By Rob Rodin
At the end of each “zoom” day in front of my computer, I have been going through some old files and my archives from the past.
I came across this commentary I wrote in 1998 [over 20 years ago] which later became the introduction to my book called: “Free, Perfect and Now” [published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster].
I sent it to a few long time friends, and business colleagues, who commented that surprisingly [after 20+ years] so many of the thoughts still have contemporary relevance.
I thought it would be fun to share this narrative from 1999.
RR [04-30-2020]
“Picture yourself for a moment, sitting at a desk, flipping through the latest issue of your industry trade paper. What would be the headline that would make your blood run cold? How about a report that a new age, well funded, contemporary, tech enabled powerhouse was about to enter your industry? Or that your biggest competitor was now open for business around the clock? What if some upstart .com IPO with a multibillion-dollar market cap were targeting your customers, promising new e-commerce capabilities and lower costs? Or a newly merged communications giant had found a way to marry its infrastructure with your interface and content?
No wonder so many managers today are so apprehensive about the future. It is too easy to imagine the worst — and too common to find that reality exceeds it. We live in an age of anxiety; no matter what business we’re in, where “Only the Paranoid Survive”, as Andy Grove so famously put it. There are no safe havens anymore, no protected markets or regions. There is no way to predict exactly from where the next competitive threat will come, only that it will come. Soon.
When I was finishing the hardcover edition of my book, I worried that some of what I’d written might seem too “out there” to mainstream managers. Terms like 24/7, bandwidth, and convergence were considered arcane. People were still debating if, how, and how soon network technology would change the way business worked. Inside my own industry I’d been labeled “Captain Internet,” [see published photo]…..
……dismissed as an alarmist for my insistence that companies would either have to make radical changes or risk competitive obsolescence.
Today [1999] — with Internet usage projected to grow more than one thousand times over the next five years; with IPOs exploding and venture funding pouring into virtually every vertical market; with thousands upon thousands of new companies launching new ideas, technologies, and organizational models around the world; with new alliances and new competitors with new solutions for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management — the debate is over. Everything is being transformed. Now. Totally. The question today instead is how soon the distinction between e-business and conventional commerce will disappear completely.
I didn’t write Free, Perfect, and Now to offer a glimpse into a crystal ball, however. I wrote it to help leaders at all organizational levels prepare for a future that remains turbulent and unpredictable. Told in the context of a real company in a real world, it is about understanding the vector and velocity of change, recognizing the larger trends in the marketplace, and discovering how to ride them, individually and as part of a team. It explores how to break down barriers and build connections, creating organic structures to help people and technology work together dynamically, aligned with the voice of the customer and the forces of marketplace change. Those issues remain as critical today as when I first started writing.
The job of a leader is to be ahead of the curve, to look beyond conventional expectations and outside individual experience. Curiosity is the best driver, knowledge the most valuable capital. We are accountable to the future, not just one part of the puzzle, responsible for our own competitiveness in a continually shifting context. Nothing can, or should, get rid of the anxiety that pressure produces. But that anxiety, if harnessed, can ignite an exhilarating journey of discovery, learning, and growth.
[The year 1999 brought change for Marshall Industries as well. We’ve been profiled in a Harvard Business School case study and dissected in MIT classrooms. We were named the number-one business-to-business Web site in the world for two consecutive years by Advertising Age magazine, the number-one most comprehensive business-to-business site by Business 2.0 magazine, and the number-one information-technology innovator by Information Week magazine.]
The future is today — not the next five years, but the next five minutes. Your customers will keep demanding more, cheaper, faster, better, pushing you toward the impossible competitive ideal: free, perfect, and now.
Will you invent tomorrow’s marketplace, or will you become its victim?”