Rick Murray
Executive Vice-President
We’ve been going online for a generation now, and transfixed with social media for a decade. The phones in our pockets are more powerful than the desktop PCs we struggled to master just a few years back.
Bandwidth is plentiful, memory is all but free and processing speed is indeed doubling every 18 months as Gordon Moore once predicted. The family cloud is fast replacing the family tree.
As consumers, we have come to expect that whatever we want will be available to us wherever we are, whenever we want it and in whatever form we want it in at that moment. Google is our friend.
Why then – in the face of all this change… this wondrous, endless and inescapable wave of technological innovation – aren’t businesses doing absolutely everything in their power to keep up? Whether some combination of fear, uncertainty and doubt, that’s where we are.
Indeed, PwC’s most recent annual survey of CEOs found that 81% of global CEO’s know that their organizations are behind. I’d wager that number to be at least that high here in Canada. To quote Jack Welch, “if the world outside is changing faster than the world inside, the end is in sight.”
Business is at an inflection point. In math, it’s called an ogee. We can choose to invest in change and growth, or begin a descent into mass irrelevance. Disruption in this economy is not a matter of if, but when. The more analog you act, the more vulnerable you are.
Someone in Silicon Valley has already pitched venture capitalists on an idea that would threaten your business model with the headline – think of this as the Uber for this, or the Airbnb for that. They’re getting funded because the sharks smell blood. And these pesky little start-ups are coming after us with guns blazing.
Don’t be swayed by any argument to the contrary. Yes, it’s a whole lot more convenient to believe you’re immune, and that your teams and businesses are fully prepared to tackle what’s next. But you’re kidding yourself if you do.
Embrace the power and potential of our very digital life. Make 2015 the year you force transformational change across, down and outside your organizations
——— Rick Murray, former Managing Partner and Chief Digital Strategist at NATIONAL Public Relations, and now Managing Partner at SHIFT Communications, sister company of NATIONAL
