Plate tectonics, the idea that the surface of the Earth is made up of plates that move apart and come back together, has been used to explain the locations of volcanoes and earthquakes since the 1960s. While the world is still coming to grips with the implications of globalization, Tectonic Shift investigates what the globe’s economic and geopolitical future looks like and discovers the unfolding of an unprecedented realignment of forces.

• Tectonic Plate Shift
• Tectonic Shift Explanation Youtube
• Tectonic Shift Diagram
• Tectonic Shifts
• Tectonic Shift Def

Techtonic Shift is the movement of the plates that make up the Earth's crust.

Did you know?

Measuring the motion of tectonic plates is part of the science of geodesy. To define the shape of the Earth, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey, part of the National Ocean Service, uses a variety of techniques to measure the planet’s rate of rotation, its plate motion, and the ways that gravity affects certain scientific processes.

The Earth is in a constant state of change. Earth’s crust, called the lithosphere, consists of 15 to 20 moving tectonic plates. The plates can be thought of like pieces of a cracked shell that rest on the hot, molten rock of Earth’s mantle and fit snugly against one another. The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. This movement is called plate motion, or tectonic shift.

Our planet looks very different from the way it did 250 million years ago, when there was only one continent, called Pangaea, and one ocean, called Panthalassa. As Earth’s mantle heated and cooled over many millennia, the outer crust broke up and commenced the plate motion that continues today.

The huge continent eventually broke apart, creating new and ever-changing land masses and oceans. Have you ever noticed how the east coast of South America looks like it would fit neatly into the west coast of Africa? That’s because it did, millions of years before tectonic shift separated the two great continents.

Earth’s land masses move toward and away from each other at an average rate of about 0.6 inch a year. That’s about the rate that human toenails grow! Some regions, such as coastal California, move quite fast in geological terms — almost two inches a year — relative to the more stable interior of the continental United States. At the “seams” where tectonic plates come in contact, the crustal rocks may grind violently against each other, causing earthquakes and volcano eruptions. The relatively fast movement of the tectonic plates under California explains the frequent earthquakes that occur there.

Learning Objective

After studying this section you should be able to do the following:

Tectonic Plate Shift

1. Appreciate how in the past decade, technology has helped bring about radical changes across industries and throughout societies.

This book is written for a world that has changed radically in the past decade.

At the start of the prior decade, Google barely existed and well-known strategists dismissed Internet advertising models (Porter, 2001). By decade’s end, Google brought in more advertising revenue than any firm, online or off, and had risen to become the most profitable media company on the planet. Today billions in advertising dollars flee old media and are pouring into digital efforts, and this shift is reshaping industries and redefining skills needed to reach today’s consumers.

A decade ago the iPod also didn’t exist and Apple was widely considered a tech-industry has-been. By spring 2010 Apple had grown to be the most valuable tech firm in the United States, selling more music and generating more profits from mobile device sales than any firm in the world.

Moore’s Law and other factors that make technology faster and cheaper have thrust computing and telecommunications into the hands of billions in ways that are both empowering the poor and poisoning the planet.

Social media barely warranted a mention a decade ago, but today, Facebook’s user base is larger than any nation, save for China and India. Firms are harnessing social media for new product ideas and for millions in sales. But with promise comes peril. When mobile phones are cameras just a short hop from YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter, every ethical lapse can be captured, every customer service flaw graffiti-tagged on the permanent record that is the Internet. The service and ethics bar for today’s manager has never been higher.

Tectonic Shift Explanation Youtube

Speaking of globalization, China started the prior decade largely as a nation unplugged and offline. But today China has more Internet users than any other country and has spectacularly launched several publicly traded Internet firms including Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba. By 2009, China Mobile was more valuable than any firm in the United States except for Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart. Think the United States holds the number one ranking in home broadband access? Not even close—the United States is ranked fifteenth (Shankland, 2010).

The way we conceive of software and the software industry is also changing radically. IBM, HP, and Oracle are among the firms that collectively pay thousands of programmers to write code that is then given away for free. Today, open source software powers most of the Web sites you visit. And the rise of open source has rewritten the revenue models for the computing industry and lowered computing costs for start-ups to blue chips worldwide.

Cloud computing and software as a service is turning sophisticated, high-powered computing into a utility available to even the smallest businesses and nonprofits.

Data analytics and business intelligence are driving discovery and innovation, redefining modern marketing, and creating a shifting knife-edge of privacy concerns that can shred corporate reputations if mishandled.

And the pervasiveness of computing has created a set of security and espionage threats unimaginable to the prior generation.

As the last ten years have shown, tech creates both treasure and tumult. These disruptions aren’t going away and will almost certainly accelerate, impacting organizations, careers, and job functions throughout your lifetime. It’s time to place tech at the center of the managerial playbook.

Tectonic Shift Diagram

Key Takeaways

• In the prior decade, firms like Google and Facebook have created profound shifts in the way firms advertise and individuals and organizations communicate.
• New technologies have fueled globalization, redefined our concepts of software and computing, crushed costs, fueled data-driven decision making, and raised privacy and security concerns.

Questions and Exercises

Tectonic Shifts

1. Visit a finance Web site such as http://www.google.com/finance. Compare Google’s profits to those of other major media companies. How have Google’s profits changed over the past few years? Why have the profits changed? How do these compare with changes in the firm you chose?
2. How is social media impacting firms, individuals, and society?
3. How do recent changes in computing impact consumers? Are these changes good or bad? Explain. How do they impact businesses?
4. What kinds of skills do today’s managers need that weren’t required a decade ago?
5. Work with your instructor to decide ways in which your class can use social media. For example, you might create a Facebook group where you can share ideas with your classmates, join Twitter and create a hash tag for your class, or create a course wiki.

References

Porter, M., “Strategy and the Internet,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 3 (March 2001): 62–78.

Tectonic Shift Def

Shankland, S., “Google to Test Ultrafast Broadband to the Home,” CNET, February 10, 2010.