Tempo: The Operating System of Success, #10

The different time dimensions of human time, digital time, and future time will impact us all, and when those different dimensions line up into a rhythm its a beautiful thing. It’s the operating system of the polyintelligent advantage.

You see it clearly in retail. A brick-and-mortar store runs on human-time. Doors open at ten, clerks work shifts, checkout lines move at the speed of hands and eyes. E-commerce, however, runs on digital-time. The site never closes, algorithms recommend products instantly, and payments clear in milliseconds. But neither works without future-time. Holiday promotions are planned months in advance, toys are pre-ordered based on trends, and shipping networks are prepared for the rush.

All three time dimensions—human, digital, and future—show up in every shopping trip. If forecasts are wrong, shelves are empty. If the website crashes, carts are abandoned. If delivery drivers can’t keep pace, the system collapses. The winners are those who can orchestrate the dimensions into one smooth tempo. 

Tempo Inequality – The New Wealth Gap

History shows what happens when tempos diverge. The winners aren’t always the fastest—they’re the ones who move in rhythm with the needs of the age.

In the mid-1800s, sailing ships could outrun early steamships when the winds were right. Clippers set records, shaving days off Atlantic crossings. But wind is a fickle partner. Voyages could double in length if storms hit or skies went still. Steamships, by contrast, weren’t glamorous sprinters, but they were steady. Liverpool to New York became a timetable, not a gamble. Merchants, bankers, and governments shifted allegiance to steam. Tempo inequality—not sheer speed—sank the sailing ship.

The Pony Express fell the same way. Riders crossing prairies in ten days seemed unbeatable—until the telegraph carried messages across the continent in ten minutes. Heroic endurance was irrelevant once a new tempo dimension arrived.

The pattern repeated in retail. Sears built its empire on seasonal catalogs, physical stores, and human-time logistics. For decades it worked. But Amazon entered digital-time. Its warehouses ran on real-time data, its algorithms anticipated demand, and its logistics promised delivery in days—sometimes hours. Customers adjusted to Amazon’s tempo, and Sears could not keep up. Tempo inequality shifted from a competitive edge to a matter of survival.

The lesson is clear: being stuck in the wrong tempo dimension isn’t just a disadvantage. It can be fatal.

When Scale Changes Everything, #9

Why talk about scale in a series on leadership and polyintelligence? Because scale is where small decisions stop being small. It’s where a clever idea, a promising experiment, or a niche technology suddenly impacts millions of lives. Scale is the moment the grid becomes a launchpad, not just a net.

Think about Zoom. Before 2020, it was one of many video-conferencing tools, used by tech teams and remote workers but hardly a household name. Then the pandemic hit. Within weeks, kindergarten classes, corporate board meetings, weddings, therapy sessions, and even funerals moved online. Zoom went from 10 million daily users in December 2019 to over 300 million by April 2020. That’s scale—when context and need snap into alignment and an “app” suddenly becomes social infrastructure.

Zoom didn’t succeed just because the software worked. It scaled because internet bandwidth, cloud capacity, user readiness, and cultural desperation for connection all aligned. The world was primed. Overnight, Zoom wasn’t just a product—it was a platform, rewiring education, healthcare, and workplace culture in real time.

Here’s the leadership lesson: if scale can happen this fast, leaders can’t just prepare for success; they must prepare for consequences. Scaling doesn’t only multiply opportunity—it multiplies responsibility.

The Future & Seventh Generation Principles, #8

Most business leaders are required to think in quarters. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (made up of indigenous Americans) thought in centuries. Their Seventh Generation Principle asked leaders to make decisions as if seven generations of descendants were in the room. That’s 140–180 years of responsibility sitting across the campfire from you.

This wasn’t just a nice idea. It was wisdom written into the Great Law of Peace, the constitution that bound six nations together. Leaders who ignored it could be removed by the Clan Mothers—the original accountability committee. In other words, responsibility for the long-term wasn’t optional; it was enforced.

Why does this matter to us? Because the Seventh Generation Principle is one of the earliest examples of polyintelligent leadership. It combined human intelligence (through governance and law), ecological intelligence (through care for land, animals, people, generations, and water), and ethical intelligence (through responsibility to the unborn) into one operating system. Today, we need to add machine intelligence to that mix, but the principle gives us a template: decisions must serve more than just our short-term lives—they must cohere across generations.

