Welcome to 2022. Each year I write a reflection piece on achieving another year in business. On 9th January 2022, we celebrated 27 years, and I couldn’t think of a more appropriate theme than David Bowie’s song, Changes.
These song lyrics seem rather apt given the current times and the journey that my team and I have been on over the last nearly 3 decades, especially the last two as we all navigate and enter yet another covid pandemic year.
To me Changes is about finding your voice, your purpose, and not accepting the status quo. Changes is about not being bullied or tyrannised by prevailing views and attitudes, instead it’s about being open minded and adaptable, humble, and willing to admit your mistakes and try again, only better.
Changes is about courage, facing your own demons including imposter syndrome. It’s about challenging the current systems that hold people hostage to old, outdated methods, ideologies and tropes that stifle progress, erode integrity, create inequality, and keep us all from leading flourishing prosperous lives.
Changes is about striving to be true to ourselves while striving to be a better version of ourselves.
Changes is about being an early adopter, a pioneer, someone forging new pathways.
I’m an early adopter, a change agent by nature; being an early adopter has enabled me and my team to make the necessary changes and read the signs. This has allowed us to quickly avert catastrophe and hardship, realising healthy and sustainable opportunities, allowing us to stay in business and keep evolving, even during the hard times.
It is usually the early adopters who experiment with the new, bring about innovations and research who can see better pathways ahead that solve the wicked problems. However, this has its challenges, especially when it comes to persuading those in power who want to hold onto the current ‘way we do things around here’. Often early adopters’ ideas fall on deaf ears as those in power profit for the prevailing paradigms (think fossil fuel industries here). It’s only when they hit crisis, they might look at other options, that is if they’re not too stupid, arrogant, or compromised.
Sadly, Changes has not been on the playlist of our federal leaders. Instead, the cracks and fault lines from years of inaction, neglect, stalling, playing to vested interests and bad decision making has stress tested the very fabric of our economy and society across supply chains and they’ve been found wanting.
The lyrics in the final chorus ‘Where’s your shame? You’ve left us up to our necks in it’ seems to sum up, for me at least, where we are today when it comes to our national leadership in this country. It’s gone missing in action.
That these so-called leaders have played us for mugs putting our lives at risk seems to justify these lyrics “And these children that you spit on, As they try to change their worlds, Are immune to your consultations, They’re quite aware of what they’re goin’ through”.
Changes to me is about the continuous cycle of change whether we take advantage of it or not.
We have hit a critical moment in time.
Crises, while invoking fear and anxiety, can also force people to be more open to change because they are usually looking for something to get them out of this mess. Crises often get people to question why they do what they do and what can be done better.
We can use the crisis of covid and the crisis in national leadership as an opportunity to show people what a better future can look like; no more of the same old same old. As the saying goes ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.’
This is why my team and I strive, every week, and every year, to bring to your attention the changes that can make a positive difference to you, your teams, your customers and communities. It’s why we always say we help people and businesses sell better now and sustainably into the future because selling better and doing better business for a sustainable world is underpinned by change and evolution.
The Barrett’s 2022 Sales Trends-Decarbonising Sales Operations Report demonstrates the changes and how-to strategies which are already here and ready to go that can lead us to a renewable climate economy; this report demonstrates that we have everything we need to create a better future for all.
So, what’s stopping us?
No more head in the sand! It’s time for real and effective change NOW; we need and want effective stewardship, leadership, management, systems, strategies, policies and processes that underpin ethical supply chains and sales and service practices; we need ethical and effective governments with politicians who represent their electorates and govern for all Australians, not vested interests.
It’s now up to our politicians, public servants, business leaders, investors, sales teams, employees, customers, suppliers and all of us as citizens to embrace these opportunities so we can make the necessary changes to create healthy economies and flourishing societies now and in the future.
This will lead to better jobs, career opportunities and service outcomes where people and businesses can prosper in a dynamic evolving renewable climate and caring economy; it will lead to amongst other things equality, real climate action, robust public infrastructure, better management of economies, better representative democracy and a system of integrity that underpins any healthy and flourishing society.
Welcome to 2022 and Changes.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
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