Daily Inspiration: “The pandemic has forced every industry to suddenly confront its technological future! Now comes the hard part – doing it right!”

“The pandemic has forced every industry to suddenly confront its technological future! Now comes the hard part – doing it right!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Pre-pandemic, we told you that your future was inevitably to be digital.

Many of you didn’t listen – I watched you in real-time and tracked your inaction. Companies avoided omnichannel e-commerce strategies, automotive manufacturers ignored the need to invest more in the digital transformation of the essence of ‘cars into computers,’ manufacturing companies thought they could delay their move into advanced robotics, healthcare organizations believed that a world of connected medicine, hospital-at-home technology would take a long time to disrupt their world.

Oh, complacency is a sweet drug, isn’t it! You inhaled deeply and injected the freedom of denial directly into your corporate veins.

Then the pandemic hit, and you had to rush to align yourself to a digital future that was suddenly terrifyingly real. Your technological platforms weren’t up to the task; the skills we told you that was needed non-existent; your strategy mired in irrelevance.

And yet you hacked something together to get by – and right now, it’s a jury-rigged solution of disparate parts, barely working in coordination, incomprehensibly fragile. It’s not a platform for your future. Worse yet, you are only one 15-year-old-hacker-away from having a massive breach occur that will bring your systems down, expose your data, and destroy your market value.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

The next phase will have you investing heavily to do things right, to fix what you’ve put in place, to really prepare for the digital future that is the essence of everything you do.

Where do you start?

More than likely your first step is to fire your geriatric board of directors! They’re of an age in which they don’t understand this new world, and won’t be prepared to make the strategic and financial commitment to align to your new disrupted reality. Without a competent board at your side, you are doomed to a future of technological failure.

Sorry. But it’s the truth. And you know it to be true! You know that until you do that, and have the proper commitment to truly becoming digital, you’ll remain mired in a hopeless vacuum of ongoing weakness.