It is very likely that, in thirty years, people will be saying to each other, 'Goodness gracious, why did we ever set fire to hydrocarbons to create … - Peter Diamandis

The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life," Kevin Kelly once said, "it gave you the excuses and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it.

Quirky, Airbnb, and Uber are great examples of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the expanding scale of exponential impact. They have created billion-dollar companies in record time. They are the absolute inverse of everything we believed was true about scaling up a capital-intensive businesses. For most of the twentieth century, scaling up such businesses required massive investments and time. Adding workforce, constructing buildings, developing vastly new product suites — no wonder implementation strategies stretched years into decades. It wasn’t unusual for a board of directors to “bet the company” on a new and extremely expensive direction whose outcome would remain unknown until long after most of those board members retired. That was then.

Many legacy institutions (like Kodak) once were able to make a great living resting on their laurels. According to Yale professor Richard Foster, in the 1920s the average life span of an S&P 500 company was sixty-seven years.14 Not anymore. Today the final three Ds in our chain reaction can disassemble companies and disrupt industries almost overnight, reducing the average life span of a twenty-first-century S&P 500 company to only fifteen years. Ten years from now, according to research done at the Babson School of Business, more than 40 percent of today's top companies will no longer exist.15 "By 2020," comments Foster, "more than three quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet."