Reflections

Every Christmas when I was a kid, my grandparents would make a big deal about Santa Claus. I had to leave a few carrots for the reindeer a glass of milk and a mince pie for Santa. We would reflect on the year and often this would not be as positive as we would like. In all honesty I was a troubled child, a bit of a loner, few friends, so had to dream of things I wanted to do. As a poor family we didn’t have much so often this fuelled the fires to dream bigger.

Some people think it is corny, but I like this tradition. I believe it was those dreams as a child that pushed me to strive for more, never being content with the status quo. These days, at the end of each year, I still enjoy taking stock of my work and personal life. What was I excited about? What could I have done better? What do I dream about doing next…

I thought I would share a few of these thoughts as 2018 concludes.

One thing that occurs to me is that the questions I am asking myself at age 35 (for the seventeenth anniversary - if you know me well enough that joke is getting pretty old now) are very different from the ones I would have asked when I was in my 20s.

Back then, an end-of-year assessment would amount to just one question: What is my next dream car?

Today of course I still assess the quality of my work. But I also ask myself a whole other set of questions about my life. Did I devote enough time to my family? Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones? These would have been laughable to me when I was 25, but as I get older, they are much much more meaningful.

Getting married and having two beautiful children has helped broaden my thinking on this point. Having family and pets that give unconditional love is a privilege, “Do the people you care about love you back unconditionally?” I think that is about as good a metric as you will find.

I think the world is slowly going through a major transition to a broader understanding of well-being. Most of us have been focused on living longer, stepping up the corporate ladder. As a result, the industrial machine has gone into overdrive...

We still need a lot of innovation to solve problems, but we are also going to be focusing more on improving the quality of life the environment and the rest of humanity. I think this will be the thrust of many big breakthroughs of the future.

As I look back on the year, I am also thinking about the specific areas I work on. Some of this is done through agents and consulting partners providing support and collaboration with our clients. What connects it all is my belief that innovation can bring success to all of our endeavours.

A lot of people underestimate just how much innovation will make life better. I have started a new ‘Explained’ series of articles about emerging technologies and innovation that can broaden our knowledge in these areas and hopefully enable them to be used and implemented.

The next in this series will be SAP AMS Explained but until that is released here are some links to previously posted works in this series.

• SAP IAM Explained
• SAP C4HANA Explained

Thank you.

My name is Mike Davis and I have been managing and supporting transformational change within major corporates for over 20 years. I am a keen contributor to the digital agenda and would be very interested in supporting and advising on successfully delivering business transformation change programs. Feel free to review my LinkedIn profile and should you wish to have a brief confidential discussion, a project or program review or engagement for a bid or program delivery please do not hesitate in contacting me.