Profiting From the Speed of Change

In the past, business success was all about size: The large eat the small. Today, business success is all about speed: The fast eat the slow.

But when change occurs, what do most organizations tend to do? They hunker down and protect the status quo. After all, it’s human nature to protect and defend. We don’t like change because change is disruptive to our way of doing things and it usually represents a lot of additional work.

But rapid change—or rather, transformation—is already occurring, which means you need to get over it. Rapid technology advances including smart phones, tablets, social media, cloud based services and many more, have ushered in a new way of doing business.

Companies that were small like Facebook, Instagram, Groupon, and Uber have shown how it’s possible to grow amazingly fast and create billions of dollars in revenue in a short amount of time. They’ve sure trumped traditional large companies, like the Blockbusters and the Kodaks of the world, in a very short amount of time.

Since many companies have been around for a while, it’s time everyone adopt the fast-beat-the-slow mentality. Instead of protect and defend, organizations of all sizes need to embrace and extend. In other words, it’s time to embrace the new reality and extend your reach by creating new business models that are increasingly relevant.

Fortunately, something as simple as the smart phone enables you to do precisely that.

Remember, a smart phone is different from a dumb phone in that it has access to the Internet. And once you have Internet access, you have video, audio, radio, apps, and a host of things to extend your reach.

This is important, because over the next five years, we’ll have an additional five billion people from Africa, China, Indonesia, and India, using the Internet via their smart phone, all in regions that have little or no infrastructure in the present. In other words, thanks to a rapidly deployed wireless network and smart phones, economies in those areas will grow quickly because billions of people will have access to radio, television, communication, Internet, texting, GPS, and more, all for the first time. Think of it this way, five billion new consumers will be entering the lower middle class, all with a mobile computer and growing purchasing power. That’s game-changing! Are you ready for that? Most business people don’t realize the disruptive opportunity this represents.

Soon, anybody—including you—will be able to sell to everybody, anywhere. That’s huge…and it’s coming fast. It’s predictable and it’s completely visible. The question is, do you see it? If so, are you ready to capitalize on it?

?2014 Burrus Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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DANIEL BURRUS is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and innovation experts, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books including The New York Times best seller Flash Foresight.