A couple of days ago I stumbled upon one of my older records, John Butler Trio’s Grand National, with the incredible folk tune “Better Than”. The lyrics basically claim that the “the grass is always greener on the other side” mentality is in the human gene pool. This may not be very new or even insightful knowledge but it provoked and reorganized some thoughts I have been having for some time.
Even though sometimes forgotten businesses and organization are fundamentally a group of human, so this mantra often goes for business too, and despite how left-wing anti-capitalistic it may seem (especially in this day of age) it might bring about a lesson to learn. From clients to just about over other business, and even in the public sector, I hear stories about the level of knowledge they wish the organization beheld. “If we just had the competence internally…” or “If only someone in the staff was a PhD in electronic engineering our products functionality would raise by…”
This might seem like a pretty obvious response, but nonetheless: “Stop focusing on what you can’t have and start focus on what you have”, and might I add: “but have yet to activate”.
For four decade Moore’s law stating that the number of transistors that could be placed on a microchip would double every other year, have proven to be pretty accurate and even though the IT development’s growth is predicted to slow down a little (double every 3 years by the end of 2013) it is still a pretty significant growth. A recent study from Erik Brynjolfsson & Adam Saunders focus on the fact that business all over the world has yet to exploid the full potential of existing technologies. Even more they conclude that “…if all technological progress ere to stop tomorrow, business could create decades’ worth of IT-enabled organizational innovation using only today’s technologies.”
My question to you is whether your organization before making a wishful thinking about hiring the next Zuckerberg, has set out to exploit the existing technologies and how they may improve your business?
With the enormous amount of technologies being developed everyday, are you sure that you have seen and activated all the easy pickings already existing in the market?
A great example would is that only a handful of Danish companies have brought to life, the valuable data an organization are producing everyday and transformed them into operational strategic tools. (More on the subject here)
The data is yours and you are producing them everyday, why not start using them? Mick Jagger got it halfway right: “You can’t always get what you want… but you can start using what you have”
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