Child’s Play: Keeping Up with Changing Technology

If you’ve ever watched children flip through magazines, you’ll notice how some of them will use their hands to try to manipulate or change the photographs as they would on an iPad or other tablet device.  These magazines, the ones I grew up reading, are little more than broken tablets for today’s youth.  Kids are born with technology and they’re fearless about using it. It’s a good thing because they will have to lead and keep up with a rate of change that will likely eclipse that of any generation that preceded it.

Next week at our Vistage Executive Summit in Denver, Dave Nelsen, president of Dialog Consulting Group, will offer his contribution to our theme of Leading with 2020 Vision by talking about tools and apps that can help us be more effective and more productive.  Dave is also one of our top Vistage speakers, and he often reminds his audiences that when Darwin observed, “‘It’s not the strongest or most intelligent that survive, but those that adapt to a changing environment most quickly,’ few people could have appreciated how precisely this would describe the world of business we live in today on a hyper-accelerated timescale.”

Blackberry’s fall from having roughly 50% market share in the smartphone market in 2009 to about 4% by 2012 should serve as a sober reminder, that as CEOs and business leaders, no matter what our industry sector, we have to keep our businesses ahead of the curve.  To do that, means starting with us – by challenging ourselves to improve our own personal productivity and effectiveness.  Better to lead by example than to become an example of a leader or company that held on to the past for just a little too long.

I invite you to check out Dave’s YouTube video Tech for Execs: Doubling Productivity Using Tablets, Apps and Smartphones.  I also hope you will share your favorite productivity tools with your fellow business leaders here on Executive Street.  You’ll find that using these tools will not only allow you to spend more time thinking about your business, but also that learning and embracing these tools is easier than you think.  You might even call it child’s play.