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This story about the decline of henequen may feel like some-thing that happened a million years ago, but it wasn’t very long ago at all. My great-grandmother was alive during both the boom and the bust, and I knew her well.

The refrigerator seems like it has been around forever, but my mother still calls it an icebox. The first NASA engineers, many of them still workingtoday, used slide rules to figure out how to put a man on the moon. There was a time, not so long ago, when I played vinyl albums on my hi-fi, played the new Pong video game for hours, and listened to progressive rock music featuring the newfangled Moog synthesizer. (My 13-year-old son still can’t understand why I call a CD an “album.”) In one defining moment in July of 1965, Bob Dylan “plugged in” at the Newport Jazz Festival and changed the sound of pop music forever. Amplified music that had heretofore been mostly the domain of teeny-boppers and blues enthusiasts suddenly became a popular creative force. By adopting technology, Dylan angered a significant portion of his “customer base, ”but opened up an enormous new market of baby boomers who were gravitating toward a more electric sound being popularized by the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion.

What are you offering right now that will go the way of the sextant, the slide rule, or the acoustic “folky” singer? It’s not too difficult to see these events coming if you keep your eyes open and recognize the signals. In 10 years, will we still see pay phones, film cameras, VCRs, or stock exchange trading floors? Will anything be made from “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil”? Many products hitting the shelf right now will be obsolete in the time it takes for one of our kids to make it through college. At the accelerated level we’re moving now, product and service cycles in some industries will be measured in months, not years.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the famous phrase “creative destruction” to describe the ongoing process that is capitalism. When the waves of creative destruction are heading your way, you have two choices: either drown or learn to ride the waves.