Investors and Investing in Authentic Sustainability with Expert Eric Weitzman

Investors today are demanding more than promises—they want data. In this episode of FOBtv, I speak with Eric Weitzman of FactSet about how investors are scrutinizing companies’ authentic sustainability commitments, and how technologies like AI, digital twins, and advanced analytics are reshaping the way businesses prove their impact.

*I use AI in all my work.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

John Boyd & The Art of Adaptation, #7

Change is hard.  Managing in an uncertain world is hard, and winning in this environment is even harder. All of these things make it very difficult to keep your head in the game and to be competitive.  John Boyd was an officer, military pilot, and a military strategist that dedicated much of his life to thinking about thinking.  I find his ideas captivating and timely.

John Boyd, was a maverick U.S. Air Force colonel and fighter pilot, who never ran a company, yet his ideas have quietly shaped many of the world’s most adaptive organizations and leaders. His genius was not in tactics but in synthesis. He fused physics, philosophy, and human psychology into a unified theory of adaptation—showing that victory, in war or business, comes not from strength or scale, but from speed of learning.

Boyd’s central revelation was simple but radical: survival and winning depends on the ability to adapt faster than the environment, and faster than your adversaries can disorient you. The organizations that thrive are not those that predict the future perfectly, but those that can sense, decide, and act faster and more coherently than competitors.

Myths, Mechanisms, and the Grid, #6

The lone frontiersman. Rifle over one shoulder, axe in hand, squinting at the horizon with bacon fat in his pack and destiny and dust in his eyes. His boots? Homemade. His mule? Raised from birth. His clothes? Woven by candlelight, stitched with sinew, cinched by a belt carved from last winter’s elk. He is America’s favorite fiction.

Because that’s what he is: fiction.

He sounds self-sufficient, but he didn’t get there alone. He followed roads surveyed by the federal government. Claimed land acquired by government treaty or conflict. Relied on supply chains, currency, forts, railroads, and laws. His bacon fat probably came by boat. His independence rode on the back of infrastructure built stone by stone by collective effort, tax payers, and the many generations before him.

The idea of being “off-grid” was, in reality, made possible by the grid. Take the westward expansion:

• Land policy: The Louisiana Purchase, the Homestead Act, the annexations and territorial acquisitions of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, along with the purchase of Alaska years later, gave millions access to land they had not settled themselves. These examples do not even include the many wars and forced removals of Native Americans.

• Movement systems: Roads, canals, and railroads were surveyed, funded, and maintained by governments, tax payers, and networks of engineers.

• Knowledge flows: Land-grant universities spread the agricultural and engineering know-how required to prosper.

• Enforcement systems: Property rights, military security, and legal frameworks secured claims.

Similar myths live on in technology start-ups. Founders in garages eating pizza and wearing hoodies programming world changing software capture headlines, but under the surface are venture capital, cloud infrastructure, open-source libraries, universities,  intellectual property law, federal research grants, and global labor markets.

The myth of the self-made hero persists because it flatters. But the truth is more useful: civilization doesn’t grow from grit—it grows from grids. The myth sells. The grid delivers.

The Cowboy We Idolize Never Existed

Americans love to imagine the cowboy as the purest symbol of American freedom — the lone rider beholden to no master, living by grit, will, and muscle. But the cowboy we remember never existed. The real cowboy was a poor, seasonal wage worker at the bottom of the economic ladder — a migrant laborer who slept on the ground, owned nothing, and moved someone else’s wealth from one place to another. He didn’t own the land beneath him, the cattle he drove, or even the saddle he sat in. When the cattle reached the railhead, he was paid barely enough to replace his torn gear, and then discarded until the next season.

The role of a cowboy, America’s low cost seasonal laborer, was not a dream job.  It was often the very dangerous last option to put food in one’s stomach for a few months each year.

And a real cowboy was never alone. The real cowboy worked on a team made up largely of immigrants and non-whites — Mexican vaqueros (horsemen), Black freedmen, Indigenous riders, and drifting laborers with little education or prospects. The skills Americans later romanticized were originally vaquero skills (Mexican herdsmen known for horsemanship, roping, braiding). The mythical cowboy character of a stoic, white, loner came later — invented by novels and film after the real cowboys were no longer required.

