Guest Commentary :
Change offers opportunities for success

by Andy Taggart

Every sportsman knows that the prospects for success are often greater at the edges of the field or stream where he seeks his game. For example, a hunter can look to find higher concentrations of game animals at the edge where the grass turns to brush, or at the edge where the brush turns to woods, or the edge where the woods thin out at the frost line. Fishermen know that more game fish can be found at the edges of schools of bait fish, at the edges of oxygen or temperature inversions in the water, or where the edge of one depth changes dramatically to another.

And so is it with history. Whenever history reaches an “edge” of change, whether great or small, better opportunities for success have followed.

Think of the invention of the printing press, one of history’s most cataclysmic edges. Not only was the 15th Century world changed, but all of history with it, and mankind’s ways of doing business and of communication was irrevocably altered. Those who were creative enough and bold enough saw great opportunity in such massive changes.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 18th Century is another great edge of history. Once the primary method of production had been painstaking – and time consuming – handmade items turned out one at a time. Within a generation, processes had been employed that increased productivity and profitability beyond anyone’s imagination. Even today, shareholders, employees and consumers enjoy the benefits that flowed from this edge of history.

In the 20th Century, the Information Age brought on by the virtual universal use of radio, television and telephone represents one of the most powerful edges of change in all of history.

And now, the Technology Age, or the Innovation or Knowledge Age as some have deemed it, is an edge of history with the potential to rock the way we think, do business and interact with one another – likely in ways more profound that anything in the last six hundred years.

Here’s a question worthy of consideration: Will we in Mississippi be among those who are creative enough and bold enough to take advantage of the opportunities abounding in this new edge of history?

Now, I can imagine that some readers will think that they’ve been hearing about the “Technology Age” for years, and that if there was great opportunity, it has all been gobbled up already. But that sort of thinking is short-sighted. How long has it been, for example, since you first even heard of a thing called the Internet? You are the very rare insider if you can honestly say you had even heard the word earlier than fifteen years ago. And when did you or your company first start using e-mail to communicate? I’ll bet it was ten years ago or less – twelve years ago tops. When did you start thinking that you needed to figure out what this “broadband” stuff was all about, so you could communicate quickly and in large volumes of data over the Internet? Could it have been longer than five or six years ago? And how recently did you really start considering that maybe all your Internet needs could be handled wirelessly? My guess is that it was as recently as the last three or four years at most.

I guess my point is this: even if you date the commencement of the Technology Age as far back as twenty years ago when Al Gore first invented the Internet, you’d have to agree that we are still on the leading curve of this new edge of history. For goodness sake, people are still making lots of money and improving our quality of life on the strength of ideas and strategies growing out of the printing press (550 years old) and the Industrial Age (240 years old). Isn’t it reasonable to believe that mind-boggling opportunities are just waiting to be exploited and discovered in this new edge of history less than two decades underway?

When I was a kid, Dick Tracy was a popular comic strip. The famous crime-buster and his fellows communicated by means of two-way wrist radio/TV transmitters that seemed like a page from a Jules Verne novel. But is there anybody around today who hasn’t seen someone talking quietly (or not so quietly) into his lapel while on a cell phone call, or typing furiously into a device the size of a deck of playing cards while sending and receiving e-mail at lunch?

In a world where change buzzes like blue tail flies, our temptation is to look around us at how fact has outpaced science fiction, and simply sit back in wonder with Gomer Pyle and say “Shazaam!” The wiser course – indeed, the only one for Mississippi if we are finally to enjoy the exponential economic improvement that our state needs – is to spend our time not shaking our heads in wonder about the pace of change around us, but instead by taking advantage of this new edge of history to reshape the world around us.

We do not have the capital to create a worldwide center of finance in the Mississippi Delta. But with the tools now available to us, we can compete in real time, all the time, with anyone on Wall Street, or in London or Hong Kong, for that matter. In the past, we’ve had to admit that we didn’t have the money to play in that league. But since we now have the tools in place of the money, I’m not willing to accept the notion that we’re just not smart enough, are you?

By the same token, it’s not likely that Highway 61, for all its romance and allure, is going to replace Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” as the nation’s supposedly priciest strip of real estate. And advertising the Blues Highway to its denizens in Western Europe used to be a one-shot-a-year-save-up-all-your-pennies-for-an-ad-in-the-London-Times kind of a deal. Today, though, a well crafted website can bring to all the world at once, and for essentially zero incremental cost, details on history, hostelry and eatery from Yazoo City to Memphis.

If a businessman in Stuttgart (Germany) was considering a business trip to the southern U.S. ten years ago and had an interest in a duck hunt while over here, Stuttgart (Arkansas) would have been a natural hook-up for him. From now on, it’s up to us to be sure that before he travels he has already learned all he needs to know about hunting in the real Delta. What a surprise to him when he finds that kind of information from a source where he least suspects it, while looking for a business deal, on the pages of a site at an address like www.deltabusinessjournal.com.

It’s a great time to be alive. Let’s live it on the edge. DBJ

(Andy Taggart is the owner of Andy Taggart, Legal and Strategic Counsel, PLLC. He is also an elected member of the Board of Supervisors of Madison County, Mississipppi. He has recently concluded a three year stint as President and CEO of the Mississippi Technology Alliance, a technology based economic development enterprise.)

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