The Age of Speed – Learning to strive in our “now” faster world

Vince Poscente, a former Canadian Olympic star in speed skiing delivered a rousing keynote address at the Pitney Bowes MapWorld Conference last week, a merged event between the user groups of MapInfo and Group 1. Now a motivational speaker, Poscente provided a exhilarating ride into the world of business strategy and how to deal with a few bumps along the way. And in his case, a bump led to losing a medal at the 1992 Olympics.

Poscente offered that in today’s business climate he defines companies in four categories:
The Zeppelin, a lumbering giant with little forward motion.
The Balloon, something that just floats along with a few ups and downs along the way.
The Bottle Rocket, a high flier at first but one likely to fizzle later and drop like a stone.
The Jet, where alignment and speed must coincide to achieve optimum results.

Obviously aware of the audience, Posente said that, "Alignment has to begin with an emotional buzz." It may be an idea that creates a physical action. "Oh I’d love to do that," he says is the reaction you need to have. As an example of how powerful that alignment must be he cited data about the human brain. He said that the conscious mind is processing with 2 million neurons every second. The subconscious mind is processing with 4 billion neurons every second. Because we are sometimes unaware of even what we ourselves are thinking Poscente offered that "there is this illusion that we don’t know what we don’t know. [Now] Take this alignment issue and bring the conscious aligned with the subconscious….how powerful would that be."

"To un-level the playing field, do what the competition is not willing to do. When you do that, you discover things that the competition never thought of. When you find that, you are probably finding things you are unwilling to do as well," says Poscente.