While doing research for this book, I found people working hard to promote a society with individuals who seek truth and have integrity. I found a groundswell of growing awareness and disdain for the post-truth era. Then I had an integrity epiphany. I saw the signs of big change.
I’ve been lucky enough to experience two explosive periods of change in my life. I worked in the personal computing industry as it exploded in the early 1980s and got into compliance and ethics in its early years in the mid-1990s. In both cases I saw early on that, “This thing is going to be huge.” And in both cases people told me, “These things would amount to nothing.”
Ironically, in both cases, people who had the most experience and knowledge told me I was wrong. The information technology community told me personal computing would amount to nothing, saying, “You can’t put computing into the hands of the users—it will be chaos.” They knew how hard it had been to program computers in the past. I completely understood their misperception. However, once they saw how spreadsheets, database management, and word processing operated in the average person’s hands, they understood that big change was coming. It revealed that what they knew from the past interfered with their vision of the future.