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Daily Inspiration: “Ponderous leadership, slow structure, committee inertia – relics of the past….barriers for your future!”
“Ponderous leadership, slow structure, committee inertia – relics of the past, and in our eventual post-pandemic economy, new significant barriers for your future!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
You know that organizations are starting to move into the next phase when they start approaching you for CEO-level leadership meetings to share some of your insight on ‘what makes world class innovators tick in this strange new world?’
That became the focus of a clip I filmed in my home broadcast studio late on Friday: “Revisit the Future”. It’s an overview of the key trends that have unfolded with organizational structure, speed and leadership as a result of the pandemic. The video clip is here, but I’ll make it into a separate blog post later today. (Nice studio set!)
The key issue that I’m focusing upon is this: in so many industries right across the board, organizations have had to learn to operate at a new speed that is unlike anything they’ve ever know before. They’ve had to reinvent faster, innovate at hyperspeed, smash through innovation barriers, turbocharge decision making. You’re seeing it in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation – everywhere!
Prior to the pandemic, many organizations brought me in for corporate leadership meetings for a keynote talk on the concept of ‘leadership agility,’ a culture that aligns to the speed of change by adopting new velocity-based management styles. The idea even became one of my key trends in my ’19 Trends for 2019′ series:
If the pandemic has done one thing to the concept of corporate agility and leadership, it’s accelerated the trend!
And so if you aren’t now operating at speed – you aren’t operating fast enough!
Daily Inspiration: “Someone is going to win at the future. Why shouldn’t it be you?”
“Someone is going to win at the future. Why shouldn’t it be you?” – Futurist Jim Carroll
The battle for the future is won by those who innovate, adapt, change, disrupt to a world which will be fundamentally different – because they recognize that the scope of the change that is coming is significantly profound.
I’m old enough to remember – LOL – when there were three TV channels that we received through rabbit ears into our home in Ontario – CBS, NBC and ABC. You had one or two shoes that were your favourites – Adam 12 and The Brady Bunch – and that became your world on Friday nights. My sister and I would devour the newly arrived TV guide each fall to see what new shows were on the horizon. The Partridge Family!
But I also remember reading as a 12 year old kid with a busy mind, the predictions of some people in Time Magazine that we would soon find ourselves in a million channel universe.
Take a look around your industry and ask yourself – how much will it change? Are you still thinking in a 3 channel universe when a million channel lineup is exploding all around you? Are you convinced that your hit show will still be a the top of the charts a few years from now? Have you asked yourself whether there will still even be hit-show charts?
Or are you already losing your audience, missing the signs that your world is already changing, and that your future is pretty much doomed unless youn adapt? Or are are too busy with your success to see it, and too arrogant to acknowledge it?
When Not to Launch A New Book -> Just Before a Global Pandemic!
A wonderful little book review of the book I released in January this year to …. stunning silence! It’s not a great time to release a book at the start of a pandemic!
It comes from CPA Canada, a print and online publication that has covered much of my insight before, which ranks it as the #1 business book of the summer!
“Every day, you have the opportunity to live up to your full potential,” says Jim Carroll. And, in this book, the FCPA and futurist shows how to do just that. By heading up each chapter with an inspirational life lesson, Carroll is able to distill the wisdom he has gained both on and off stage over his 25-year career as a keynote speaker.
Direct and down-to-earth, this uniquely formatted book provides a fresh perspective on how to negotiate a world in flux. And, in so doing, it should prove to be an enlightening read for anyone who wants to view the future in a positive—yet realistic—light.
If you want to think about something other than the pandemic and inspire yourself, you can grab a copy here.
Daily Inspiration: “Do something today that your tomorrow will thank you for!”
“Do something today that your tomorrow will thank you for!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
A phrase that I’d often use in the closing moments of my keynote on stage – a call to action, inspiration for taking the message from a a conference and hitting the ground running.
It’s actually a common phrase – and there are a lot of variations on this quote, the most common being “Do something today that your future self will thank you for!”
