Renewal
There has been much new in my life lately. A little over a year ago my son Otis was born, and throughout the fall, I have been on parental leave. I have bought a old house in need of renovations, though I barely kept in a hammer let alone a drill before, but there is youtube.
I also took the opportunity to dismiss me from maybe Boras best job of helping young people start and run businesses, to launch and operate its own. I as a person looking for change and renewal. It is said that it is out of our comfort zone that we develop the most and the best people. I am sure this also largely applies to companies.
But I see many especially of the larger companies live by the old traditions and old ways of doing business. It worked yesterday, why would it not work tomorrow. Here’s how we’ve always done, and this is how we will always do. I have often been told.
During my lectures on trends for students so I always used to start by saying that we live in terribly exciting times, the ongoing revolutions everywhere and I mean not with bombs and grenades, but with business models, communications and logistics. Everything goes so quickly today, via the net, trends spread worldwide in a matter of days, sometimes within hours. I have always had one foot in the music world and one of my first company I started was a record label, when I was 14. At that time copied the tapes own cassettes sold at gigs and I remember when a friend’s dad bought one of the first CD -brännarna and dreamed of instead of cassettes to copy CDs, but in economic terms it was just a dream then. The burner cost over 10 thousand and a tomskiva close to a hundred. In just a few years halved prices and today costs one burner close to a hundred. And this was in the mid 90s. How much has not happened in the last 5 years, when we look at the music industry. Who still listen today to CDs? How will our consumption of media and other products look like in 5 years? I follow with great interest how the 3D printer will affect our buying habits. A printer a few years ago it cost 60 thousand today you can buy for half the price, twice as good. How will this affect logistics and sales, design and gifts industry? More revolutions in the form of the Internet of Things, big data, and person to person economies are emerging trends that require renewal of today’s businesses if they want to continue to be tomorrow’s business.
Even the language is constantly changing, and earlier had each generation its own language, now it goes so fast that it is almost so that each age group has its own codes and words so that even I find it hard to keep up. And if we can not even understand what they’re talking about young people today, how will we ever be able to do business with them? Who would, for example, heard about this ten years ago, a platform for young people today is old news, and choose other channels of communication.
I would urge people and businesses to seek renewal, change, evolution and revolution. Take a trip outside your comfort zone and developed to better meet tomorrow.
(Article writing for the now-defunct local newspaper Borås The courier in Borås.)