Now showing items tagged trends expert

With the dramatic changes that have occurred across the globe in recent months in the midst of our modern crisis, many of our standing systems have had to rework their regular ways of doing business. As many of these adaptations are working quite well for the people and institutions that have embraced them, it is likely that our new ‘business as usual’ will look drastically different from what it did before.

Last week I posted a blog examining how a crisis provides a unique opportunity to recalibrate and rediscover the unchanging DNA that makes up your business. While this is true, it is also worth examining the possibilities and perils of significantly changing your business in the face of crisis. While such pivots can open up opportunities for maintaining momentum and tapping into a pressing market need, business leaders must tread carefully. 

In the last few weeks, it has seemed that every day has brought yet another piece of bad news, pushing the world deeper and deeper into crisis mode. With more and more job losses, confirmed cases of Covid-19 infection and uncertainties arising, it is difficult to see the opportunities being offered by a crisis like this.

It is undeniable that Coronavirus has violently disrupted the way we do normal life. The one unique gift it is giving us, however, is space. In the most literal sense, it is giving us physical space from each other and for many of us, from our regular offices, commutes and meeting places. More than that, it is giving us space to recalibrate.

We find ourselves this week amidst one of the most unprecedented challenges the world has seen: a pandemic, declared by the World Health Organisation as a global public health emergency. Had we told ourselves just two months ago at the start of the year, when we were all optimistically organising our 2020 plans and resolutions, that a surprise like this was on its way, we would not have believed it.

Decades ago, the prospect of talking to someone on the other side of the world was unimaginable. Doing business with them, regularly coordinating with them and bridging the geographic and linguistic distance between you and them was even more incomprehensible. Now it is the norm.

In the lead-up to Mother’s Day a few years ago, I teamed up with the engineering team from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, to take part in an experiment live on national television. In this experiment, my engineering colleagues and I would print an intricate necklace from scratch over the course of the morning show with the hosts periodically cutting back to us in the studio to check on our progress. The angle for the story was something along the lines of ‘Don’t buy your mother a gift this Mother’s Day, print her one instead!’

How would you respond if you were told at a job interview, ‘Tell me something that you have invented’? This is exactly what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos says to new employees, in his effort to build and maintain a culture of innovation across all facets of the business.

If you had told your grandparents that in the future the currency of the world, the power of big companies and the division of wealth would largely centre around the movement of an invisible object, they would never have believed you. And yet it is increasingly becoming the case with the unstoppable use of data in the modern world.

We have all heard the painful clichés at the business conferences and read them in the self-help books – ‘the glass is half-full’, ‘look for the silver lining’. The sentiment of optimism is not one we are unfamiliar with in our modern world of self-help. Despite this, 1 in 7 Australians will experience depression in their lifetime and 1 in 4 will experience anxiety. 1 in 7 young people experience a mental health condition in a year.[1] The popular sentiment of optimism has not seemed to translate into a happier or more fulfilled society.

‘Access is the new ownership.’[1]

With the recent dramatic growth of companies like Airbnb, Uber and Spotify, it is hard to overlook the common denominator linking multiple major industries. The concept of ownership seems to be aging into a thing of the past, as renting and borrowing become more legitimate solutions to everyday needs.