Year in Reflection
Dear fellow readers and bloggers, what an insane year 2011 has been. Ever year has highs and lows and highlights. But this year has been a bit different. In a course of a year, countries have ousted monarchs and leaders and social transparency is growing by leaps and bounds.
But 2011 has also been a year of great duress in Europe. The prospects of countries such as Greece collapsing has forced the EU to make very difficult decisions which will prove challenging for the EU in the years to come. UK’s decision to not play with the EU will have some potentially difficult consequences for the UK. Too new to tell but clearly there will be rifts between the EU nations and the UK. Potentially nothing new given that the UK was the only country to hold on to it’s currency. I have always found this very odd, so the recent veto last week was not too surprising.
Asia is growing leaps and bounds and it has been an utter joy seeing how far things can go in 12 months. Entrepreneurship and innovation growing to such great extent that unless you are in these countries to see it, you just won’t believe it! Thank you friends in Asia for your hospitality!
South America is refreshing in showing how countries can define their role in the global economy. Great progress.
All in all, 2011 has been a year of not spending corporate funds as nervousness trumped innovation risk. I feel for the many highly talented people looking for employment in 2011 and not succeeding. Not because of any fault of your own but frankly, corporations are not hiring period. And people who are obsolete and ineffective are not leaving. A total stalemate in 2011. 2012 will be different as transparency and democratization will re-define corporate plans.
In the US on the other hand, I have been dismayed as to how much of our focus has been on IPO’s! We have been pouring tons of money in the social media bubble (social media, gaming, social interaction…), and then celebrating our success or avoiding our failure in the process. We need to focus more of our attention on innovation and revitalizing our large corporations to become more innovative than we do hyping how companies with few hundred million in revenue are suddenly worth tens of billions of dollars! Didn’t we learn from the internet bubble?!
ProVoke is allowing us to open up the conversation of the necessity of disruption to innovate, the ecosystem of disruption and the ensuing democratization of what I call ‘everything’… Democratization of IT, Democratization of leadership and the fantastic Global Democratization of Innovation!
I thank the many of you who received ProVoke with open arms and those of you who are becoming more open to the concept of ‘Democratization’ as a whole. 2012 is going to be the year to peel away the layers and make the democratization revolution become more real and more impactful! I can not wait for us to rock and roll in 2012! Would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think?
Where are the shareholders? Ben Graham wrote that the shareholders should at least be able to tell when their company has been unsuccessful and demand more from management than platitudes. Shareholders are good at picking the stock but not owning the stock. This “daddy knows best” attitude of we can invest your money better than you shows up in the scanty dividend payments.
Every year shareholders get to vote yea or nea. Maybe 2012 can be different
There is hope.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/american-competitiveness-technology-innovations/2012/02/14/gIQArdvqDR_blog.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/best-innovation-moments-of-2011/2011/12/12/gIQAfR0YrO_gallery.html#photo=14
Too often, innovation is judged by buzzwords and not true calculated risk taking with vision. Many will publicize their commitment to innovation by saying things like, “like us on our Facebook page”, “follow us on twitter”, or “check out our blog”, when in fact the emperor still has no clothes.
We will see if 2012 opens up to disruption or continue down the same tired road of failure avoidance, which in itself is failure. Creating a facade of innovation may be simple, but actual innovation, while difficult, will add meaning to your product line.
Let’s hope that the hamster wheel will stop this year…
http://www.innovationfatigue.com/2009/05/%E2%80%9Cfake-innovation%E2%80%9D-lessons-from-fake-work/
Many companies react with fear, much as individuals, to a unsure landscape. It goes against instincts to push forward when failure is all around you. In the end the market will decide which path is the best.
I’ve always wondered if the social media bubble will give us the same thing the Internet bubble did in the late 90s and early 2000s. So much money, time and effort was poured into, what essentially turned out to be things and companies that did not actually produce or accomplish anything. With so many social media sites appearing left and right, much of which without any focus, I’d be curious to see what comes out of this.
With all the attention here being focused on the innovation and democratization of business, I am a little surprised that no political discussion has popped up. So I guess I will go ahead and burst that bubble.
Perhaps the question in this environment should also include: Where is the innovation in politics? Some may claim that with the advent of the Tea Party and the rise of Libertarianism that there is disruption occurring. However, I would like to gloss over party issues and focus on the driving factors of campaigns themselves. Where is the outcry for campaign finance? Why does so little disruption occur in this area? Companies blatantly dump money into various political causes that essentially make government paid employees for that companies cause. Are we to say that the government is run by corporations rather than the public vote? With all this talk of democracy, perhaps some of the disruptive and innovation focus should be on the democracy itself.
20 mile march! Many companies have been losing very talented people due to layoffs and attrition since 2007. They’ve also significantly reduced spending in R&D in attempts to maintain the same profit margins for the short term. The unfortunate part about this is that when the times get better they’re going to be so far the innovative curve they won’t be able to keep up with the companies that have continuously invested in innovative technology.
I couldn’t understand how come companies with 100’s of million $$ revenues are valued at 100’s of billion $$s. Seems like as human we make the same mistakes again and again, I guess we feel like we learned from past mistakes and corrective actions are inplace, but we forget about mistakes, workaround the corrective actions and make same mistake in innovative way. I agree there was lot of financial chaos around the Europe alot compared to rest of the world. Seems to me like still Europe is not stable. let’s see how the world makes progress in 2012.