The West he rode across was not lawless wilderness - although lawmen were often spread thin. It was surveyed, titled, adjudicated, and claimed long before he arrived. Grazing rights, branding law, property enforcement, mining rights, claims, and water access were all regulated. The cowboy was not living beyond the reach of government — he was living inside it.

Even his livelihood was government-dependent. The range was “open” only because our collected taxes paid the U.S. Army to forcibly displace Native nations. The cattle trade existed only because federally subsidized railroads, paid for by US tax dollars, made long drives profitable. Remove government land policy or railroad subsidy and the cowboy era disappears. The irony is unavoidable: the cowboy myth is used today to celebrate freedom, rugged independence, and self reliance, yet the real cowboy’s very existence depended on massive investments in public infrastructure paid for by tax payers.

Only after the real cowboys lost their jobs and vanished did he become a legend and myth. When barbed wire ended open grazing, and the railroads pushed south, ranchers no longer needed to hire cowboys. So the cowboy was reimagined — not as the poorly paid disposable seasonal worker he was, but as an icon of independence, strength and freedom. His legend said he built this nation, alone, on his folksy wisdom and strong shoulders. 

This myth, this legend still shapes how Americans think about freedom: we treat needing nothing and self-sufficiency as virtues, and community and interdependence as weaknesses. But the real cowboy’s story teaches the opposite — that being alone is not liberty, it is vulnerability, poverty, and disposability.

He was not proof that independence built the West.

He was proof that interconnectedness, government infrastructure and investments, legal systems, property rights, and laws supported the economic growth of the West.

If he could tell the story himself, without the myth laid over him, he would remind us that a man without a living wage, safety network, or community is not a state one aspires to be in without duress.

The lesson that history erased is the one we most need now: freedom is not the absence of support scaffolding — it is belonging to a scaffold that holds you up, not one that uses you up. The mythical American cowboy was created, romanticized and untrue.

The real cowboys deserved better than the myth.

Why is a futurist writing about the mythical cowboy?  Because this myth impacts our future.  The myth says the future can be conquered on one's own.  The truth is the future will be all about succeeding through collaboration, interconnected communities, ecosystems and long-range purposeful planning and investments - all things that require interdependence and networks of like minded future-builders.  

*I use AI in all my work.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Circular Economies, Regenerative Processes, and Biomimicry with TCS Expert Haley Price

In this episode TCS's sustainability expert Haley Price and I dig deep into the motivations leaders and companies have to support sustainability and sustainable business models.  We explore the technologies, risks management strategies, and standards used to audit progress, and where the future of sustainability is likely to take us. TCS Digital Twindex Sustainability: https://www.tcs.com/what-we-do/servic... Read the TCS Digital Twindex Series: https://tinyurl.com/3tha7p58

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

How the Past Informs the Future with Archeologist and Futurist Janna Jokela

What can a buried city, and ancient materials teach us about building a better tomorrow? On this episode, we connect the deep past with the long future. We're joined by Janna Jokela, a futurist and archaeologist who sees the remnants of ancient civilizations not just as historical artifacts, but as a map for our future. 

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Survival Skills 2025

Knowing how to survive in the heat of the desert, does not help much in the darkness and cold of wintertime in Alaska.  Likewise, having the skills to operate in an environment running on 1970 business processes and practices does not offer much for a business operating in 2025.

New graduates today will be entering a world that is a completely different place than we faced decades ago.  Their skills will need to be relevant for today and tomorrow.  They will need to understand, and skillfully utilize intelligent digital platforms, intelligent tools, intelligent cobots (digital agent, partners and coworkers), and how to interact with intelligences of all kinds in our emerging polyintelligent world.

I fear though we will miss our mark.  Today, we check our phones between 72-100 times a day, spend many hours a day using our phones, but nothing in our schools teach us how to use our smartphones optimally, strategically or skillfully. We focus on banning them from schools, not because they lack utility, but because we use them wrongly and destructively.

Our world uses smartphones, but we don't teach them in school.  Our systems and processes use smartphones, but we don't educate ourselves, or our kids on how to use them effectively, optimally or positively.

Now comes a world where artificial intelligence will be inside everything.  We will depend on AI to support us in all of our endeavors.  Will we treat AI as another smartphone - a toy, hobby or uninvited guest to be banned from our schools, or will we recognize its utility and build a deep understanding of it into our educational curriculum so we can amplify and optimize that which is positive, and manage and diminish that which will cause us trouble?  

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.