Commit this idea to heart each and every day – every moment matters, every step counts, every initiative is an investment. Why waste your time stressing about the fact that you yesterday is gone, when the only thing that matters today is the effort that you make to get to tomorrow? We can often become the architect of our failure by focusing too much on what we did, rather than what we might yet do.
I live this philosophy every single day – I’m spending a massive amount of my time building awesome virtual stage sets for which there is yet little demands, and yet as it arrives tomorrow, I’ll be one of the few who is ‘massively ready!’
Why bother? Because successful people always arrive in the future long before the future actually arrives, because they are willing to put in the effort despite uncertainty and lack of clarity.
Revisiting the Innovation Killers in the Era of Covid-19 : A Reality Check For Your New Future
Over 20 years ago, when I began an intense focus on researching what defined “innovation success,” I came up with my list of the ‘innovation killers’ – the excuses that people and organizations make on their way to the future. Hence, failing at innovation.
It’s a pretty comprehensive list, and became a key focus in many of my keynote presentations. You can find a full page all about them: phrases such as “it won’t work” “it’s a dumb idea” “it’s too risky.” Preview the list here.
A key observation?
Many organizations have failure embedded into their DNA.
They build up a culture of aggressive indecision, which guarantees a slow culture that provides them a boat-anchor in the era of acceleration.
Jim Carroll identifies, on stage, both the cultural killers and the practical strategies that must be pursued to break through!
And now, in 2020, we have a new list of innovation killers! I’m witnessing countless organizations worldwide, stuck in a state of aggressive indecision, unwilling to act until they see some sort of clarity with respect to Covid-19 and the global pandemic. They’re waiting for some sort of certain path forward – when there is none!
The result? They’re stuck! The impact? They’ll miss out on obvious opportunities. Watch this clip which I filmed in the home broadcast studio yesterday.
Think about it – how many people do you see actively deferring decisions on innovation? Or not pursuing obvious trends, or not moving forward with initiatives, because they are using excuses like this?
- we’ll wait until this ends! (It won’t any time soon)
- we don’t think we will be affected! (You are)
- we’re not quite certain what we should be doing! (You should)
- we’re not prepared to invest right now (if not now, when?)
- we’re just going to take some small stepsI
- we’re not really prepared to commit with all the uncertainty (but that’s your new reality)
- the science isn’t real! (It is)
- it will soon be over! (It won’t be)
- it’s impacting other people but not me! (It is)
- it’s way overblown! (It isn’t)
- I’ll just wait till things get back to normal! (It won’t)
- we can just come up with a plan so we can easily manage our way through it! (You can’t)
- we’ll inspire ourselves through some type of #strong hashtag! (Nice, but that won’t fix things)
- we don’t think it will take a lot of work once we get back to normal! (It will)
- we think it will be pretty easy to manage things once we get back to normal! (It won’t be)
- things are really not that bad! (They are)
- we haven’t really been impacted and the stock market is strong! (The market is not the economy or your industry)
- we have a young workforce so our employees won’t be affected that much! (They are)
- it hasn’t changed our industry too much! (It has)
- the emotional toll is not that big (It is – the mental health implications are astounding)
- our supply chain / business model / business structure isn’t impacted (it has been)
- our product or service hasn’t really been impacted (yes it has)
- we’ll set a date in stone for a return to normal – and things will become normal (the date you pick will continue to change)
You need to share this list: so here’s a shorter version of the video which gets to the heart of the matter:
In my own industry, this rush to uncertainty is playing out in a fascinating way: at first, people were planning ‘live’, face-to-face events, pushing them back to June 2020. Then, it became the fall. Now, they’re working towards the early winter of 2021. And yet, the virus is not under control, the pandemic rages, and the dates keep getting pushed back. I highly doubt 2021 will see many live events at all.
Fact: there is no clarity on ‘how’ we come out of this new state of affairs. There is no certain path forward – we are in uncharted territory.
That’s why I’m doubling down on my investment in virtual events – staging, production, content, sophistication of delivery. I figure my basement is my stage for quite some time to come, so I might as well become one of the world’s best at it. Check the video and you can see a bit of the results from my effort.
With that in mind, I even filmed this blog post!
The innovation killers referenced in this video? Here’s a playlist!
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