Damien Mulley

This blog post on design houses have entrepreneurs got me thinking about businesses and how they should always be in an adapting frame of mind. It made me think of dancing and specifically of dancing at weddings. We start off with the bride and groom and the traditional waltzy dance and move there to the “classics” and pop hits with the wedding band and then as the DJ comes along we wobble our extremities to all different songs, rhythms and so on. Some businesses are perfect at the traditional stuff, no stamping on feet at all while others are shit and do their best not to crash into others as they spin about. The ones good at the waltzes sometimes find themselves in foreign land at this “modern” stuff and leave the dance floor.

I often think that while being fantastic at one style of dancing is great, the ones that are rough around the edges and will stand in the middle of a dance floor and give it a bash have the better attitudes. Trying different things out, being game for something new is a survival skill. I’m reminded of this by three tech companies in particular: Odeo, Seesmic and Game Neverending.

Photo owned by edenpictures (cc)

Odeo created a tool called Twittr which became Twitter and Odeo the shell got sold on. Seesmic started as a video service and now their main product is an aggregator for Twitter and more and Game Neverending had a photosharing tool that turned into Flickr. Sometimes if you do join the dancefloor after watching the ebb and flow and studying the dance moves you’ll be grand, sometimes the music changes without notice and you’ll need to improvise and adapt.

It seems this year more companies than ever had to adapt and yet still haven’t. Taxi drivers are a great example. All complaining there are too many plates. That can’t be changed but they won’t adapt in other ways. Offer premium services. Create a driving standard way higher than the regulator enforces and push that as a selling point. New music, they sit in chairs and grumble. Any other examples of Irish industries that are not dancing to different tunes when they could be?

You dancing? I’m asking. And an all too serious video to end the post with:

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under business, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.