Thank you for a valuable lesson to the tech community, mister president-elect
For decades I've been on the side of disruptors, attacking the establishment with a new value system, fresh ideas, better tools, and a growing tribe of self proclaimed "barbarians at the gate" looking to seize power and resources from the hands of the incumbents.
Few saw us coming. To them digital was unplanned, unexpected, instantaneous. To us inside the machine, it took years and years of underground labour until we started to see daylight.
Today we are the ones who were disrupted. We are the ones who didn't see the new value system emerge. We are the ones who didn't take those ideas and barbarians seriously. We are the ones who got outplayed by someone who turned our tools and our ethos against ourselves. We are the ones who have - had? - the money and the power in our hands.
Trump has gifted us with something extremely valuable by giving us the possibility to see how someone on the other side of that fence felt. But perhaps he has done something else, which is to put us back in the barbarians' shoes at a time we were becoming comfortable and complacent.
That could be the best possible news for our community, because this is the position that seems to unleash the most creativity and hard work from us.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.
"Security Use Case Designer at KBC Global Services | Crafting Detection Rules | Passionate About Cyber Defense"
8 年It is not a revolution, it's a massacre. You can put it any way you want this is the end result and there is no stopping it. Technology is everywhere. There is no stopping this in a global world. If you don't do it your neighbor will. It is evolution in it's prime. You adopt or you die.
UBS Internal Management Consultant | Upskilling organizations and people in digital time
8 年We shall see in a couple of weeks, months and years, who is losing what exactly, but what have we learned from this? Let's be more specific. Did we learn that it is not at which speed we run that counts, no matter how legitimate disruption is, but how many followers we have and how many people we disconnect from while running the accelerated race of Globalization & Technology? 4th industrial revolution might be a revolution. But revolution need people. Bad luck this time, the people followed another route. This is the true story of Donald Trump: he gained followers within the millions who could not follow that race. He's a marketing guy and he's clever enough to use the tools he has at his disposal these days, but he did not win because of Twitter or Facebook. He won because of the divide between those who benefit from progress and those who don't. He won because there was someone reachable to listen. The ironic thing is that Globalization and Technology provided both the means and the reasons to be reachable and open to his speech. This is not a reason to stop Globalization and Technology (who could?), but it is a reason to reflect on how to enable lasting progress and change, not just provoke it. How to make people embrace it, not react against it? Sometimes it simply means taking our time so we do not loose anyone behind. Taking time to get used to, taking time to listen, explain, inform, educate, support, help and learn. In other words: making change sustainable. Change is like an elastic spiral: if you force too much or too fast, you break it, you stay with the smallest part in your hand (ouch, can you feel how it hurts?) , and the rest moves backward, sometimes even at your starting point, sometimes even beyond... not too far beyond hopefully this time. Looking back at great depressions and battle fields, their root causes, always the same, their consequences, always the same as well, I wonder whether we really learn. One step further, two steps behind, seems to be a dance we like. We shall see whether we learn anything this time.