Toffler’s

Waves
Why Alvin Toffler’s
Third Wave Matters

Toffler’s
Waves
Why Alvin Toffler’s
Third Wave Matters
by Michael Finley
I n the annals of change literature,
Alvin Toffler is the 600-pound
gorilla. He and his wife -and-
collaborator Heidi Toffler have
written a baker’s dozen of prescient
books that have all been best-sellers,
starting way, way back in 1970 with
Future Shock.
The leafy canopy of thousands of
books about the future, and how we
can hope to cope with it, leads to a
trunk and root that says Toffler. He
has written about society, culture,
the media, organizations, science,
computers, politics, war, and
economics. It is hard for a beginner,
coming to grips with Toffler’s
impact, to know where to start
reading. But the best place to begin
is with his theory of waves.
Wave theory
The central premise of Toffler’s
work is that human history, while it
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is complex and contradictory, can be
seen to fit into very broad patterns.
The pattern he has focused on in his
scholarly career takes the shape of
three great advances or waves.
The first wave of transformation
began when some prescient person
about 10,000 years ago, probably a
woman, planted and nurtured a seed.
The age of agriculture began; its
significance was that people moved
from nomadic wandering and
hunting and began to cluster into
villages and develop culture.
The second wave was an expression
of machine muscle. The Industrial
Revolution began in the 1700s and
gathered steam after America’s Civil
War. People began to leave the
peasant culture of farming to come
to work in city factories. It
culminated in the Second World
War, a clash of smokestack
juggernauts, and the explosion of the
atomic bombs over Japan.
Just as the machine seemed at its
most invincible, however, we began
to receive intimations of a
gathering third wave, based not on
muscle but on mind. It is what we
variously call the information or
knowledge age, and while it is
powerfully driven by information
technology, it has co-drivers as well,
among them social demands
worldwide for greater freedom and
individuation.
Economics old and new
In the first wave, wealth was land,
and it was exclusive; if I grew rice
on my acres, you could not.
In the second wave, wealth
diversified into three factors of
production: land, labor, and capital.
As with the rice paddy of the
agrarian regime, each of these was
discrete, allowing for only one use
at a time.
To illustrate: In the industrial
regime, General Motors became rich
by combining its resources (its
factories, its manpower, and its
money) to make cars. Each car
loaded onto the truck slightly
drained the company of its
resources.
Today’s counterpart to General
Motors, Microsoft, makes cars that
anyone can easily replicate at home
(by copying disks). Microsoft is not
drained of its resources when it
ships a package of Windows 95. The
land, muscle, and money in
Redmond, Washington, are not the
source of the company’s wealth; the
knowledge of its software
developers is.
Economics has been lovingly
defined as “the science of the
allocation of scarce resources.”
From the standpoint of the third
wave, in which the primary resource
is knowledge, that second-wave
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definition rings hollow. In the first
place, economics has never been
much of a science, according to
Toffler. More to the point, our
supply of knowledge is anything but
scarce.
Indeed, like paper money, in which
the tangible gold of the earlier
waves has been replaced by alpha-
numeric figures stamped on
intrinsically worthless sheets of
paper, our knowledge is
inexhaustible.
Massification and
demassification
A central theme of the industrial
regime was centralization and
standardization. Where the first
wave lacked the technology to
connect locale to locale, and to
organize large systems, the second
wave provided highway systems,
cars, telephones, and mainframe
computers, linking remote outposts
to central controls. At the height of
the second wave everything was
mass, from mass production to mass
destruction.
Both Alvin and Heidi Toffler
worked in factories when they were
young, and they knew, as all factory
workers of that era knew, that the
job was to turn out the longest
possible line of identical products.
This was one point on which
assembly-line capitalist Henry Ford
and assembly-line Marxist Joseph
Stalin could agree: the virtue of
mass production. The larger the
quantity, the cheaper the run.
But the economics changed.
Computers make changeovers less
expensive. A recent Siemens
manufacturing product went by the
name Lot Size One.
To be sure, the bureaucracy and
pyramid power structure of the
second wave made possible many
wonderful things. Consumer goods
streamed through factories at an
unprecedented pace. Medicines,
appliances, government services,
and entertainment all found their
way from production centers to
every nook and market niche.
But the price of quality goods was
sameness. In the famous words of
Henry Ford, “They can have a car
any color they like, so long as it’s
black.” The completion of the Union
Pacific Railroad in 1867 created a
single transcontinental megamarket
that would soon overwhelm every
micromarket it passed through.
1984 and beyond
The tyranny of the factory inspired a
bleak futurism in which Big Brother
ruled the planet through centralized
information control. But something
happened that prevented the night-
mares of George Orwell (1984) and
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Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
from coming to pass. Technology
took a sharp turn away from
standardization and toward
individuation and diversity.
In a not-always-pleasant way, the
third wave began decentralizing the
machine. Today is a time of
transition, in which we witness the
curious spectacle of massive second-
wave-type enterprises adapting to
the third-wave appetite for
differentiation.
Take coffee, for example. In the
1920s each town had its distinct
coffee flavor. In the 1970s it was
Maxwell House and McDonalds’
scalding coffee, from sea to shining
sea. By the 1990s, an explosion of
mom-and-pop coffeehouses took
place across the country. Today you
stop, as I did recently, at a coffee
shop in Talladega, Alabama, and
order a double latte of decaffeinated
Kenyan with a finger of amaretto
hazelnut syrup.
Or you can have the best of all
worlds, second-wave McDonalds’
standardization combined with
third-wave product choice, by
walking into any of the 2,000
Starbucks coffee shops nationwide.
In retail, we have witnessed the
second-wave juggernaut Wal-Mart
break upon cities small and large,
with the third-wave possibility of a
single store selling 100,000 different
items.
Again, the Tofflers have coined a
term for a third-wave predicament,
familiar to anyone who has surfed
the Internet, shopped at a warehouse
grocery store, or installed satellite
download television: overchoice.
Mass culture
Mass culture has not vanished with
the arrival of the third wave. We still
have Disney, rock and roll,
Powerball, and CBS. But alongside
these mainstream cultural entities,
there have developed a vast array of
demassified niches. The Usenet on
Internet boasts 10,000 special
interest newsgroups. On the radio it
is possible to turn the dial and find
stations dedicated to certain types of
music, from classical and contem-
porary to bluegrass, zydeco, salsa,
tejana, tropical, bomba, and bangra.
To a thousand different strains, the
tastes of individuals are emerging as
a market force to be dealt with.
