The New Normal vs. Old Normal

Saturday, I was at Chapman University in Orange County as a delegate for The Innovation and Humanity Summit. I was able to address the group, along with a panel that included the senior vice president of strategy for Pepsi, a genius professor from Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management, who is the founder of their Kellogg Innovation Network, and a brilliant strategy consultant from Santa Cruz, whose article on innovation appeared on the cover of the Harvard Business Review recently.

We were talking about the new normal versus the old normal. The easiest way to explain it is this; the old normal is the Hummer.  That’s what you get when you view business purely as a materialistic enterprise. When your vision is nothing but numbers you produce vehicles like the Hummer. The new normal is represented by the Prius. This is the development of products that consider people, the planet, and sustainability. Toyota has sold over 1 million Prius’s and now intends to create a whole line that will include cars of many shapes and sizes.

The old normal rewarded hard work, loyalty, and productivity. In the new normal it doesn’t matter. You can be hard working, productive, and creative, but be downsized with a huge knife in your back no matter what. This is business operating at its worst. There were some things about the old normal that were good, and therefore we need a new normal. All we’ve done is succeed in creating a work force of frightened zombies; people who feel they have no control over their economic destiny and therefore are shut down. Fear is rampant in our work place. Executives feel off the status while workers feel off in security. But, fear has made us un-creative, non-collaborative, and pessimistic. If the way that we conduct business produces fear, then we are conducting business in a way that prevents us from being prosperous. It is a vicious cycle.

The answer is that nobody is going to take away our fear but ourselves and the only way to take away our fear is to realize that we are all entrepreneurs; all the CEO’s of our own lives. Our current job is not our career. The people who understand this the best are some of the leaders of Chapman University who have installed entrepreneur classes throughout their curriculum. That is right! If you take dance or music you will study entrepreneurism so that you can set up your own dance/music studio and create your own economic engine. Everyone it seems is going to need to know something about marketing, finance, and about creating value in demand.

We all need to become brands of what it is we do that creates value. I believe that the only way to overcome our fears to become more independent economically. It is great that a university in Southern California has recognized that and is helping to train a new generation of workers who have the self-confidence to take care of themselves.