As I write this, the community here is still in shock over events in April at a local suburban Denver high school where two students stormed the building with guns, spraying bullets into crowds of kids and lobbing home-made pipe bombs. The two teenagers killed 12 students and one teacher, as well as injured 23 others before finally killing themselves.
For the past week, people around the United States have been struggling with the question of why this happened and where our society has gone wrong. This is the worst of a string of attacks in our country in recent years. What have we been ignoring as a culture, and what do we need to do to change?
We’ve realized it’s time for a little self-examination and time to take responsibility. It’s time to react.
I wrote in an e-mail this morning to someone in the community, “People can preach and preach that we need to change, but sometimes it’s the major, traumatic events in our lives that finally set us in motion.”
It’s human nature; we tend to react to the environment around us instead of being proactive in creating that environment. Many times we don’t take responsibility until we’re forced to.
The problem, of course, is that when we reach the point of having to react, we’ve already lost control and spend much of our energy regaining it before we can begin to work on positive steps to move in a new direction.
The same pattern can be seen repeatedly in the business world and yes, in wireless communications. The most obvious area, of course, is a carrier not preparing well enough for competition and then having to respond to it when revenue levels fall. In this case, the impact is on the carrier and perhaps shareholders.
However, I see two major problems in our industry with regard to areas of ethics and public interest that must be better and more proactively addressed:
1) We must figure out once and for all any possible health issues related to cellphone use before the issue really comes back to bite our industry in the butt.
2) In countries where relevant laws do not yet exist, we need to do a better job of vocally encouraging people to use cellphones more safely in their cars and automatically packaging hands-free equipment with handsets.
We’ve given people a wonderful tool-the ability to communicate wirelessly. Now we need to take responsibility for the industry we’ve created by dealing with these issues. It all comes down to image in the long-term, whether or not any blame is due. Just as the parents of the two gunmen in Denver will undoubtedly be scrutinized by the media for what they may or may not have done right, the wireless industry’s image could be torn apart by a major disaster that somehow could be linked to a cellphone.
While disasters tend bring out the best in us as humans and as business people, we still need to work on keeping up that momentum in between news events.
