Yolynd Lobo*

Can we move ahead at the same pace as we did earlier? Will we be able to shatter myths and illusions and create new realities? Yolynd Lobo has some answers

A new millennium, a new century of time for exploration of ideas, to create miracles, to boldly go where no man has gone before... What a wonderful millennium of creation has gone by -- and to think that an officer at the United States Patent Office once remarked that there would’t be anything left to invent by the end of the century!

The best dossier on the same that I have seen so far is the Business Week online report on 100 Years of Innovation – an accumulation of the wealth of ideas that have been generated in the past century peppered with audio interviews with the geniuses themselves. Fantastic stuff!

But what about what lies ahead? Can we move ahead at the same pace as we did earlier? Will we be able to shatter myths and illusions and create new realities?

What is the environment of this new century? Various ideas on the same have been promulgated by revolutionary thinkers. My favourites are from Tom Peters' book, Circle of Innovation, and are listed below:

Distance is dead
"Carrying a call from London to New York costs virtually the same as carrying it from one house to the next. The death of distance...will probably be the single most important force shaping society in the first half of the next century."

-- The Economist

Information age is (still) in diapers
Nintendo, states The Management Review, gave us a Game Boy for $199 which has more computing power than the fast Cray supercomputer of only 25 years ago….the computer revolution is now more than 50 years old …but what’s coming makes what’s here look Neolithic.

-- Tom Peters

Value
Value customers, value employees, value design, value failures, value inconsistency, value service…

Nerd Nirvana
Richest men in the world today ~ Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Azim Premji … ~ BRAINWARE RULES !

Forget it
"The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget about old ideas."

-- John Maynard Keynes

Cutting vs growing
"You can’t shrink your way to greatness."

-- Arthur Martinez, chairman and CEO, Sears Roebuck

Incrementalism vs innovation
"You don’t leap a chasm in two bounds."

-- A Chinese proverb

Evolution vs revolution
"Wealth in the new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimisation; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known but by imperfectly seizing the unknown."

-- Kevin Kelly, 'New Rules for the New Economy', Wired

And most importantly, remember this
"Whatever made you successful in the past won't in the future"

-- Lew Platt, chairman and CEO, Hewlett Packard

SO GO OUT AND BE DIFFERENT!

*About the author
The author is an MBA from the University of Wales, UK, with specialisation in the management of innovation. Her thesis was on ''Intellectual Property Rights in the Age of the Internet". She welcomes your feedback on the ideas mooted here.

Email the author at yolynd.lobo@tatainfotech.com