Meanwhile, Google is ripping along at its own rapid pace with a fleet of fully autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids that have logged over 300,000 miles. And the company has pushed through legislation that legalizes self-driving cars in Nevada. California is close behind, and Google has also been busy lobbying joyriding lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

While we know that robo-cars are coming, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently released predictions that autonomous cars will account for up to 75% of vehicles on the road by the year 2040. The organization went even further, forecasting how infrastructure, society, and attitudes could change when self-driving cars become the norm around the middle of the century.

IEEE envisions an absence of traffic signs and lights since highly evolved, self-driving cars won’t need them, and it believes that full deployment could even eliminate the need for driver’s licenses.

While this all sounds sci-fi, we’re already starting to see separate threads of this autonomous car future being weaved in current real-world tests.

A nascent form of vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) is currently being tested in a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) field trial in Ann Arbor, allowing cars to share situational data to avoid crashing into each other.

Meanwhile, Volvo is testing the concept of using “road trains” in Europe to allow for more efficient driving. “A train of vehicles moving very close to each other would reach a higher throughput—the number of cars per road unit—and have lower fuel consumption due to aerodynamic drift,” says Dr. Alberto Broggi, IEEE senior member and professor of computer engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. Broggi was the director of a 2010 project that successfully piloted two driverless cars on an 8,000-mile road trip from Parma to Shanghai.

IEEE also predicts that the biggest barrier to pervasive adoption of driverless cars may have nothing to do with technology, but will be general public acceptance. While the average driver may grasp the basic benefits of autonomous cars—increased fuel efficiency and safety, along with a reduction in traffic—it may not be enough to get them to let go of the steering wheel.

Sometimes you have to break things. Shake it up. Bust it up. ‘Cause that’s where the breakthroughs live.
–Randy Gage, author, Risky is the New Safe

Over the past few years it has been intriguing to watch the decline of well-known brands and companies: Blockbuster, Nokia, BlackBerry, Best Buy, Borders, and Kodak. These are just a few names of companies that are filing for bankruptcy or experiencing significant declines in revenue and/or market share.

One lesson that can be drawn from how these companies handled change is that there is a significant danger faced by dominant firms that refuse to cannibalize themselves—to give up existing sales in order to position themselves with the next generation of products and services. Kodak invented the digital camera yet was unable to cannibalize the profits from its film business to invest in new digital technology. Management reluctance ultimately led to Kodak’s demise.

Giving up what’s making you money sounds much easier in theory than it is to execute. To paraphrase author Steven Pearlstein, “The key to success in such a fast-changing environment…[is] keeping a mind open to numerous possibilities, having the discipline to experiment with several conflicting strategies and moving quickly to embrace one of them when the direction of the market becomes clear.”

Perhaps the best way to handle this dilemma is to devote a certain percentage of your time to developing what’s new, be it mobile delivery, a new product, or new audience.

Randy Gage, in Risky is the New Safe, provides five marketing lessons for entrepreneurs who may not want to play it safe. They also apply to the insurance industry:

1. Action beats perfection: A well thought-out plan executed today is better than the perfect plan executed whenever you figure out it’s perfect. (Which is usually never.)
2. Boring kills: A book, video, sales letter, brochure, opera, story, song, dance, or any creative work can never be too long—it can only be too boring. Insurance is already thought of as boring. Do something to spice it up.
3. Say what you want: When you want someone to do something, don’t speak in codes. Whether you’re talking with your kids, raising money for a charity, crafting a marketing message, or persuading a business owner to let you work on their insurance program—tell them what you want them to do. They’re big kids and they can decide if they agree with you or not, and if they want to take that action—but only if they know what the message is.
4. Be bold: The best promoter of you, your agency, service, or cause is you. You know it best, and no one is going to make a more passionate case than you. If you believe you provide the best value, stand up for it.
5. Take risks: The insurance industry is by its very nature risk adverse. But to move forward you may have to take risks and experiment. You won’t always succeed, but you will learn and you will move forward. A Facebook ad may not work. That new marketing piece is going to be bold, different, and unconventional—and that’s why it will work.

Gage titles one chapter in his book, “Move Fast and Break Things.” That was the mantra of Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook family, he says. The insurance industry tends to not want to break anything! This is a new skill many of us might have to learn.

A more realistic mantra might be to “Move Fast and Try Not to Break Everything.” And: “Keep an Open Mind.”

The reason these businesses don’t change fast enough is because what they do is still working.
–Alan Wurtzel, former CEO of Circuit City, and author of Good to Great to Gone.

Alarmingly, though, people who tried to do two visual tasks at the same time rated their performance as better than did those who combined a visual and an audio task—even though their actual performance was worse.

“Many people have this overconfidence in how well they can multitask, and our study shows that this particularly is the case when they combine two visual tasks,” said Zheng Wang, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. “People’s perception about how well they’re doing doesn’t match up with how they actually perform.”

Results showed that multitasking, of any kind, seriously hurt performance. Participants who gave audio directions showed a 30% drop in visual pattern-matching performance. But those who used instant messaging did even worse—they had a 50% drop in pattern-matching performance.

In addition, the findings show that technology companies need to be aware of how people respond to multitasking when they are designing products. For example, these results suggest GPS voice guidance should be preferred over image guidance because people are more effective when they combine visual with audio tasks compared to two visual tasks.

The study appeared in a recent issue of Computers in Human Behavior.

That’s why I was interested to read a comprehensive study from The American Assembly, a non-partisan public affairs forum affiliated with Columbia University. They conducted the Copy Culture Survey, based on thousands of phone interviews in the United States and Germany. The group released part of the results, which show that people who download music illegally also buy more music than those who don’t.

