Pre Christmas gloom following Osborne’s scary Autumn statement has settled like a cloak of depression over the whole country.  A wasted decade of zero or less GDP growth, unemployed youth and 50 year olds thrown onto a scrap heap that is becoming cruelly indifferent to their plight. Business cut backs and loss of confidence creating a self fulfilling prophecy of decline.

There is no doubt that we live in dangerous times. The economic upheaval that started in 2008 with a bank liquidity crisis and has been transformed by the bailout then, into a sovereign debt crisis today, represents a major challenge to Capitalism as it has been played.

So where are the grounds for optimism?

“If  its not broke, don’t fix it”
– well now it is  broke, so we had better do something!

As a small business we know that our opportunities come when the tectonic plates of the existing established order start to shift.  That is the moment when businesses and institutions are prepared to contemplate the idea that unfamiliar ways of doing things, may be risky, but are better than the alternative.

We live in a time of unprecedented technical innovation and each one has the potential to create opportunities to re-invent business processes. Moore’s Law which described the speed at which computing power would double every 18 months and halve in price, is only one of the many defining events (programming, DNA, genomics, neural science and many others which are showing even faster rates of exponential growth) that will certainly transform our world over the next 50 to 100 years.

To take a step back:-

• • The genus Homo arose about 2,500,000 years ago
  • I took a couple of million years to for Homo sapiens to evolve, about 500,000 years ago
  • We had reached the Bronze age about 3,000 years ago.
  • The industrial revolution and the birth of  our modern age is about 300 years old.
  • The age of modern computing and communication started about 50 years ago and I only have to think back to the world of my youth to see the impact that has already had and will continue to create on the way we live our lives.

If we can be flexible, imaginative and focussed, there is no end to the opportunities and the excitement that the very near future holds.