Redbean - I live in the southern hemisphere so it is spring. I also live in the sub-tropics. That means the trees are losing their leaves. Is that counter-intuitive for you?
When white fellas came to this country about 200 years ago they dismissed 30,000 years of experience and labelled everything they saw with European names. Including the seasons.
Australia is currently the leading performing economy in the world in terms of growth in the past quarter. It grew by 0.6%. Business is gearing up again and there is a general confidence around the place. Yet reading the press and talking with my clients I am not hearing anything new. Everyone seems to be back to Plan A - Sell more stuff.
In the subtropics it can be argued we have the same seasons as those in the northern tropics though not as severe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian_seasons
This means that in Spring it is the dry season or Rarranhdharr in Yolngu language.
The indigenous trees know this too so they drop their leaves to conserve water. Not fully (there are only a handful of native deciduous trees in Australia) but just enough to survive.
Yet each ’spring’ we are inundated with images of flowers blooming and bees buzzing. Yet those images are surreal. They are images of the inverse of a repressed memory from over 200 years ago. One we can’t forget and continue to reinvent.
Does business do the same thing? Do we just have one picture on our wall of the good times. One based upon unlimited credit and excessive consumption? Are we just hibernating waiting for that time to return? We can’t seem to get out the door, take a look around and observe for ourselves. If we did we would see a different outlook.
Growing sub-tropical fruits you can watch them deal with the extremes of the seasons. They fruit before the wet season. So they flower in summer. In addition to native bees they use birds and migrating bats to pollenate. And unlike the European fruits have few pests and need little attention. My Sterculia quadrifida is currently bare and the fruit is ripening in time for the wet season.
Do you think business will ever come to understand the ‘new world’ we now live in? One where Seth Godin describes the “post-consumption consumer” as having less desire to return high debt and business having less ability to consume precious resources at past levels.
I hope so because in a bizarre sense it is business that has got us into this mess yet it is also business that will have to get us out of it. We have become so dependent upon business and the economy that we can’t unravel the connections. Yet it won’t be the dumb or even the ordinary business models of yesteryear that save us. No we have to build something smarter. And that is both the need and the opportunity!
So what is your new plan for dealing with the new world? Is it the same old image or are you going to get out and observe for yourself? If you need some help reviewing your strategy just let me know. We can start with a walk around my property and have a look at some of the four thousand trees that I had to plant after some white fella had tried to turn the original rainforest into a picture of the rolling green hills of England!