The risk of inertia, and of change

Embrace change or die, we are told. Clearly slavish resistance to change will end badly. David Rowe argues, however, that embracing change for its own sake can be equally disastrous

It is hard to believe that it has been 35 years since Alvin Toffler coined a phrase for the disorientation caused by living in a world characterised by bewilderingly rapid change. In fact, the first edition of Future Shock appeared in 1970, before the first and second oil shocks, before the invention of the PC, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, before the advent of the internet and the dotcom boom and bust, and before 9/11. Yes, the integrated circuit had been invented and