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Brad...Not being a lurker. Honest! That being said two things. First, agree with you whole heartedly about Brave New Worlds and the crossover. How very geek of us. Second, I might add one element to your recipe for Digital Transformation: The desire to change. I think that one of the failures of Covid has been, at least at the outset, was the desire to change and adapt. Without being too political leadership did not encourage people to embrace the reality of the situation and inspire change. That did happen for better and worse after 9.11

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Hey Paul, LURK AWAY! I'm honored and grateful that you're a regular Dispatch reader. Thank you. I wonder if there's much daylight between my construction about institutional pain and yours about a desire to change? What I was driving at was that the desire to avoid institutional pain--or possibly the actual pain of a terrorist attack--can be enough to overcome institutional and individual resistance to change. What do you think?

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I think there is. For example, when the internet began to change how people consume media and advertising dollars started to flow away from traditional publishing companies, they had a crisis on their hands. I think everyone knew the genie had escaped the bottle but most of the major companies refused to acknowledge the new world order of media dissemination and doubled down on print in many ways not the least of which was putting traditional publishing people in charge of their digital operations. They had institutional pain but not the willingness to change. It was the source of their ultimate failure. In other words, institutional pain too me is just identifying that something is amiss. Correctly, identifying the source of that pain and the willingness to make the changes required to eliminate the pain is the only way meaningful change happens.

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Interesting, and fair. I wasn't trying to convey that those three things were the ONLY things required for digital transformation. To extend my recipe analogy, you can have all the ingredients for a cake, but if you just leave them on the kitchen counter nothing happens. You have to bake the cake. The baking process is leadership, which has to come from SOMEWHERE in order for the transformation to happen. I'll be writing more about this soon, so I'll work to convey that. Thanks!

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