Always excited for change

I started my speaking career in the late 1990s. As an entrepreneur, I sensed that massive changes were happening. So I presented ideas that could help people and businesses be future-ready. Those were the years when “change” became a buzzword. Credit this to authors and futurists like Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Faith Popcorn, and company.

So as “change” and “change management” became the buzzwords in the corporate world, a British business philosopher says: “The future is no longer a continuation of the past.” These words created a significant impact in my life, motivating and inspiring me to constantly learn, adapt, relearn, and unlearn because things were changing and I wanted to stay relevant. As if those wise words were not enough, the celebrated Charles Handy also says: “The future is already here long before tomorrow arrives.”

Books on “change” and the “future” began dominating the business section of bookstores. There were book titles like “The New Paradigm,” “Only the Paranoid Survives” from former Intel chairman Andy Grove. These were the wave of literature and buzzwords spreading so fast in the business world, enough to cause paranoia.

Now comes 2021. I will venture to say that the times we are in today is similar to the late 1990s and early 2000s, except that the scope and breadth of change compared to the past is magnified a thousand fold, and change continues to accelerate exponentially. Here I am again, constantly searching for answers and guidance on how to navigate my business and my craft to stay relevant and useful in responding positively to the changing times.

Today we have more than enough business case studies to prove how the refusal and resistance to change can put an entire business or industry down. Let me give you a famous and often quoted one.

In 1997, a young entrepreneur named Reed sold his tech company and decided to celebrate with his wife one evening. They drove down to the local Blockbuster video rental store and rented the movie Apollo 13. A problem ensued. Reed neglected to return the video. He actually could not remember where he placed the video. When he finally found it, he sped back to the store and turned it in, only to find he owed a huge late fee. On his drive home, his thoughts bothered him:

1.    How will I explain to my wife why we have to pay a massive fine for a late video?

2.    There’s has to be a better way to experience home video entertainment.

Shortly afterward, on his way to his fitness center, Reed had an epiphany about a different way to handle memberships. His gym charged him one flat fee, regardless of how much he used the equipment there. What if a video store charged one monthly subscription, and customers could rent as many videos as they wanted? And what if customers never have to leave their homes? After some development, he shared the idea with Blockbuster, assuming they’d see the improvement in their business model. But alas, they didn’t. They did not want to change the business model because they were making a fortune from the late return fees. And so they told Reed to take his idea somewhere else.

And he did.

Netflix took the world of home entertainment by storm, mailing DVDs to consumers and later streaming videos to televisions. And while they are not the only show in town, they controlled a large part of the market. In the meantime, Blockbuster shut down their last store in Alaska and is no longer a brand we buy from today. In less than three decades, Blockbuster went from entering the record books with 9000 stores, to entering our history books. Netflix is a 21st-century approach to home entertainment, while Blockbuster was a 20th-century method that did not want to change and has been punished with a heavy fine called “irrelevance.”

“But I am too old now for all these digital stuffs,” one will say. These were the exact same words mouthed by Baby Boomers during the transformation from manual ledgers to personal computers just a few decades ago. This is not a good way to think. The more we learn, the more exciting life becomes, and we will not be handicapped missing the good old days of Blockbuster video rentals, but we embrace the exciting digital world. Perhaps this is my way of saying we need to stay relevant and continue learning. This is why I have my podcast and Tiktok channel now, and I think this is why I am still excited!

(Francis Kong’s podcast “Inspiring Excellence” is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other podcast streaming platforms.)