How to not be afraid of your business technology

The one constant of the digital age is the rapid and dizzying rate of change in business technology. Periodically, more often than he or she would like, a business leader will find themselves earning a completely new way of doing things. New 

technology has the promise of providing great things for a business, whether it is the advertising power of social media to the mobility and ease of use of smart phones. The trick is that when the new technology comes, to not be afraid of it.

Learning new technology can be intimidating. A business automation and strategy expert named Tara Phelps compares IT learning to riding a bicycle or how to walk. Both of those learning experiences involve falling down and getting cuts and bruises. The same can be said about learning new business technology.

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The trick for not being afraid is to recognize that you will have a learning curve and will likely make mistakes on the way to mastering new business technology. You should not be afraid of looking dumb, think about how the new technology will benefit your business, and think of a new piece of technology as just a new and better way of doing what you’ve been doing all along. 20 years ago you likely read a newspaper. 10 years ago you were looking up news stories on your desk top computer. Now you are reading stories on your iPad or other tablets. It is all the same thing, just a different way of doing it.

For just a little bit of inspiration, read the account on the Emmenation blog of a business manager who was obliged to throw out everything he knew and had built up in the past 15 years and had to learn how to do social media to accomplish the same thing. It took three years of trial and error, practice, and instruction from a variety of people. But now the manager has embraced the social media technology and he feels himself lucky to be alive in an era in which a keystroke or even a wink of an eye on Google Glass can do so much. And you will feel this way as well, if you persevere and think of your new business technology as something that can help you and a business tool; not something to be afraid of.