Forward Thinking

It is not enough to just innovate around a tried and true point of reference.  To survive and thrive you must be willing create a “new” tried and true point of reference, continuously, and in real time with the market.  I can remember when my team first introduced the asTech technology to the collision repair industry.  We were traveling to conferences doing demos for so called experts.  It was common to hear, “I don’t believe them.  It’s just smoke and mirrors”.   Most of those folks are not considered experts anymore because we moved the needle on what was possible.

 You can spend your whole career and never get a chance to make a difference in the market place.  What will folks say about you in 10 years?  Be the writer of this script, not the reader.

 The article below is example of accepting the status quo.  This is not the script I want to write for myself.

Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. By: Ziyad Jawabra

Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”.By: Ziyad Jawabra

During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly.

Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful.

They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival.

The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition.

It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated.

Conclusion:
1. The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.

1.     To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change, is like being discarded.

Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.