This is one of those rants occasionally I feel a real need to express. Forgive me, normal service will be resumed after this ‘break’.
Coffee in hand, soapbox set up, let me begin.
Today, we are all struggling to transform ourselves in our businesses, even just within ourselves, to adjust to the current economic difficulties we all seem presently to be facing.
We are not only confronted with the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to just simply ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it.
We have the pressures of global competitiveness and calls that constantly are urging us to never stand still because others aren’t.
We often become overwhelmed by the merging, acquiring, and rethinking that is going on constantly around us, the changes in processes, new alliances and the sudden emergence of a ‘new kid on the block’ who sees a weakness and rapidly fills that gap overnight.
Oh yes, and we still are not very good at being more innovative!
Lots more hotfixes or a more radical redesign?
These pressures compel us to focus on a host of ‘quick fixes’ but what we are failing to recognize is where all these changes fit within our long term plans.
Just finding the opportunity to take out precious ‘thinking’ time to synthesise and reorganize ourselves seems impossible, we are just getting caught up in the flotsam of life, just bobbing along.
We need to not only re-imagine but we need actually breakthroughs in our thinking, some of that bunker-busting stuff to give us all a ‘concentrated’ focus on what is important to our business, to our lives and what is important to us as individuals.
Where do we grow, where do we go and how do we achieve this? We can’t continue down towards the rapids that lie ahead of us, just around the next ‘economic crisis’ corner.
Where innovation and invention need to combine
Innovation has an important part to play in this future, far more than in the past. We must try to reflect on the effect of too much cost-cutting that is going on at the very fabric of our lives, the communities we live in.
Nothing is replacing it, we just seem intent on knocking down what we have presently got and not offering alternative solutions, accepting more ‘self-sufficiency’.
This will eventually have the very opposite effect of destroying more than creating, it will extract more out of it than we will be able to replace.
Today the rush to cut budgets, and to have ‘fiscal consolidation will not give a more flexible environment, actually, it will be the very opposite. The expediency of the measures to slash and burn is not healthy.
Our world has been turned upside down on us, but we must strike the balance between cutting back and building up.
Who is going to allow us the necessary time for rebalancing this mood for cost-cutting and provide the leadership and eventually the stimulus for the necessary innovative thinking, so as to enable us to think about how we can rebuild, regroup? We need to seek out new opportunities, we need growth but I think it needs to be from a very different type of economic model.
Politicians and mainstream economists all advocate a return to ‘normal’, which I certainly feel is doomed as ‘normal’ can’t be based on the past economic approaches or ways we have organized ourselves.
The task ahead is to do the opposite of what we used to do: we do need to save resources, improve the environment, create jobs, shift to another model for consumption, and restore confidence in the economic system – all at the same time.
Use innovation for resource-saving.
Now the time has come for resource-saving innovation. to extend what we already have. We need a clear political shift to the new courses that will gear us to do that. Instead of market economy pricing favouring individuals and corporations we have to shift to ones based more on society.
As painful as it is for some, we need to increase the premium on those short-sighted people who are still insisting and managing our economies and businesses for the short-term extracting costs.
They simply cannot ignore the need to invest, build and promote more onto the longer-term potential for containing consumption as we know it today, and finding new ways of adding different lasting value. We need to invest in the future, we just can’t keep cutting and reducing.
We do need to shift our thinking onto a new type of consumption model; we must practice a more frugal type of innovation that still offers plenty of opportunities if we can break the ‘throw away’ attitudes of society and business design.
We need to go back to repairing not just throwing stuff away. To do this the redundancy is deliberately built to our products so one part that always seems to break before others and you can’t obtain a replacement, or you find it far more expensive to have repaired than replacing it has to be designed out from the existing product design.
Current material consumption actually is not fulfilling
Did you know that the current material consumption actually is not as fulfilling as we expected, according to work that has been undertaken by researchers, psychologists, and anthropologists?
They conclude that less materialistic consumption gives a better and longer-lasting feeling of ‘happiness’ than material consumption.
They also are suggesting that we have hard-wired into us, that basically human beings still are inclined to want to work together, help each other, and do something for others and with others.
So the good news is that this nagging fear I’ve had that we are just shifting to islands of individuals just connected through our computers remotely seems like we really don’t want that, I do hope so.
If we don’t think society really wants this then it can’t afford these billions of islands of individuals, it needs to find new ways to deepen the emerging global connecting model that works more for society’s good, than the individual as it seems at present.
We lose far too much of that deeper happiness factor it might seem, we become increasingly disconnected, inward and remote and that surely is not healthy for us as human beings that thrive on ‘human’ interactions.
Interestingly this is where the emergence of newly connected communities gets exciting. What we have to do, is redesign these dispersed ‘connected’ societies into better economic blocks and find different ways to work together that will give us back a new economic value plus lasting pleasure, satisfaction and identification.
We need to reverse where we are seemingly heading and that requires some radical redesign of how we want to collaborate for economic value within these new communities.
Collecting money and taxes becomes a growing problem
I’m just not sure where it leaves national boundaries or who will pay for the entire infrastructure if there is no attribution and way to make sure this happens.
Presently we learnt from a recent report that the major banks and the financial global elite, as well as a number of developing nations, are now confirmed to have as much as $20 plus trillion in hidden assets stashed away in offshore accounts that are subject to little or no taxation.
As a result, around $280 billion is estimated to be lost in tax revenues.
In other words, the multi-trillion-dollar banks and wealthy elites are combining in novel ways for avoiding any taxation, while forcing the vast majority of tax paying citizens to foot their tax avoidance bill.
Amazingly, the $20-odd trillion stashed away it is suggested represents the overall GDP of the United States and Japan combined. The “scale” of the numbers is staggering and are these huge sums actually being employed for different innovations or just accumulating more from the present model of consumptive. So much offshore wealth and financial mischief is ‘killing us’ all off.
I also wrote a blog on this destructive creation http://paul4innovating.com/2012/03/01/the-innovating-era-creative-destruction-or-destructive-creation/ and along with this latest report on hidden assets that is actually putting some hard numbers on this tax avoidance just adds more to this growing concern of a really messed up world that is losing its moral compass.
The time has come to restructure and rebalance production, consumption, and corporate governance and how they work together, in short in a more connected global world is the overwhelming need to invent a new economic model.
So where does innovation fit in any new model?
It sounds actually a little bit of “more of the same but better” as our starting point. We understand that innovation grows our businesses, it can certainly grow our equity, and it shows it does grow our economies.
It is one of the best platforms around that can provide you greater economic returns (growth, utilization, new activity) if you set about doing this thoughtfully and right.
Innovation should always replace something we have with something better (often today that is not the case) but in different ways than encouraging us to not throw away what we have but to utilize it in better, lasting ways. We can begin to change that right away with some ‘groundswell of pushback if we wanted to.
Of course, the complexity we are facing today does need far greater recognition of its ‘multiple’ parts that must somehow fit together in new innovative and novel ways. We still need to offer and entice people to change their existing ways and habits.
We need to find better models that will give real new returns that provide more lasting value and identification than what is the present as offered.
Innovation has to be central to our future, it needs a more systematic and integrated approach that has a ‘heart’ that beats on a continuous repeating basis. One that scales accordingly to the challenges we are facing and these are growing in challenges, not declining at present.
It needs a ‘fitness’ that knows where it has to focus and why so you can meet these constant challenges in a flexible, coordinated, well-balanced way with speed and combined strength…..the art of building increasing agility into your innovative thinking and approaches.
We all need to work on the answers to fixing our current problems; otherwise, we face a protracted, maybe bleak future. We certainly do have to turn everything upside down.
Innovation and invention need to combine in new powerful ways and we need to search for different business and economic models that put together human ingenuity for changing the consumptive model and perhaps put to use some of the trillions stashed away needing to be put to better use than just sitting in offshore funds.
I wish I had some decent answers but my first need was to write about my increasing concerns here. I hope this ‘rant’ prompts your thinking to stop and think a little more.
There are answers; we just need to find them faster than you think, I feel. There are enough burning platforms already around us.
Well let me get off my soapbox, my coffee is cold and I need to warm it up, certainly, I’m not going to throw it away!
