Carlota Perez and in general, "time to read"

I had been intrigued by Carlota Perez's writings on the theory of Technological Revolutions ever since I came across a summary of it in the 2004 IBM annual report.  Her thesis is simple: each "technological" revolution goes through three phases -- a period of disruptive innovation and increased "installation", leading to a period of "collapse and readjustment", following by a period of extended "deployment" where it leads to long, sustained growth in its impact by becoming part of our everyday fabric of life (my words, not hers).  She cites 5 revolutions -- industrial; steam and railways; steel, electricity and heavy engineering; automobiles, oil and mass production; and finally IT. 

Every revolution lasts 70 - 80 years, so given the collapse we have had in the IT industry after the pre-2000 boom (and assuming that the revolution kicked in high gear starting with the microprocessor invention in 1971), we are at the middle point of this revolution, and are just entering a phase that will last 3 decades or more of sustained deployment and IT becoming an increasing part of our fabric.  She also argues that what the next revolution is unknown and unpredicatable in the middle of a previous revolution.

I used this hypothesis to argue in my VLDB 2006 keynote that the next phase of the web will be through a sustained web 2.0 style deployment, built on an Info 2.0 fabric, but I had realized then, and realize now, that I was stretching it a lot to make my point on Info 2.0 :)

Nonetheless, I had always wanted to read Carlota Perez's writing.  Recently, IBM had its Business Leadership Forum at the State Hermitage Museuem in St. Petersburgh, Russia.  This is an annual gathering of business and thought leaders that IBM organizes to discuss the industry agenda going forward, and the topic this year was to understand the implications of a globally connected world.  Anyway, Carlota Perez spoke at the conference, and while I was not there, I listened to her videocast (I will see if IBM makes it available for hte outside, in which case I will provide the link), and again, I said, "gotta read her writing."

But the question is: how does one find the time?  Between a full day's work, catching up with email, catching up with all the blogs I read, spending time with family, reading the newspaper and magazines -- both New York Times and the New Yorker can be time consuming :), how does one get to read important, thought provoking books such as Carlota's?  I do not have a good answer to that, do you?

Comments

[Tomoaki Sawada]

I agree with you and share the same sentiment that Carlota Perez's thesis refered in that annual report is now being proved. Looking forward to the news that link to her video will become available. Regards

[Anant Jhingran]

Hi, as an IBMer, you can access this from the internal media library. Send me mail and I will send you the link. I was refering to its external availability.

[Andi Gutmans]

I've recently started to listen to audiobooks on the way to and from work (when not on a conference call). I think it's the best solution for catching up on reading without having to make time for it in between work and the family. I was thinking it'd be odd before I tried but it's actually remarkably convenient and I didn't feel myself mind wander more than I do when reading a book (still quite a bit :)
The only problem is that there are still only a small amount of titles on audiobooks but I hope this will grow over time.