The Third Wave
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler
Random House Publishing Group, 1980
ISBN 9780688035976

I read the Portuguese edition of this book together with my wife during our 1999 Summer vacations in Nazaré. We both found the book delightful. The Tofflers explain history as a sequence of technological waves, noticing however that waves take their time to spread, and that the next wave starts to spread before the previous wave has finished. This remains a powerful metaphor for social and technological innovations.

The explanation of the second wave reinterprets history and made us understand the World in a new light. For example, what the Tofflers say about school resonated deeply with me:

Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the "overt curriculum." But beneath it lay an invisible or "covert curriculum" that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.

The explanation of the third wave was considered impossible by naysayers, but the future described in 1980 is with us now. For example, the Tofflers explain why traffic patterns changed in cities such as Lisbon.

Reflection on 2024

Ultimately the Tofflers taught me to understand established institutions as the result of forces in society, and to see historical change happening around me. For example, to see the way new technology changes relations and institutions. This becomes critically important when you or your company are disruptive:

• At Altitude Software, contact centers were disruptive of internal silos. For example, when a customer asks an insurance company "How much do I owe you?", the answer cannot be "What policies do you have? We have to check with each department".

• At Farfetch, the purpose was to enable luxury creators and curators to reach buyers worldwide, later combined with the ability to blend the online interactions into the in-store experience. The purpose was to lead the online disruption of traditional luxury business, for the love of fashion.

• At MillenniumBCP, the Cloud Center of Excellence leads the introduction of modern development practices such as CI/CD pipelines and observability, disrupting software that has been evolving for decades.

Why I bought this book

We had a nephew studying Management in the Polytechnic University of Viseu that read and let the book to us together with a strong recommendation. We kind of destroyed the book during the Summer, so we bought a new book for her, and kept the old book for yourself, photographed above.