The research found that in the United States, people who download pirated music have larger music libraries—around 37% larger than those who download only legal songs. “But some of it also comes from significantly higher legal purchases of digital music than their non-P2P using peers—around 30% higher among U.S. P2P users,” Joe Karaganis from American Assembly explained.

He added: “Our data is quite clear on this point and lines up with numerous other studies. The biggest music pirates are also the biggest spenders on recorded music.” Compared to the United States, in Germany the figures stack up even higher, with pirates buying nearly three times as much digital music as the legal downloaders, the study found.

While peer-to-peer sharing of files is the most prevalent form of illegally acquiring music files, in the United States, according to the survey, 29% of those under 30 listen to most all of their music via streaming services. However, only 11% of those have a paid subscription, which would indicate that music streaming services play a similar role to pirated music: try before you buy.

The music industry was perhaps one of the first to experience a digital disruption. Others—like the book publishing business—are not far behind. But the response of the Recording Industry of America was to sue its best customers. It’s a strategy that doesn’t seem to have worked very well.

How will you respond?

What assumptions are you making when planning for your agency’s future? Will you respond like many industries and keep your head in the sand? Or, will you look to the future and try to see what opportunities digital disruption provides?

If something can be done, it will be done. And if you don’t do it, then someone else will. Commit to being an agency that is willing to embrace change and explore how you can take advantage of the opportunities created by disruption.

According to an USA Today article, nearly 32% of U.S. households are wireless only, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, up from 10.5% in 2006. The article also stated, “First it was street corner phone booths and home delivery of telephone books. Now, landlines are on their way to becoming part of American telecommunications history.”

AT&T agreed to sell a majority stake of YellowPages.com to a private equity firm. Revenue from the Yellow Pages unit has shrunk 30% in two years, as consumers continue to shun phone books in favor of the Web. Verizon also spun off its directory business to shareholders in 2006, only to see it file for bankruptcy three years later.

There are a few remaining pockets of Yellow Pages usage, e.g., the elderly and certain rural areas. Deals can be had if you decide to continue advertising in the Yellow Pages. But if you do, make sure you create a way to track business that comes to your agency via this channel.

The report, titled Self-Driving Car: The Next Revolution, is based on interviews with leading technologists, automotive industry leaders, academicians, and regulators, as well as research and analysis of industry trends. The study examines the forces of change, the current and emerging technologies, the path to bring these innovations to market, the likelihood that they will achieve wide adoption from consumers, and their potential impact on the automotive ecosystem.

The findings are outlined in four sections:

1. Market dynamics: Examines the market dynamics and the social, economic, and environmental forces that are making change inevitable.
2. Convergence: Discusses the ongoing convergence of the key enabling technologies.
3. Adoption: Focuses on the path to widespread adoption of advanced automated driving solutions, which they believe will take place in stages, leading over time to reliance on increasingly autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles.
4. Implications for investment: Addresses the social, political, and economic implications of self-driven automobiles and their impact on the entire automotive ecosystem.

Gary Silberg, national automotive industry leader for KPMG LLP, added, “Like many of the industry leaders, academics, and policy makers interviewed, we believe the age of the self-driving vehicle is coming. But getting there will require that many pieces of a large puzzle fit together. When and how that will happen remain open questions.”

Automotive and technology companies are already investing in connected and autonomous technologies and applications. While there is no clear leader, companies are trying to figure out how to compete and collaborate at the same time. Over the longer term, the evolution of these advancements will cause a rebalancing of the automotive value chain, with nontraditional firms playing a more significant role.

Google’s researchers wanted to know, for instance, how activities on one screen (say an iPad) affected those on another (for instance a smartphone). While it may seem like a bit of an abstract research question, their results uncovered some fascinating insights:

• 90% of all media actions are screen based.
• On average, people spend 4.4 hours a day of their leisure time in front of screens, with the TV being most popular, followed by the PC or notebook, tablet, and smartphone.
• The choice of which screen to use is driven by the context: where we are, what we want to do, and what device is within reach.
• 38% of our daily media interactions are done with a smartphone.
• Tablets are primarily used at home and their main function is entertainment.
• We’ve also become quite accustomed to using multiple screens at the same time, with the combination of the TV and our smartphone being the most popular.
• The TV no longer holds our full attention; 77% of users are using another device at the same time.
• Smartphones really have become the backbone of our media use.

The implication for insurance agents is the need to go beyond traditional phone and email communication options. Agents need to be thinking about the type of screen clients might be using when they want to make contact with the agency.

With Internet-connected TVs becoming more popular, is it beyond the realm of possibility that your client could use that screen to access their information on your website? What about tablets and smartphones? At a minimum, your Web presence needs to be automatically adaptable to whatever screen size is accessing your site.

What you don’t see in the information above is a high percentage of desktop access. This is a significant change from just a few years ago. People don’t have to “go” to the Internet anymore. They carry the ability to access the Internet around with them all the time. This is especially true for younger consumers.

It’s important to consider screen size when you look to improve your customer service options. Being adaptable will allow you to better connect with your customers and provide a service experience they can enjoy—regardless of what device they use.

According to the lawsuit, the insurers are infringing three patents that relate to vehicle monitoring and ways the monitoring is used to determine insurance rates. Both complaints were filed in federal court in Cleveland.

The complaints target Hartford’s “TrueLane” and State Farm’s “Drive Safe & Save” initiatives. These programs get data regarding location, mileage, speed, and other information from an onboard computer to calculate a “safety score” on the driver. Progressive is “suffering from the effects” of the infringement by the two companies, the Mayfield Village, Ohio-based company said in the complaints. Hartford offers its TrueLane in Connecticut, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, and West Virginia.

Progressive has previously sued Allstate Corp. and Liberty Mutual over similar programs. It has settled with Allstate.