Weapons of Mass Disruption

The late 20th Century was the heyday of Big Media. It was also the last time we had consistent information narratives in the national news cycle. Beginning with the launch of CNN in 1980, the world entered a 24-hour news cycle. A little over a decade later came the Internet, and a decade after that came the smart phone, each one disrupting the news cycle and the information environment a bit more,...

Since the nation began to reopen this summer following wide availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, Main Street America has struggled to get back to pre-pandemic operations. According to 50% of small business owners across the country, in 2021 it has gotten more difficult to find qualified people to hire compared to one year ago. The labor situation is particularly challenging for the restaurant ind...

When images of George Floyd’s death hit social media in May 2020, people all over the country hit the streets to remind our nation that Black Lives Matter (too). This message was met by competing narratives such as “Blue Lives Matter,” “Stop Asian Hate,” and “All Lives Matter.” As conversations on race began to consider the concept of “systemic racism” then-President Trump banned government traini...

The motivational speaking industry was valued at approximately $1.9 billion in 2019, with projected annual growth of 4.9% and reaching $2.3 billion by 2025. Then Covid-19 hit, and organizations started to ask, “How valuable is a motivational speaker when you can’t put them up on stage in front of your people?” When Covid disrupted everything in March of 2020, professional speakers like Dr. James S...

Cyberthreat has been mischaracterized as a technical problem with a technical solution, but if it were really just a technical problem, we would have solved it by now. In other words, cyberthreat is a journey up Mt. VUCA. In the wake of numerous cyberattacks against critical infrastructure industries, the nature of cyberthreat has been in the spotlight, disrupting not only these critical infrastru...

According to Business Insider, the Podcasting industry is expected to hit $1 billion dollars this year. Although the podcast was invented almost 20 years ago, this audio format has really exploded in the last 5 years. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the industry engine into overdrive, as celebrities, politicians, and obscure college professors looked for ways to connect with an audience. On this epis...

Between the pinnacle of the music industry in 1999 when it was valued at approximately $40 billion dollars, and the trough in 2014 where the industry was valued at less than $15 billion dollars, there has been a love/hate relationship with the disruptive force of technology. It’s no accident that the decline which began in 1999 aligned with the rise of Napster. The landscape of the industry was su...

We live in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous – where the only constant is change, complexity is growing, and all the ambiguity this creates is making us feel anxious and uncertain. The world is being disrupted over and over again, and the risks previously categorized as “unknown unknowns” have become commonplace. Everywhere we turn, Mount VUCA is in various stages of volca...

Welcome to our new podcast Weapons of Mass Disruption! Transitioning from the hit podcast IQ4U comes a new technology podcast produced and hosted by Dr. Tamara Schwartz. The term " Cyberthreat"  has been mischaracterized as a technical problem with a technical solution, but if it were really just a technical problem, we would have solved it by now. In other words, cyberthreat is a journe...