Here is a snippet I took from an article by Dennis Waitley (read the article),”The world is too big for us. Too much going on, too much crime, violence and change. Try as you will, you get behind in the race. It’s an incessant strain to keep pace and still you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. Everything in business and life is high pressure. Human nature can’t endure much more!” This newspaper editorial reads as if it were written last week. But it actually appeared more than 177 years ago on June 16, 1833, in The Atlantic Journal back in the “good old days!”
That’s pretty scary in my book, because it sounds so much like the present time, and we thought it was only our generation that felt like we do about the hectic pace of innovation. Although I guess innovation like a sea shift from a penny farthing to an automobile, or a flightless society to man’s first flight, is pretty disruptive innovation. But then again is a societal transformation from typewriters to IPads in less than half a century any less disruptive? In the face of this incessant and unstoppable innovation Waitley suggests, “Success in the new era is heavily dependent upon innovation, creativity and solving problems for which there are no precedents. While new technology is often the driver of economic and social change, the real opportunities are created by individuals who apply technology in new ways.”
Specifically in the world of technology, there has been a long held misconception that technology drives people in a business when in fact we have all come to the stark, and more recently seemingly obvious, realization that it’s actually the people that drive technology in a business. Sounds stupid I know but how many conversations have you had where the latest bells and whistles technology is going to change people’s behaviour when in fact the people’s behaviour ultimately caused a technology solution to be rendered obsolete. Innovation is not the sole domain of the techies either, innovation is everyone’s domain – it’s just a matter of personal choice. We all have two clear options, “stew on it” as Waitley suggests and get left behind, or anticipate it, embrace it, and be a catalyst of technological innovation. Sign me up for the latter.
