CLEAR AND PRESENT OPPORTUNITY
Monday, Apr. 6, 2020
Returning to normal seems a vast mental stretch.
We can run, but we cannot hide.
No virus-defeating vaccine or drug yet found. For now, it must be slowed, blunted, and endured; or not. If it was more ‘physical, visibly tangible,’ we might find it less scary.
Foes we can frame, name, blame, shame, tame, and fight – ones we can see, strike, or blow-up feels more real – in video games, war movies, and ‘real war.’
We have a clear and present danger.
AND, we have an incredible opportunity, one we should not be wasting.
Some things will be the same, many will be different – and products, services, and ideas that catch fire during this pandemic will change the world as we know it.
How we do business, work, play, and mitigate risk will vary widely. One could argue that changes happen all the time, because we live in a modern culture with a voracious appetite for change, for what is new, for what is tech.
While that may be true, I think we behave the way we do through a lens that sees: newer, simpler, cheaper, bigger, better.
We always do.
But we’ll be adding a word to that list: safer
It seems our future is in the hands of politicians spinning part-truths about what has happened while hiding ‘what they knew, and when they knew it’ behind a curtain. Our future is in the hands of a logistics tug-o-war between supply-chain, front-line human resource capacity in healthcare delivery, and evolving science of treating a new enemy called COVID-19.
The more I read and listen, my understanding of COVID-19 grows, as I hope the body of knowledge improves and expands for everyone.
Have we bent the curve?
Have we learned to cope?
We are mostly compliant citizens, that’s good.
But we need to be breakthrough, break-out, and break things in terms of ‘how we do business.’
If something isn’t working, break it – or stop it.
If something might work, now is the time to try.
If something is way outside the box, maybe it’s not as far outside as you might think.
How long ago was it that Skype (bought by Microsoft in 2011 for US$8.5 billion) and Zoom (went public April 2019 – valuation in Sept/2019 US$500.0 million, market cap Mar/2020 US$29.7 billion) were novelties?
Today’s idea or new way of doing something might appear to have no value. Not yet. Try it. Try again, it will likely get better every time.
It might not be the next biggest new thing – but nothing gets that big overnight; let’s start close to home with something that can work for any home, anywhere, because the whole world has the same collective problems. This means a solution to any issue we need solved might have pervasive applications. While scientists are testing drugs, first responders are saving lives, and the rest of us are ‘available to work,’ let’s all get to work.
We cannot see the clear and present danger, but we are learning to understand it.
The more important question we should be asking: can we see the clear and present opportunity?
