While in Tibet a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to view an actual sand mandala. As you might know, the Dalai Lama is well known for creating large and elaborate mandalas from colored sand. Although usually created by a team of monks, sand mandalas can use millions and millions of grains of sand and take weeks to finish. They are absolutely beautiful to see in their intricacy and large scale. Yet, despite all of the time and effort expended to create this unique and beautiful work of art, once a sand mandala has been completed, it is ritualistically destroyed. This ceremonial destruction is carried out to tangibly symbolize the transitory state of material life.
It certainly puts some perspective on all of the well researched and documented thought that has gone into creating the many wireless industry paradigms we have all embraced over the years. As the wireless ecosystem has developed, what seemed like sustainable paradigms only months earlier, are summarily discarded as more advanced technology and newer business models emerge. The transitory state of wireless life, indeed!
We have travelled from the religious battles between TDMA and CDMA in the 1990s to LTE vs. WiMAX today. In 1995 the average GSM customer sent 0.4 text messages per month. In the second quarter of 2008, the typical subscriber sent or received 357 text messages, compared with 204 phone calls. Apple introduced the app store a little more than one year ago. A year later, over 1.5 Billion apps had been downloaded.
The paradigms for wireless success have been created and destroyed, morphed and changed, tweaked and deconstructed more times, in less elapsed time, than in virtually any other modern industry. Today’s paradigm for wireless success has a good chance of becoming tomorrow’s forgotten business model.
Imagine taking a team of people and creating something significant and meaningful only to deliberately destroy it when it was completed like the Buddhist monks do with sand mandalas. But isn’t that what we should do when circumstances, technology, competition or business model changes make what we created no longer as relevant or as profitable?
If so, then why is our first response always to resist? Why can’t we be the first to embrace paradigm change, even if there is an associated cost or an associated risk?
Take a moment, and let’s just imagine if we did. Imagine if we were the first to embrace a new thought, a new idea, a new advertising business model, or new hardware or software innovation – not because we had to, but because we understood that with the risk of being first to say yes, comes all of the rewards of being a new leader in our industry.
“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” — Robert F. Kennedy
