“Change Something”
by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist
IBM, American automakers, Kodak and Polaroid. These are just some of the ever-present reminders that markets change, consumers change, the production environment changes, the world changes.
IBM executives were adamant that individual people would never want to own and operate their own computer. The “big three” American automakers insisted people would always want big, expensive cars. The Kodak and Polaroid camera empires were entrenched in systems that required film and paper.
One potential lesson to be learned from these and many other examples is that philosophies that were always “right” can become “wrong”, simply because the world slid out from underneath that production mantra.
In football, the quarterback throws the pass to where the already-sprinting receiver is GOING to be, not where he is right now. Even more impressive, a sprinting hockey player passes the puck to where another sprinting player will be a half second from now. The very survival of your business rests on this next choice of philosophies: either the world will not change substantially within the next 20-30 years, or it will.
Unfortunately, anticipating change is not easy, and the cost of the wrong direction may be devastating. That may be why many businesses simply allow change to affect them, paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong decision, they make no decision. And to go back to the football analogy, a successful quarterback will average 60-65% completion for a career—even the greatest miss a third of the time.
For those of us with gray around the temples, we could ride out the existing production environment and leave the rubble to those that come after us. But the sad waste in that approach and mindset is that the 40-somethings and 50-somethings of today are the very people with the experience and hind sight to best anticipate what will change and what will come after.
Change is coming, and it is here. The only question left is how will we respond?