If you understand, you’re falling behind the curve

Last week I attended the OCTANe program on digital advertising, and aside from the frightening Orwellian aspects of the evolving internet, I was absolutely fascinated and overwhelmed by the information revolution and the new business models that it conceives.

OCTANe's Digital Advertising Program

One of the companies presenting was Brand Affinity Technologies (BAT) and their CEO, Ryan Steelberg was not only charismatic, but also thinking 3-5 years ahead of most of my contemporaries.  The second presenter was Mike Hodges from Freedom Communications, the parent company of the Orange County Register and 20-30 other newspapers.  By the end of his talk I felt like such a prisoner of antiquated technologies, I canceled my print subscription to the New York Times the next morning.

Charlie Black from Specific Media presented on how advertisements on the internet were becoming user specific.  I always thought that it was uncanny how the internet pop-ups seemed eerily targeted.  Now I understood my own stupidity and that this was on purpose.  I was so looking forward to Scott Christensen’s presentation from CBS Outdoor Advertising anticipating that I had to have a good general understanding of the business model for billboard advertising.  I was crushed when the conversation turned to using cameras to monitor the eyes of the people looking at the billboards, and changing the content based on viewing audience.  I started to think that if you understand everything that these guys are doing and selling, they’re slowing things down too much for you, and in the process you’re falling behind.

Living and working in a high technology sector requires the self confidence to surround yourself with people that know more than you do.  If you need to be the smartest guy in the room all the time, chances are the room’s intellectual evolution will be replaced with stagnation.  But rather, if you resign yourself to be one of the less gifted ones on a particular topic, to fill the room with bleeding edge technology experts, and have the comfort to ask when you don’t understand something, chances are that everyone will ultimately be a little smarter, and the room will emerge ahead of any single individual’s expertise.

Technologies are evolving exponentially.  The capabilities we have today were unfathomable 10 years ago.  It’s hard to say exactly what the future holds, but it is safe to assume the technological advancement in the coming ten years will eclipse that of the last fifty.  Many companies will be unable to keep pace with the meteoric changes in how things get done.  The most successful will be the ones with the self confidence to surround themselves with people that are more advanced than themselves and the courage to admit to their own ignorance thereby curing it.