Daily Inspiration: “Beware becoming comfortably smug!”

“Beware becoming comfortably smug!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Are you potentially one of the companies in the frame? Maybe so – because you are too smug in your belief that the road you travel today will be your path into tomorrow.

The fact is, when the axis of the universe changes, you’d better change with it! History is littered with the debris of the complacent, the wreckage of the hesitant, the ruins of the fallout from hubris. It’s all too easy to think that what you have today will be fine for tomorrow when the reality is that yesterday someone already invented the idea that renders you irrelevant.

Always run scared; battle hubris; vanquish excessive confidence! You should always be reinventing, reassessing, realigning, re-creating, and constantly rethinking because its’s pretty likely that your reality today is already someone else’s concept from the olden days tomorrow.

Anyone can build up a successful career path, fantastic company, or great personal trajectory, and might in the eyes of others be fully in control of their future – and then, in an instant, blow it away. A downfall can come from arrogance, hubris, personal conflict, overconfidence, or a failure to adapt to fast change. These very same attitudes can be embedded in the very DNA of the organization, setting you up for failure.

And here’s an interesting angle – these things were true before Covid, and yet, the impact has become even more profound as we enter into the next phase of our future. The ultimate impact of Covid-19 is that, beyond the fact that we will be living in a somewhat surreal and unusual future, every organization is entering a new future in which a new era of massive acceleration defines everything you will do. If the future was fast before – it’s crazy fast now!

Need to think further about this new reality? I hit my virtual broadcast studio, and with the assistance of my fantastic overseas video producer, outlined what has happened – and what you can expect!