their communities. Flexibility may be valued by leaders, but it should be balanced with the benefits that stability brings. The latter is more long-term efficient.

The patient educate, feed and contribute to the community. All of these tasks become more expensive and less efficient when done by the state. This is especially true where families are involved. Relationship instability is also bad for business. An employer’s staff churn knocks on to its ability to retain business and build relationships. If the average job tenure is five years, then this equates to an annual staff turnover of 20 per cent. Many firms manage only three years, thus are dealing with a churn rate of 33 per cent.

Uncertainty⁵ makes it harder for leaders to engage with people. Leaders must work harder to emphasize vision and mission, to clarify expectations and communicate. The inescapable conclusion is that if the internet is destabilizing and undermining employment, then it is also disintermediating leadership itself. The time actually allowed for leadership to engage might become so brief as to undermine its effectivity.

As an aside, the same might even be said of parents trying to get the attention of iPhone-smitten teenagers. Many a parenting moment of insight has been lost due to teenage impatience to see what’s new on their iPhone. This generation more than any other has expectations that the offline world should more closely match the online one.

The only group that is living with a partner more frequently are those over 65. Well, who cares whether you live with a partner? This again is a matter of efficiency. People living with partners tend to be healthier, live longer and can afford better accommodation.⁶ The more households, the more pressure on house prices.

This trend towards shorter, more rapidly churning internet relationships is clear. Half of British singles have never asked someone out on a date face-to-face. Forty-six per cent of singles had never broken up with someone in person; it was done online or via texting.⁷ The internet has therefore facilitated both the forming of new and the ending of old relationships. In this respect, dating apps have performed a similar role to recruitment software.

The majority of online daters also admitted that dating apps have made them more judgemental of people’s looks and more likely to choose a partner more quickly.⁸ This growing impatience is a trend also recognized by Professor Ramesh Sitarman at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who showed that the majority of internet users would, for instance, give up waiting for a video to load after only 10 seconds.⁹ The majority of visitors to a website have even less patience. They will leave unless the page loads within only three seconds.¹⁰ Therefore, we know that where choice is involved, people will move on rapidly to another alternative. This increases the number of relationships in total.¹¹

QUICK TIP Leaders should be careful to review their online presence, whether it be personal or corporate. If anything takes too long to find, or takes too long to load, it will be discarded.

How we have become ‘Amazonified’

The technology change over the past 15 years has been only one contributory factor. And it doesn’t just encompass the iPhone. On 4 February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook and it now has 1.7 billion users. On 15 October 2009, Amazon announced same-day delivery in the United States. Last year, the company developed $6.4 billion sales.¹² On 12 September 2012, a little-known app called Tinder was launched. At March 2018, it had made over 20 billion matches.¹³

Now you can get all your banking online. No-one waits for photography. You can get most government services online. You are connected everywhere – travelling, in the bathroom, in bed, in school, even at the top of Mount Everest. You can see anyone and anywhere in the world via Skype, FaceTime, Zoom and so on. You can monitor security and control the temperature in your home remotely. You can use WebMD to diagnose your symptoms online without having to book a doctor’s appointment, so why can’t all doctors do that?

We mentioned Metcalfe’s Law briefly in Chapter 1, but we need to revisit it here to understand that the speed at which we’re now moving may well be counter-productive. If we go back 15 years, new office technologies such as e-mail and teleconferencing contributed to a significant boost in productivity. Information flows were accelerated as co-workers collaborated. The knock-on effect on productivity was significant. Productivity thus grew faster during the 1990s and early 2000s than in previous years and then it suddenly stopped growing as fast.¹⁴ Since 2007 it has stagnated. The iPhone was launched in the same year. Could this be the reason?

If Metcalfe’s Law holds good, then the utility and value of a network increase exponentially as the technology reaches its maturity. Two telephones add no value. Everyone having a telephone adds huge value. The problem comes when examining the cost/usage relationships. It’s easily understood that usage increases as cost falls. But what happens when the cost falls so far that everyone interacts in real-time?

QUICK TIP Tech is loved by the impatient. It is helpful to a point but it can and does deliver diminishing returns. New tech is not always better, it’s just different.

When previously the productivity technology was confined to the workplace, this represented, in Metcalfe’s terms, a smaller number of nodes. When the nodes expand to just about everyone and all waking hours, the number of connections expands exponentially. This is what would logically happen if everyone were given an iPhone. Under these circumstances, the productivity then is replaced by paralysis as everyone communicates with everyone, in real-time, all the time. When this is linked to impatience, it becomes a recipe for overload, as we saw in Chapter 1. This is almost certainly why office productivity has declined dramatically since 2007. In Figure 3.3 we can see the consistent acceleration in productivity from 1973 through to 2007, when technology gain began to be offset by Metcalfe’s Law and overload. Now, it is no longer certain that more information and more technology will improve productivity.