#disruptiveideas

Day 23: Today’s Gratitude List

The Internet Week NY (IWNY) free session I attended today, entitled Maximizing Digital Opportunity for Large Enterprises, was hosted by FROM—a digital transformation agency—as they describe themselves, and was held at their NYC headquarters, which also serves as their Innovation Loft, located on West 30th Street. The space is open and airy and provides comfortable seating for a good number of…

Kitty litter, YouTube, the euro and 82 other visionary inventions that changed the world

I had a couple of versions of blackberries in 2006 and even into 2007. You were not a business person of substance if you didn't have a blackberry back then. But when Apple launched the iPhone, initially it was the 'cool' folks who got one, and the business folks stuck to the blackberry. I remember the passionate debated people would have about hot much easier it was to type on a blackberry than on a touchscreen smart phone.

For a while in 2007 I thought so as well, and I thought Blackberry would have apps too. But the first time I played with an iPhone, I realized that it was actually more effective to not write long emails on the phone. Ralph was a Board Director in my company then and we'd have long discussions on how to communicate effectively. I found that the biggest change was that as I wrote fewer long business emails on my iPhone, I got into the habit of scheduling when I did most of my writing. By writing most of my business emails early in the day and late in the evening, it gave me a chance to put emails in others' inboxes, so they spent most of the day playing catch up and I had time to proactively think about the company, rather than being reactive to other's emails most of the day.

So much is written about iPhones, but I find very few thoughts on how it got us all into being more proactive than reactive in our business thinking and communication. This is a huge paradigm shift effected by Apple on businesses, in my mind.