It’s a Marathon —Tom Polischuk
What an experience! I had the pleasure—mixed with an immense measure of pride—of watching two of my daughters compete in the ING New York City Marathon earlier this month, along with about 39,083 other runners. The runners come in all shapes and sizes from the professional men and women who run at a stunning pace, to matronly grandmothers in the wheelchair division. I even saw Zorro and SpongeBob. (I saw him twice at the same location, so I think he must have lapped everyone.)
Business is often compared to sports because of the direct analogies that can be made—the competition, team work, preparation, strategies, tactics, and the list goes on. It is why participation in sports is such a good way to cultivate the skills needed to be successful in business (and in my humble opinion, why Title 9 is so important on a broader scale).
In this month’s article on RFID (p. 34), a reference is made to the evolution of this market as taking the shape of an endurance race. At times during the last three years, the hype that RFID received would have led you to believe that it was a sprint, and competitors had better get into the race and fast. But, as is probably the case with the majority of new technology implementations, RFID expectations have not been met—yet.
For input to this article, we asked executives to comment on whether they thought RFID would follow a similar path as bar codes has during the last three decades. “I believe this will eventually be the case,” said Jeff Feltz, director of product management at Mark Andy. “When bar coding was first introduced, the infrastructure did not exist to support it. Today, you can find bar code scanning technology just about everywhere.”
Maybe RFID isn’t ramping up like people originally expected and the finish line is nowhere in sight, but it sure has come a long way. As I saw first hand in NYC, persistence and determination are key traits needed to run a marathon, and these same traits are required by those intending to run in the RFID marathon.
So, if Sherlock Holmes was mentoring businesses today, instead of “Patience, my dear,” he might just say, “Persistence, determination, my dear.”
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