The Fallacy of Risk..Betting Your Badge
The Fallacy of Risk...Betting Your Badge
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
- Mark Zuckerberg,
Chairman & CEO, Facebook, Inc.
Take a stroll through any Business Hall of Fame and the one constant you find is that it’s filled with people willing to take risks – and not just little “I think I’ll have a Caramel Macchiato instead of regular coffee” kind of risks. These are people who consistently take big risks – as in “huge” – and do so over and over again.
The business press is filled with stories of companies that crash by resisting change and failing to take important risks – or no risks at all – in an attempt to satisfy someone else’s idea of what this quarter’s projections should look like. Oddly, these sad bits of news often serve only to inspire caution and lead to a choice for a perceived “safer path” – which is the opposite of what’s really required.
Progress means change, and as futurists like Alvin Tofler and Ray Kurzweil have shown, technology has now reached a point where it moves far too quickly to allow for continued success by playing it safe. It’s not even a question of becoming the next Steve Jobs. No one creates something “insanely great” by traveling the “let’s see what the Board thinks first” path. A camel is a horse designed by committee.
Assuming risk and falling short might temporarily set your company back; not embracing it will surely end it. The British East India Company was once responsible for half the entire world’s trade and lasted well over three centuries. This was only possible in large part because those that ran it were not afraid of risk and because the pace of technological advance was slower and more manageable.
By contrast, business behemoth IBM took a risk in 1981 by introducing the 5150 desktop computer – six years after Apple and Wang– and quickly became the world leader in business computers for ten years. Yet, a little past that decade, rapid technological innovation combined with an entrenched, risk-averse corporate philosophy that resulted in a 1993 single-year, $8 billion dollar loss – the second largest in corporate history.
Moore’s Law states that computing power doubles every two years. But because of rapid movement to the cloud, Moore’s law is no longer a direct indicator of technological advancement. Neilsen’s Law is now the more relevant benchmark as bandwidth and speed of access to information and data on the Internet are now the gating factors to technological advancement. This means that the speed of connectivity now drives the efficacy of technology and the rate of advancement.
Redstone Technology is the next generation of technological risk and far outstrips the performance of any Layer 1 network architecture available today.
With a significantly lower CAPEX/OPEX and a greatly reduced time-of-deployment, the day you meet with me becomes a decisive point where you need to decide “Am I willing to bet my badge?”
Redstone’s Physical Layer Engine? is so innovative that your newest, most important career dilemma becomes “Am I willing to ignore strategically-critical, market-dominating technology?” And what will the reaction of your superiors be when they learn you let it slip away?
Are you willing to bet your badge?