I read this post from Dave Trott this morning about people’s reaction to having to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election here in the United States.
The big line was that people didn’t seem to realize that not voting was still a vote.
It was a vote for the meh.
“I’ll take what you give me.”
That’s what they were saying.
I was also listening the Martin Lindstrom on the Virgin podcast this morning talking about small data.
One of the key observations that Martin made was that America is a society that is built on fear right now. You see that everywhere you look, if you can peal back the filter enough to recognize what he is implying.
Don’t believe me:
- How much has the wisdom of crowds taken over, even if we aren’t wise?
- What happened in the above mentioned election? We elected a president that didn’t preach a message of hope or optimism, but fear, anger, and hate.
- Think about how you try to make decisions, but you end up visiting 14 different sites to get as many reviews as possible.
All of these examples are signs of fear in the culture.
The thing is that with the election, with fear, with any decision that we are dealing with we have two choices: do nothing or do something.
In many cases, we have tried to find a way to make doing nothing seem like the safe bet.
We don’t change our business model to reflect the new economic environment.
Look at the inside sales model in sports business, the cold call is still king.
While I still know you need to use the phone to be a successful sales person, the thing is that many of these sales should be nurtured using technology and developed after people have raised their hands.
Or, think about elections, in 2017 the Commonwealth of Virginia elects their governor. The fact is that the Democratic governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe would win in a landslide if he were able to run for reelection. But he can’t.
So you have a race for an open seat.
Learning nothing from the race against Donald Trump, the Democrats in Virginia are running the same tired campaign with the same bogus tactics that have been less and less effective in every race for the last decade.
And, the race is closer than it should be.
In every instance like this, you have an opportunity…you can take a look at the world as it exists and ask if the results you are getting are consistent with what you are hoping to achieve.
If they aren’t you can change.
If they are, you can double down.
Or, you can do nothing and allow the status quo to reign.
Either way, you’ve made a choice.
The thing is that you have to choose.
Which will you pick?