Daily Inspiration: “The real impact of covid on business? …. We’ve learned to operate at speed, and there is no going back!”

“The real impact of covid on business? We’ve compressed 10 years of change into but 6 months! We’ve learned to operate at speed, and there is no going back!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Check the smile! Do you think I’m happy to be back on a real stage?

This is a photo from last weeks’ opening keynote in Detroit for PMMI – the Packaging Machinery Manufacturing Institute. They invited me back in for a look at the future after they originally had me back in 2003 for a focus on the future of consumer goods, packaging, manufacturing, and retail. I referred to a few of those slides in the opening moments of my talk as a bit of refresher of our faster future – and can see that even then, I was accurately predicting what comes next.

It’s good to be back, even though we all know that the road forward from here remains tenuous and rocky at best.

I’ve got a staged clip of this portion of the talk, albeit with slides:

What did I cover? Consider the reality of what we have learned through these remarkable times:

• we compressed 10 years of change into but 6 months
• the result is that major trends accelerated
• such that organizations learned something new about speed!
• and agility and flexibility became critical!
• the impact is that business models shifted faster
• as people become more adaptable to new interaction methods!
• the attitude ‘it can’t be done!’ disappeared
• and decision-making paralysis disappeared
• a slow organizational structure was put under a microscope
• old barriers to new ideas disappeared
• and getting it done became the rallying cry!

And now? Organizations are busy learning how to keep what they’ve learned – how can we sustain the momentum.

As I noted at the close – if pre-pandemic the future belonged to those who are fast – it now belongs to those who are even faster!

Here’s to 2022!