Wednesday, June 2, 2010

When the Winds of Change Blow


There's an old Spanish proverb that says "When the winds of change blow, some build walls and others build windmills."


Businesses need to figure out ways to harness change so they can remain relevant into the future -- they need to build windmills. You can't protect yourself from tomorrow. 


But there is always resistance to change. We are creatures of habit and we don' t like anything new. It's alien, threatening and probably French. This mindset can kill you in the 21st Century. Clay Shirky summarized it best by saying: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."


That's what happens. You focus so intently on the old problem you don't even realize it isn't relevant anymore. I remember IBM's woes from the early 1990's. They were so focused on solving the "mainframe computing problem" that they didn't see the marketplace change into personal computers. 


As long as you keep solving yesterday's problems you will never be able to see tomorrow. Eventually you become irrelevant. And irrelevance leads to bankruptcy. 


IBM survived because they had enormous amounts of money, prestige, clout and the most well known brand in the world of technology. Do you have those assets? Could you rebound? If not, we can help you get futureproof. 




R-Squared Computing - Business Technology Experts
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