A world without constraints?

I was talking to a tech executive at a multinational and he was describing the labor pools he had access to in India, E. Europe, S. America, China and he said “I don’t think technical talent will ever be a constraint for us again”. I was talking to a banker about Dell’s large debt load as they go private and he shrugged his shoulders and said “Capital is cheap”. I talk to a number of Big Data pioneers and they gush that memory and storage is no longer a constraint.

Against that background it is so good to see ambitious, almost heretic, projects. Google Glass, Fiber in Kansas City, autonomous cars and more. eBay’s remarkable transformation into a mobile commerce and payment giant to the point where its original auction business is almost a rounding error. China’s massive infrastructure investments in high speed rail, airports, dams. Projects to map the human brain. 

I could go on, but then I see much more constrained thinking.

HR executives who go wow when they hear about Google’s HR analytics or GE’s recruiting savings, but instead of saying “Why are we not doing that ourselves?”, ask “When will my HR package vendor deliver that?”. Accountants who are drooling over cloud based Excel and ledgers when they should  be working on predictive maintenance projects with their asset management teams. Vendors who constantly watch over competitors in their “magic quadrant” and do not want to step out of that box. Telcos who talk about “their innovators” when they don’t have a line item for R&D in their financials. Outsourcers who talk cloud when they have little capex in their financials.

Dennis Howlett  often accuses me that I “exhaust peeps like (him) who are trying our best to  get peeps to go from point A to point B as  a stepping stone to your point C/D.”

The problem is it’s not me defining point C or D. Plenty of projects are doing that around the world. I am just impatient with so many folks who are only setting Point B as their goal in a world with shrinking constraints.