Struggling with choices

“It’s too hard to keep up with all the choices. I can’t decide whether to use Facebook or Twitter, Microsoft or Google, Dell or Apple? Doing business today is just too complex. As soon as you make a decision something new like Google Circles or the iPad comes along.”

This was the complaint of a business owner at a dinner earlier this week – just as consumers feel overwhelmed by choices, managers and entrepreneurs find themselves at sea with the plethora of technology choices at a time when there’s a new social media platform or mobile device appearing on the market every week.

Maybe it’s true we have too many choices but yesterday’s business people had plenty of hard decisions to make.

Business people a hundred years ago had to choose between steam, gas or electrical power. If they chose the latter, there was another decision between AC and DC electricity.

There was a further choice between keeping your horse-drawn cart or buying one of those new fangled motor vehicles, which could either run on kerosene or steam.

So our great, great grandparent’s didn’t have it any easier and, unlike the relatively small investments we can make in technology today, their choices could easily bankrupt them if they made the wrong decision as the capital cost of choosing between steam, DC or AC electrical power was huge.

Where today’s similarity lies with the business people of 1911, is understanding the technologies and what they mean to our markets. The entrepreneur who ignored motorcars in 1911 looked pretty silly and probably wasn’t in business within a decade.

Today we see a technology divide developing and while some focus on the age difference between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” while others – more validly – worry about the economic barrier to adopting new tools, the real divide is between those prepared to understand the new and adapt to change.

Instead of worrying about the choices, it’s time to get informed and understand what the alternatives mean. The time to worry is when our competitors, or the market, is leaving us behind because we didn’t care enough to find out what was happening around us.

While life today might be complex, at least the choices on offer aren’t the simple alternative of whether we send our children down the mine or to the mill.

Paul Wallbank is one of Australia’s leading experts on how industries and societies are changing in this connected, globalised era. When he isn’t explaining technology issues, he helps businesses and community organisations find opportunities in the new economy.