Modernizing Your Infrastructure Can Change the World

When I tell my teenage boys to 'clean up your room,' they don't exactly listen right away. It isn't until there have been real consequences-losing their allowance debit card in the mess or running out of clean shirts for their first coed party-that they've begun to understand the value of some purposeful structure amid the chaos. A friend recently turned me on to Admiral McRaven's now famous 2014 commencement speech to the graduates at the University of Texas and suggested his book as an 'inspirational primer' for my kids. The Admiral's promise is that making one's bed can ostensibly change the world. It sounds a bit counterintuitive-how can performing what on first look feels like boring routine prepare you to win at life? And yet, I think the point of his message is that having the courage to change the world is sparked by the conscious choice to start from a foundation that sets you up for success.

You wonder why I bring up the trials and tribulations of teenage parenting. Forgive the tortured analogy, but in some ways, coronavirus delivered a similar 'clean your room' message to us all last year when global business was thrown into chaos. We've all been forced to stand up and take notice with urgency, and work in earnest to pick up our dirty socks and get things in order for the new digital reality.

Businesses that were already embodying the advice from McRaven have been outpacing the market in part because of their early adoption of a distributed, interconnected digital infrastructure. These digital leaders had already anticipated and adjusted for the impact of the explosion of data across billions of devices worldwide, so they were more prepared when the proverbial 'you know what' hit the fan. Having already worked to eliminate distance-related performance barriers by optimizing for proximity to cloud, ecosystems and edge-they were positioned not only to weather the pandemic impact, but to level up on the advantage afforded them with their infrastructure.