This period also coincided with the onset of the knowledge revolution that launched a gigantic Third Wave - as famously described by Alvin Toffler - of economic, technical and social change and is still forcing businesses to operate in radically new, continually shifting ways. Every shred of industrial-era thinking is in fact now being re-scrutinised and re-formulated.
It is precisely when an old paradigm crumbles and the new one is not yet fixed in place that we get great bursts of creative thinking. This is perhaps such a moment. What does the future hold? One thing is certain; - the future will clearly not be a continuation of the past. It will rather be a series of discontinuities.