Break frameworks that break you

These days nothing tends to remain sacred. In business, we don’t feel guilt to play, even subversively, with what was perceived until now to be “untouchable icons”. The disruption that many expects and embrace it seems to come in many situations “by stepping over someone else’s body”.

In our lives we find as well, day by day, that nothing remains guaranteed the way we knew it. Financial system ends up being discredited by the non-transparency of most and the gross lack of respect of some. Central and local governments are at least not aware of the things that happen around them. Their ignorance to recognize the need to change lead countries and cities to the point of facing the harsh possibility of becoming bankrupted. Greece, Island, Detroit or Naples are just few examples.

The social role of the state is harder to be maintained in a new economical interdependence without a keen commitment to efficiency and economic vision (BCG_Ending_the_Era_ of_Ponzi_Finance_Jan_2013). People losing their present pensions despite previously conventional societal customs (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/us/detroit-bankruptcy-ruling.html?_r=0). Others stripped out from the chance of having one in future as private pension pillars are nationalized (o tempora, o mores!) for the only guilt of becoming “attractive cash cows” that have to be “milked” by incapable-wolves for either covering their foregoing incompetence or offering poisoned gifts in election years.

This is the present that finds most of us still obeying blindly past inherited or mentally acquired models, frameworks that keep us captive, unable to transform and reinvent ourselves. Either social customs or business “best practices”, they represent a static snapshot of past understandings that, if not related with the continuous present changing, become in themselves irrelevant. In challenging times, it might look comfortable to rely on known generalizations. However these generalizations are not able to create the true distinction that can mark the difference between succeeding and failing. Existing frameworks break our chance to design own successful future, limiting and isolating us in irrelevant “micro-universe bubbles”.

In business, the only chance I see for those interested to succeed in the new normal is not to stop exclusively at mastering existing frameworks. Instead, they will have to identify frameworks’ uncapped potential and to push further their boundaries, forgetting limitations like “we must always” or “we must never”.  By breaking out from self confined captivities and establishing new frontiers, the courageous ones will not only innovate and differentiate themselves but will also drag the rest of us into following them.

We live our lives surrounded by what some call: “infinite newism” forcing those that try to remain ahead to update themselves. Our needs, desires and thoughts become interconnected in a perpetual update continuum.

This is why I think that we will witness a near future impacted by the upgrade “mindset” of the present few that tend to become the future many. It will not be only related with the “hype” technologies, where the newest and “coolest” item that you buy today becomes in just months hardly resalable even on the secondary market. It will be as well about citizens “upgrading” their societal involvement, starting the “reverse acquisitions” of their countries. I just hope that the last will use their power not only to build a better future but as well to embrace themselves the economic commonsense that starts from understanding the present realities and their challenges.