The emerging politics
The clearest sign of changing
politics is the decay of political
parties. The day when a Franklin
Roosevelt could win a string of four
elections by combining a handful of
voter blocs (farmers, labor,
intellectuals, the rural South, and the
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urban North) into a single lasting
coalition is gone. Election today
requires stringing together hundreds
of splintered grassroots groups: the
nonsmokers, AIDS activists, save-
the-whales people, what-have-you.
Every group is passionate and
narrow in focus. It is in every way a
more daunting process, and it is
conducted, as making frankfurters
should not be, in full view of the
public. It is no wonder that no one in
the United States, in Japan, in Italy,
or anywhere, believes in parties any
more. Parties were a static second-
wave, homogenized, massified
function that do not seem relevant in
the more volatile, diversified,
heterogeneous third wave.
The state of the family
Many people share the sense that the
traditional nuclear family of the
’50s, with working father and stay-
at-home mother, is the best defense
against the wrong kinds of changes
in a society. Is it reasonable to
expect that everything else in
society will change, but the family
unit will undergo no change?
Thus we have the proliferation of
family types today: the remarrieds,
the adopteds, the blended family, the
single-parent family, the same-sex
family, the zero-parent family, the
family of convenience, the virtual
family.
Toffler does not endorse the
fracturing of the American family
that has occurred in the past 30
years, but he notes that it is of a
piece with everything else that has
happened.
A management revolution
Centralized management made the
world go round from the rise of the
nation-state through World War II.
In a simple system, a single
individual could provide the wisdom
and authority to guide a large
enterprise.
No one believes that anymore. The
emphasis, since the 1970s at least,
has been on decentralization, on
delegation of authority and
empowerment, on self-managing
teams, on the leader-as-facilitator as
opposed to the leader-as-god.
Running a large enterprise from a
hub on the basis of a single person’s
competence, Toffler says, is like a
doctor making morning rounds and
prescribing Valium for everybody.
You can’t doctor an entire economy,
or even an entire organization, with
one medicine anymore. In the
demassified organization of today,
one-size-fits-all doesn’t cut it
anymore.
Diversity and change are key. Every
leader should check for the novelty
ratio on the organization’s product
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offerings: how many are six months
old or less versus five years old or
more?
The same can be applied to people:
how many have arrived in the past
six months, versus those who have
been around five years or longer?
How old are the organization’s
existing managerial practices? When
was the form you are now holding in
your hand last changed? How might
it be improved?
In every company new ideas, new
products, and new people are
waiting to be born. The leader’s task
is to get them out and breathing.
The demassification of intelligence
has happened. Though it sometimes
seems that in the competitive third
wave you must be a rocket scientist
to survive. But Toffler sees the
current era as one in which multiple
intelligences are finally identified
and given their due.
In the third wave, good ideas can
come from anywhere and anyone. It
does not behoove management to
treat like dummies people who are
supplying the native wit that allows
organizations to succeed.
Conventionally “smart” people
without motivation, energy, or good
health tend not to amount to much,
he says. Indeed, reducing a person’s
gifts to an IQ number is a kind of
ultimate unintelligence, but about
what you might expect of a second-
wave educational system that still
sees teaching as a factory activity
and young human beings as
products to be processed.
The new intelligence will be all over
the place. It may mean courage,
imagination, entrepreneurialism,
warmth, organizational savvy, or
street smarts. These are the kinds of
brains that will thrive in the third
wave. Reduction of intelligence to a
bell curve is a toxic supersimpli-
fication of reality.
Third-wave playthings
Beside human intelligence, Toffler
is interested in where we are
embedding machine intelligence,
creating smart products. Microchips
have already migrated from the
desktop to our environ-ment, so that
the average home today has 200
chips performing discrete tasks. The
connectivity specialists at Novell
have floated a goal of networking a
billion different products.
Why don’t the 200 chips in your
house talk to one another? If your
toilet develops a leak, why can’t it
diagnose itself, research the matter,
and call the plumber on its own?
The high price of sleeping
At a dinner party held for the
Chinese ambassador in the late
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1970s, Toffler found himself seated
with the top executives from NBC
and RCA. Since it would be unlike
him not to take advantage of such
access, he asked them how broad-
casting would be different five years
hence. Both smiled languidly and
assured Toffler there would be no
major changes.
They, like everyone else who would
lose their jobs in the years ahead for
not seeing the approaching third
wave, saw a future of fine tuning
and incremental adjustments.
Amidst tremendous upheaval, they
were asleep at the wheel.
The power of the third wave has
taken even the Tofflers by surprise.
When they published Future Shock
in 1971, they saw the knowledge
age as an outgrowth of the industrial
age that would require only a bit of
fine tuning. They now see it as more
revolutionary than that. The regime
of the smokestacks has been toppled
forever. What remains is still
frothing and changing its shape. It is
a whole new era, with dangers and
opportunities uniquely its own.
Dr. Livingston, I prosume . . .
We are not currently in Toffler’s
third wave; we are still in transition
between the second and third waves,
and that is why the implications of
the transformation are not
immediately obvious.
Just as knowledge is replacing
material and manpower as the
fulcrum of the new economy, the
old roles of producer and consumer
are blurring. In the case of Windows
95, which anyone with a disk drive
can duplicate as well as GM made
Cadillacs, those roles have lost
much meaning. The Tofflers have
come up with a word that describes
the blurred role we all play:
prosumer.
As prosumers we have a new set of
responsibilities — to educate our-
selves. We are no longer a passive
market upon which industry dumps
consumer goods but are a part of the
process, pulling toward us the
information and services that we
design from our own imagination.
It is a version of capitalism that
colonial economics (“There’s a
sucker born every minute...”) never
envisaged. In the third wave, the
prosumer is always right.
merchandising, small-town roasters
were replaced by the central roaster
at Chase and Sanborn or Chock Full
o’ Nuts.
Yes sir, no sir
Toffler, consulting with the
Department of Defense, had doubts
about such a hierarchical organ-
izations mustering the will to change
itself. He took heart when he learned
what the new motto among many in
the military is:
Disagreement will not be treated as
disloyalty.
It is a motto he recommends for
organizations that think themselves
much less hierarchical.
And it just may become the motto
for all of us if we are to steer into
the future successfully.

