Are you the best at something nobody needs anymore?

The antivirus on my laptop is and has been for the past 8 years. It makes me feel that I’m protected from adware, spyware and any sort of thing that can bring down my computer. It also makes me feel proud to say it because I know the Avira team is more than up to the challenge of staying ahead of my needs by making sure their ‘software’ never feels outdated.

 

Bottom line is I know they’re always on their heels and will work to keep their product ahead of the pack.

 

Why am I telling you this?

 

Remember the boiling frog syndrome?

 

If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will instinctively jump out. But if you place a frog in a pot of cool water and gradually increase the temperature, the frog won’t notice that the water is getting hotter. It will sit there until the water boils and boil with it.

 

This is what most businesses suffer from. They let routine set in and let the habits that brought the success before to blind them of changing opportunities, changing times, new behaviors to become outdated and irrelevant, in a word inertia set in. They failed to change and became the best at something nobody needed anymore.

 

The history of your organization is not set in stone

Because change is continuous it’s is very difficult to know what is next after you’ve made it past the first curve but merely accepting that tomorrow is not going to be like to today is a great place to start. This means you have to do activities that are different from the day to day stuff your organization does, it means of where things are going and then .

 

Innovation is all about change and this requires that you have all your senses in tune to what’s changing around you. The day to day stuff gives you no insight into what’s changing, it only reinforces what you already know which is going to become irrelevant sooner than later.

 

I don’t know how the Antivirus of the future looks like but I bet Avira has a good idea and I’m willing to stay with them because they’re in it for the long haul.