Been thinking recently about speed - and lack thereof. I am reading a Popular Science article on a NASA scientist working on a warp drive. I am watching how Amazon, Google, eBay and a bunch of startups like Zipments are chasing each other around same day delivery models. You can just feel the rush.
Faster than light travel may be theoretically impossible – if you believe Einstein. But I am surprised most of us are not impatient, in contrast, with even glacial speeds.
I recently got a press release about a financials shared service success story. I had to double check the date on the release. My first Gartner research note in 1995 was on shared services. 18 years later, my analyst colleagues are supposed to be impressed?
Why don’t many others point only 6.5 of SAP’s revenues have come from new products introduced in last 5 years compared to 60%+ for Apple?
Why are more of us not yelling at Verizon and our cable companies and asking when we will get Google Fiber speeds at 1GBPS and at those price points?
Impatience has its virtues.
I see how Katie Couric and several Hollywood types founded Stand Up 2 Cancer driven by their impatience with progress by the life sciences establishment. They are funding agile research Dream Teams which are showing promising results almost immediately. Reading Tampa Police Detective Sal Augeri’s frustration about the IRS Criminal Investigation unit and how the IRS has since massively increased focus on Stolen Identity Refund Fraud, I say impatience is good.
The best example of impatience to me came from an airline employee who was supposed to merely repeat the script explanation, but clearly frustrated with the pace of integration between her airline and one they were merging, she told me:
“The Flintstones have taken over the Jetsons”
We should all be more like her.