Cuppa joe

Like a steamroller grinding across

the landscape, the massification of
America ran roughshod over local
individuality, replacing it with one-
size-fits-all conformity. Toffler
recalled how every town had a
different-tasting cup of coffee at one
time, because every town had its
own roaster. With the emergence of
mass production and mass

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 About the Author
Resources
Michael Finley
researches and This report was put together using
writes about a writings, interviews, and
host of topics presentations by Alvin & Heidi
relating to Toffler
culture and
change. His The Third Wave, by Alvin Toffler
website “Future
Shoes” is a Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and
treasure trove Violence at the Edge of the 21st
of articles and essays about what we Century, by Alvin Toffler
are becoming. Mike’s book with
Harvey Robbins, The New Why War and Anti-War, Alvin & Heidi
Teams Don’t Work, won the Booz- Toffler
Allen & Hamilton Global Business
Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler
Book Award for “Best Management
Book, 1995, The Americas.” Mike
enjoys the distinction of being
named one of a handful of “Masters
of the Wired World” in 1998 by
Financial Times Press. Other
nominees include Arthur C. Clarke,
Nicholas Negroponte, Alvin Toffler,
Charles Handy, Al Gore, Tony
Blair, and Jim Barksdale.

Page 9 • Copyright 2002 by Michael Finley • http://mfinley.com