3 minute read
THE FUTURE IS DIGITAL
Except for Jeff Bezos and perhaps a few lucky others, when the dust settles, and the virus is in retreat, I doubt many entrepreneurs will look back fondly on 2020.
I expect many of us will emerge a little bruised, surveying the wreckage of a pre-pandemic world that no longer exists, our businesses more fragile, possibly in debt, and with our people traumatised by what just happened.
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Some of us will insist “things will soon go back to the way they were”.
They won’t.
The last decade or so has been tumultuous for entrepreneurs in the UK. First came unprecedented disruption caused by the 2008 financial crash. Then, after the Brexit vote in 2016, we had to deal with four years of uncertainty about the disruptive impacts of economic, political and regulatory change caused by the UK’s departure from the European Union.
Throughout the decade leading up to the pandemic, businesses were also dealing with the most disruptive technological revolution in human history.
The confluence of cloud computing, big data, AI, and the Internet of Things - and now the roll-out of 5G - was, and still is, driving an accelerating wave of societal change that will ultimately impact every business, without exception. As we look forward into 2021, the pandemic has layered a seismic, global disruption event on top of that wave of technological disruption, creating an extinction-level event for businesses that fail or refuse to adapt.
But we entrepreneurs are resilient creatures.
We won’t sit back and refuse or fail to adapt. We’ll be in the vanguard as our businesses lead the way out of the pandemic. We’ll react quickly to the new world we find ourselves in, and we’ll adapt because that’s the entrepreneur’s superpower - resilience and adaptability are the very things we do!
And as we move forward into 2021 - vaccines in our arms - entrepreneurs everywhere will have new and exciting opportunities to embrace technology’s disruptive impacts and reinvent how we run our businesses for a post-Covid world.
Some of us will need to fundamentally rethink how we create value for our customers and reimagine how we capture some of that value with innovative business and operating models that utilise technology in entirely different ways.
We’ll examine every aspect of our businesses as we look for new ways to improve our customer experience and capitalise on technology’s potential to accelerate growth and enhance productivity and profitability.
We’ll restructure our businesses to break down the traditional organisational hierarchies, operational silos and inflexible management models that stifle creativity, slow down decision making, kill innovation and disenfranchise our brightest team members. Our willingness to give up a degree of control and delegate decision-making to agile teams will become pivotal in this endeavour - as will our talent for creating and leading an authentic and nurturing culture in which mentoring and learning from failure replace outdated performance management methods.
2021 might take a few months to get going, but it will be a better year. When we, the pandemic entrepreneurs reflect on our careers, I suspect we’ll look at 2021 as the year when entrepreneurs, and the people we work with, faced the worst disruption society has ever seen outside of a global conflict and won!
By Nick Salloway, Qrious
