KNOWLEDGE NAVIGATORS - NEW ADVENTURERS 

Hundreds of years ago crews of sailing ships were the adventurous travellers of the day. Not only did they lead exciting (and dangerous) lives, but they were handsomly rewarded by ship owners or, in some cases, by the rulers of the kingdoms they entered. Marco Polo wasn't treated exactly like a scullery maid.

Later everyone envied those "Captains of the Clouds", airline pilots who travelled the world and freely tested new adventures. They too have been richly rewarded for their adventurous outlook and navigational and piloting skills.

Coming up soon, a new breed who will thrill to different adventures in different places and different worlds. They are known now as knowledge navigators. They will be in more demand than marine or aeronautical adventurers of times past.

People who know how to size up and seize opportunities, when others only see doom and gloom and unsolvable problems, are going to collect sums previously paid only to baseball stars. Those who have this talent are and will be in demand everywhere. In the Age of the Risk Taker in a globalizing world, they are becoming the pampered darlings.

Such knowledge workers are rare, because at the cutting edge in a rapidly changing world, there is no time to relay knowledge by conventional means. By the time such knowledge has been passed on it will already be obsolete. So to keep relevant, even knowledge workers must be constantly retraining. People call me a futurist, but if I don't change today, tomorrow I'm a historian.

It wasn't always thus. Ninety percent of the scientists who ever lived are still with us today. For millennia past, everybody did what their parents had done before them. Only in the last few centuries has information, then knowledge, even been in a recordable state that allows us to read and study the small steps taken by humanity in the past. Past methods of recording and relaying words are inadequate. Constantly improving modes of communications and memory storage are multiplying exponentially. Soon 4.5 inch discs will hold 10,000,000 words, and 12-inch discs will hold libraries. And crystals will eventually make such disc storage look like stone tablets.

These changes will revolutionize the world. When advances appear so quickly and in such radical form, not many people can see beyond the hardware to conceive the software and what it can accomplish.

People who do will become the new Midases. We already have the model: William Gates, President of Microsoft Software of Bellevue, Washington, is a billionaire before age 35. It is reported that over 100 of his employees are already millionaires and few of them are over 30.

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