Coloring Between The Lines
Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.
Industry Week's guest expert may have shot himself in the foot recently. He led off with a characterization of 9/11 as an heinous act that ruined the US economy. Heinous, yes; ruined, not so much.
More to the point, he linked the collapse of his employer's telecommunications business segment, then goes on to blame the technology installation that shifted copper usage as a faster than a speeding bullet legacy installation.
Ummm, I was actually there at the time. 9/11 was heinous, but led to massive recovery investment. Copper cable "tanking" was a myth; succeeding years set new records in copper cable purchases as fiber optics installations took off.
The expert makes a (weak) case for the destruction of an old paradigm, with replacement by a new one. And adds wireless technology to the mix - before stirring.
I will freely admit that new technology today replaces the old, faster than we can imagine - and places resource and materials demands faster than Procurement can possibly keep up with.
So, with the myth of one new paradigm some three decades ago discredited, how are we staying ahead of needs among a parade of new paradigms?
Simple to conceive; tough to execute. But, in all cases, they mean being close to customers, listening to the customers' voices
Not being close after 9/11, not having a clue about technology shifts, not understanding copper cable demand, not getting the massivity of legacy technology infrastructure - all these contributed to the cable company's demise.
That's what happens when a manager posing as a leader takes decisions based on received wisdom. No amount of expertise changes those realities.