I stumbled across Eddie Obeng from a Technology Entertainment Design (TED) recorded presentation posted on LinkedIn. I’m always looking for new business ideas and evaluating presentation styles. After all, it’s not just the idea, but the delivery that tends to make it stick.
I’ve never met Mr. Obeng and have no affiliation, but he made me think with the premise that thinking rationally in an exponentially changing world no longer works – unless you look into the future and evaluate the impact of your actions.
I’m always asked “What would you do?”, so following Eddie’s lead:
- Continue learning and know that you’ll generally learn much more from concepts outside of your industry. The approach of “Don’t tell me about technology. Just tell me how long.” died 20 years ago.
- If you’re a small business, don’t buy Microsoft Small Business Server. All of those integrated products moved to the cloud nearly 5 years ago. Save yourself the inordinate expense on planned obsolescent hardware and the time of learning archaic infrastructure software concepts from a decade ago.
- In the same vein, all of you mid-sized and large organizations should get out of the technology business by moving to the cloud and focus on your own business. The concept of talking about your servers and being able to touch them sounds like Smiguel from the Lord of the Rings. How many of your other business processes are still valid since 1937?
- If you were ever on it, get off the Apple bandwagon. Apple has no transparency and not even their own blog in the era of social media. There has been no new product type since 2007 (for a TECHNOLOGY company!) and only memories of a superior reputation to justify high price. What is the wisdom of following the RadioShack retail model of 1977?
- Forget about Google ranking or advertising. Cash is still king, but you’ll have a much more prosperous next 20 years if you provide digital content that answers the questions for your prospects and customers better and differently than the competition.