It’s a theme!
Insight 2020: Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration #16 – Focus on Continuous Reinvention
Product lifecycles have become shorter ; market longevity is not guaranteed; new competitors emerge faster; customers display less loyalty. These trends and many more mean that you don’t have any guarantee that the product or service that you are offering today will be in demand tomorrow – or even relevant.
That’s why you need to focus on the concept of continuous reinvention – a mindset that today’s line of products or services is not good enough – and must be refreshed and reinvented on a regular, continuous basis. Because as I will often point out on stage, Apple is in a situation in which 60% of it’s revenue comes from products which did not exist 5 years prior – and you are finding yourself in the same type of demanding future today!
How critical is this trend? It was in my list of 19 Trends for 2019 – ##10 – Continuous Reinvention – as one of the most important trends that leaders everywhere should be focused on going forward!
I actually cover the issue quite a bit on stage – here’s a short compilation clip from a few different conferences:
The issue is particularly important for manufacturing organizations – as I outline in this particular clip from the BigM Manufacturing Conference in Detroit.
The concept was first crystallized in a leadership series that I began running around 2010 – “What Do World Class Innovators Do that Others Don’t Do?”. This clip captures the essence of the story. Learn more -> https://worldclassinnovation.jimcarroll.com
The simple fact of the matter is this – standing still is no longer an option. Continual, rapid reinvention is one of the key aspects of your future success!
Daily Inspiration: “There’s always still time to try to reinvent yourself!”
“There’s always still time to try to reinvent yourself!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
No, I’m not really checking the time while I’m on stage – I’m actually in a bit of a section where I’m speaking to the power that devices like an Apple Watch have with people becoming more involved with their personal healthcare circumstances!
But I digress!
Reinvent – it’s never been a rule that you need to stick with what you have – in terms of your current capabilities, situation, skills, career path, education job or other aspects of your life. You can always reinvent any of those. And that word, “reinvent,” is #16 today in my video series, Insight 2020: Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration – as in, ‘Focus on Continual Reinvention’ Never stop!
The business concept that I explore involves the fact that today, companies must continually reinvent the products and services that they sell on an ongoing basis – give the post a read for background.
But the same holds true for people! Who said that we have to be stuck with what we have, rather than we could achieve? As soon as you start to delude yourself that you are stuck, you will be. Where is the rule that our status quo is a good enough quo for the reset of our lives? Change the status! Find a new quo! Where is the requirement that once we attained some particular responsibility that we also can’t take on some new ones?
Successful people get ahead particularly because they are never fully satisfied with where they are, always believing that they can achieve something more.
Pursue a path of continual, relentless, continual reinvention – it’s one of the secrets the longevity of success!
Insight 2020: Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration #15 – Look Forward, Not Back!
Most organizations have built a structure, culture and leadership style which involves looking back in time to judge what might come next – the thought process being that what happened yesterday will be the best guide to what tomorrow will bring. And so we design accounting and financial systems that use past performance as a guide for the future; insurance risk and actuarial assumptions that use yesterday’s risk factors as a guide to future risk; and agricultural systems that use old data to try to identify new trends.
Yet the impact of technology and accelerated change is such that we can increasingly look forward based upon real time data, particularly as connectivity comes to take hold. That’s the theme in today’s leadership opportunity – to align to the era of acceleration, look forward, not back!
Are there real opportunities here? Check this clip – I’m on stage speaking about what happens as the science fiction ideas of tomorrow suddenly become real today.
The opportunity for thinking in this manner is significant in many industries – perhaps none more-so than in the world of insurance. Here’s an older clip where I’m speaking to an insurance industry conference about the opportunity that what happens as technology comes to drive the pace of change and disruption within the industry:
Where are we today? Here’s a clip from a recent keynote at the National Safety Council on what is really happening in the life insurance industry as business models begin to shift:
Daily Inspiration: “Your best source for inspiration? From looking forward, not back!”
“Your best source for inspiration? From looking forward, not back!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
You can’t undo the past – you can only create a future. You can’t live a life in which you focus on yesterdays’s ‘what-if’s’ but instead, you need to think, “what’s next?”
As soon as you look back at what you could have done, and not on what you could still do, you end up with a fundamental realignment of your thinking – because you are now more focused on the mistakes that you made instead of the success that you might yet enjoy.
And that theme – “look forward” – is found in my Insight 2020: Leadership Insight for the Era of Acceleration series today.
#15 is all about how organizations have an opportunity to do new and innovative things by focusing more on what comes next rather than by peering back in time. The trend really has nothing to do with personal development which is often the theme of this daily post – but still involves a fundamental realignment of thinking. Take a look when you have a chance!
Because in essence one thing we know about the future is this – it’s out in front of you, not behind you!
Insight 2020: Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration #14 – Challenge Assumptions
Assumptions are the ideas that blind us to the reality that the future is bigger than we think! A belief that tomorrow will be much like today is one of the worst mistakes that a leader can make today – in the era acceleration, everything we know about what might come next is fundamentally challenged.
We are heading into a world of 24 hour farming rather than doing it only when the sun is up! A retail world in which most products come to us, rather than us having to go get them. The end of the era of oil and one of renewable, distributed energy and battery supremacy. A healthcare systems in which we Increasingly fix people before they become sick rather than afterwards. Construction processes based in factories, not job sites. We can assume one future and yet an entirely different future unfolds. That’s why you should challenge your assumptions!
The future is faster than you think – that’s been a mantra on stage that I’ve been using since 2008. And it is also far more different than you expect:
Consider, for example, what is happening in the world of energy – here’s a video clip from my trend series, The Era of Acceleration.
What do you do to challenge assumptions? Focus on killing your innovation killers!
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