You enter the office and you find a surprise. The year is 1986. The night before a fax arrived from Korea on their new $1200 single page fax machine. The problem is that it is now an hour too late to contact their manufacturer and tell them the corrections they made they’re wrong and you’ll have to waste another couple of days because of design issues.

It’s 1998 and you come back from lunch. You sit at your desk, pick up the phone receiver, and go through your 14 messages, one by one. When you’re done, you get up and check your inbox. Not the one on the big desk on your desk, but the one littered with mail and papers on the wall by your door.

This is what we take for granted today. That as recently as 12 and 25 years ago, the time-saving advantages of mobile and web technologies were not only absent, but businesses continued to thrive in a trillion-dollar global economy.

Today, with our pocket-sized access to the entire universe (have you seen Google Sky? I’m not exaggerating here), we no longer have to wait for answers, information, solutions, or just a conversation. We can find anyone wherever they are. In fact, these days, the trend is to disconnect rather than be part of the collective that is connected.

The hip will not make you more effective as a leader. Online cloud services will. If you think your small business can run with just one computer, a bookkeeper, a website, an email address, and Microsoft Office, think again. See the business to your left and right is moving their billing online, has a virtual assistant managing their web properties, a project collaboration tool, and customer relationship management system. They have you connected to the world through a social network and are constantly making sure you are part of the conversation. The cost of this assistant is the same as it was at his previous office, but now he works from home and lives over 1,000 miles away. And the 15 to 20 different programs that this person uses in the cloud to run his business cost him about $250 a month. That’s less than half the cost of the space you save by not having that bigger office if you still leave the house for work.

I’m talking to you, a small business owner. The wedding planner, the plumber, the architect and the florist. We have to increase our agility and take advantage of what technology provides or, frankly, someone else will.