Let’s be honest. In today’s volatile economy, foresight and planning are easily pushed aside in favor of reactively averting poisonous arrows and perilous moats. Those hazards continuously threaten us—and often appear from a surprise enemy. How many of us keep putting our foot on the gas and have not slowed down to finesse these dangerous conditions?
(photo courtesy of www.webweaver.nu/clipart/dragons3.shtml)
We may not be able to control unforeseen events and demanding clients. What we can control is how we respond. It starts with arming ourselves with knowledge and confidence.
Knowledge begins by understanding the most common pressures our clients are facing: Continue reading » »
Much has been written and discussed about Gen Y in the workplace, including in our own webinar with Lisa Orrell. As this article in the Wall Street Journal shows, Millennials are becoming “good workplace citizens.”
Apple is about to sell its one billionth “app“, an amazing pace of development for a marketplace that just got established 8 or 9 months ago. In contrast, it took a couple years to sell a million songs on iTunes. A lot of entrepreneurs are toiling in basements and coffee shops to make those kinds of numbers happen.
Ning has now generated 1 million social networking sites, evidence that virtual 
networking is becoming a way-of-life. When social networking becomes a way-of-work we’ll see projects, teams, and organizations run differently.
Now expert advice service is becoming increasingly virtual, too. The question will become – how do you determine quality and how will those services be delivered in ways that solve our work and life frustrations?
You can read a great review in the Wall Street Journal of the book, The Industrial Revolutionaries by Gavin Weightman. The author makes the case that the practical applications of innovations – and the systems that underly their successful deployment – are what really changes our lives, not the innovations themselves. For example, telegraph lines existed before Samuel Morse, but it was Morse’s telegraph system and his famous code that made long-distance communication indispensable for businesses. Similarly, it was Trevithwick’s steam locomotive that enabled steam power to change economics and society.
Peter Drucker made similar points about the Internet. The internet, he wrote, is our steam engine. But internet commerce, or the “buy-button” as Lou Gerstner once put it, is our steam locomotive. Think of how our buying and business habits have changed with the widespread emergence of digital commerce.
Al Vicere, our June presenter, has a similar view of the economic shifts we’re experiencing now. According to Dr. Vicere, the information age is finally upon us. The economic crisis of 2008-2009 is hastening the demise of many traditional economic institutions and organizations, and what emerges on the other side will feel a lot more like the promises we’ve been led to expect for some time now.
Jay Light, the dean of Harvard Business School, is calling for business school education to swing back toward the center: “We lived through an enormous extended period of financial good times, and people became less focused on risks and risk management and more focused on making money.”
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times
We needed better risk management over the last 5 years, but now that we’re on the downside of the cycle the need for innovation and risk-taking is at a premium. It’s time to grow new businesses and new products not preserve a diluted balance sheet.
Daniel Gross noted today in Slate.com that the “zeitgeist has spun 180 degrees” and adds: “For the economy to recover and thrive… business must once again be willing to roll the dice.”
Some of the greatest entrepreneurial ventures have been founded in recessionary economies. As Wired Magazine put it in December 2008, “When the economy is in turmoil, the time is ripe for ambitious innovation.”
FG Ghadar and Al Vicere will have much to say on these topics in the next few months.
