Read a newspaper article, watch news on TV or even receive a tweet on your phone and you are likely to be faced with some dreadful image of the current economic conditions. The housing bubble has exploded and dragged us into a hole that many still consider to be too wide and deep to crawl out of. Those few times that you actually hear about a glimpse of hope for economic recovery is usually overshadowed by some discouraging statistic the following day.
But all is not lost. In fact, by finding ourselves in a corner we are truly challenged to choose between needs and wants, real value and make belief, between progress and waste. And the market has already spoken. Products and services that focus on core features, customer value and ability to quickly respond to changes in their environment are the new success stories – Flip camcorders, netbooks, on-demand applications in the cloud, the list goes on – “The Good Enough Revolution” as Wired Magazine calls it. Many new startups have embraced this paradigm and turned it into a multi-million dollar business, a very profitable, nimble, exciting and influential business. Take a look at guys at 37signals. Their business culture and principles are a sign of what is more to come.
Truth be told, it is easy to be agile, innovative and revolutionary when you are a company of 20. It is a whole other ballgame if you are a multi-billion dollar enterprise with thousands of employees. Cutting waste and finding focus in a enterprise environment is no easy task. A task that few are willing to take up and even less are going to succeed at. But timing could not be any better and as we look for ways to transform our organizations, departments and teams we must embrace the limitations of this moment and turn them into means of achieving breakthrough.
“Less is More”, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe