“Business Mantra for the Future … Think Fast. Act Faster!”

Back in February, I was the opening keynote speaker for 2014 Ameriquest National Symposium, speaking about trends related to transportation, infrastructure, fleet management, business model disruption — you name it!

Bridget Fediuk is the Marketing Manager for NationaLease, and is responsible for overseeing the marketing of NationaLease meetings and events, the NationaLease NEWS, Webinars, and various other projects.

She was at the conference, and wrote about her views over in the NationalLease blog.

Business Mantra for the Future … Think Fast. Act Faster,
by Bridget Fediuk

Successful companies in the future will be agile, flexible, and willing to embrace change, says futurist Jim Carroll.

Many speakers at the 2014 Symposium spoke about connectivity; how we’re all connected by technology and how those connections seem to grow faster and faster. Renowned futurist Jim Carroll was one of those speakers. He made it clear to those attending the Symposium that a company’s success now and in the future will be decided by its agility, flexibility, and willingness to embrace change. We all know that technology has been expanding at an incredible pace.

If you want to know how fast things are changing or will change, here are a few factoids from Carroll:

• 65% of pre-school children today will work in jobs or careers that do not yet exist
• ½ of what a student learns in the first year of college is obsolete by graduation
• Most digital cameras have a 3 – 6 month shelf life before they are obsolete
• 60% of Apple’s revenue this past year came from products that didn’t exist just four years ago

Carroll kept repeating the phrase that is the title of this posting, “The future belongs to those who are fast.” Many companies suffer from organizational sclerosis. They try to do things the way they’ve always done them, but we’re moving at such speed when it comes to innovation and invention that the old ways just don’t work. Businesses need to understand that fully half of today’s global population is under the age of 25; that most of them are globally wired and connected. These are your customers and your employees, and they’re used to nearly immediate gratification and acknowledgement. So if your business can’t adapt to fulfill their expectations; if you can’t embrace and implement changing technology, you are going to find difficulty achieving and maintaining success.

Carroll illustrated the pace of change by talking about the Jetsons, a cartoon show popular in the ‘80’s. Although the show was supposed to take place in 2062, he talked about some of the technology in that show that actually exists today. We may not have flying cars; however, tanning beds, video chat (think Skype), robot vacuums (think Roomba), and TeleViewer (think iPads) are items we no longer think of as futuristic. For the transportation professionals attending the meeting, Carroll stated that the typical truck cabin today contains more technology and computing power than a Cessna and that, by 2017, SIRI will be available for most new trucks.

So what is the secret to adapting to change; how do people and companies become world-class innovators.

According to Carroll, there are five key ways:

• Appreciate the unique time we live in and the rate of change that is occurring. Embrace it, don’t fear it.
• Think now of how much change will occur and pursue that change. Innovators don’t follow the rules, they rewrite them.
• Control the speed of innovation.
• See change and search for opportunity to capitalize on it.
• Ride the generational acceleration.

When it comes to your business and the future, Carroll suggests that you “think big, start small, and scale fast.”

The tortoise might have beaten the hare in the old fable, but in today’s world, slow and steady will not only lose the race; it will be lucky if it gets past the starting line.

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