Daily Inspiration: “You won’t activate tomorrow’s opportunities based on yesterday’s structure”

“You won’t activate tomorrow’s opportunities based on yesterday’s structure” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Yesterday’s ideas, strategies, methods, and structure won’t provide you with a path for tomorrow’s success!  Product lifecycles as a concept are dead. Old skllls don’t solve new chalelnges. Nothing lasts forever. What you sell today will be obsolete tomorrow, if it isn’t already from the olden days today.

That was a part of my message last week in Kansas City, with the undercurrent being that you’d better disrupt yourself before you are disrupted. The talk took a look at the future of infrastructure – energy, telecom, highways, roads, buildings, water, sewer – and the fact that ‘it’s not your grandfather’s infrastructure anymore.’ It’s becoming smart, and connected, and involves new materials, different skills, and bigger concepts.

One of the biggest issues is. that the structure you have in place – the skills you have in place, the method by which you collaborate, the manner in which you are organized, how you scale up your teams to tackle projects, the speed with which you pull your team together – all that needs to change. Your structure from yesterday won’t work tomorrow.

Here’s a clip where I’m telling that story.

In that context, you need to change everyone thing you do organizations need to reinvent their product line on a continuous basis because the future will change:

• the products you develop
• the services you deliver
• the methodologies you use
• the materials at the heart of it
• the skills that are required
• the speed with which you operate
• the speed at which you are impacted
• the competitors that you face
• the revenue that you generate
• the age group of those you were up against
• the collaboration you require

Everything you do is changing. If you don’t, well, it won’t go so well!