Inefficiency - the antidote to surprises.

Everything in and around us changes constantly. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, around 50 million cells in your body will have died and replaced. Our entire bodies are replaced every seven years.

We don't notice. It's normal.

Twenty percent of businesses fail in their first year, fifty percent by their fifth year and seventy percent by their tenth year. Fewer than 25% of FTSE companies have made it through the last forty years. Most of the knowledge you are using today will be obsolete in five years.

We don't notice. The rate of decay is normal. We don't notice it often until it's too late. Our business becomes irrelevant, our resume tired. Normal is a seductress.

Normal has a half life

People's reactions to the impact of Coronavirus have been instructive. Universities wanting government subsidy because how they do what they do has been obsolescing, and the virus has exposed that brutally. A confectionery manufacturer who has done an exemplary job of using their online cha…