photo credit: Patrick Hoesly
I read the below paragraphs from this excellent post today by Salesforce.com‘s CEO Marc Benioff, I couldn’t help but expand my horizons of thinking past his topic and apply it to so many more that are right in front of us. So, the question for you is, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to hang on to tradition or move with the cheese.
In fact, what is being asked of us is no longer to only move with the cheese, but to decide where the cheese is to go. We have progressed from “Who Moved My Cheese,” to “Where Am I Going To Put The Cheese?” We can’t sit on our laurels any more or we have a guarantee to be left completely behind.
As you read this, put in your company or your industry in the text and apply it.
As we try to keep pace with these changes to a new computing industry, we are left with only two choices: innovate or die. Microsoft like DEC before it, and IBM (IBM) before it, tried too long to hold on to its Windows model believing it was permanent in an industry of impermanence. But it didn’t work out that way. Google outsmarted Microsoft into the Internet, and it dominated the next Internet paradigm. Now Apple is the clear winner in the new mobile paradigm.
We are fully entrenched in the world of Cloud 2. Smart phones that run apps have replaced PCs. We are mobile. We touch, not click. We are social, not siloed. Our location is known, not anonymous. We know more about what our friends are doing than our own employees, and sometimes our own families. Facebook, Apple, and a new generation of technologies are defining our daily experiences. The old model looks older every day as it tries to hold on in a last gasp of updates based on stability instead of innovation.
The way we run our lives has forever changed. The employees we are hiring right out of school are appalled by the technology we use to run our companies. They are more productive at home than they are in the office. They call for a change that is difficult to hear in companies that rank seniority over insight. The new paradigm is amplified as entire industries like communications, music, and education are transformed forever.
