"Tradition is the dead hand of human progress.” -Kelly Miller
We spend a lot of our time covering new product developments and how emerging technologies can change the way contractors do their jobs. Manufacturers boast of the productivity savings associated with various tweaks, improvements and, at times, wholesale changes.
In our conversations with contractors about new equipment, it’s not rare to encounter companies that recognize the potential for improving productivity by purchasing “cutting edge” equipment, but instead are happy to continue on with the good old reliable machines they’ve been using for years. Sure, they’ll take a look at the new equipment, test it out and see what it costs. But many contractors subscribe to the same opinion as the irrigation contractor who recently explained to us his hesitancy to jump on board the bandwagon about a new irrigation system component this way: “I usually let other contractors test products out for a year or two for me to make sure they work well before I buy them.”
It’s an understandable position to take, and I speak from experience on this matter. We recently debuted a new service of Lawn & Landscape called News Now that allows us to deliver breaking news stories to our readers’ computers via e-mail as soon as we learn about them. An unfortunate mistake following a distribution of one such story resulted in a number of our readers being inconvenienced by receiving a couple dozen e-mails not intended for them.
At this point, it would have been easy for us to scrap the entire News Now program and pull our heads back into our comfortable shells from which we produce the printed product in your hands right now (except for those of you reading this at Lawn & Landscape Online).
However, the Internet represents an amazing technological explosion for business in general, particularly for the publishing industry. It is our corporate belief that to best serve our customers we must constantly reevaluate how we produce our product and how the available technology can enable us to improve that process.Inherent in this philosophy is the acceptance that we will occasionally make mistakes or learn lessons the hard way. But as with any business, it is a marathon we are running, not a sprint. What matters is where you finish in the long run. To finish where we want to finish – as the premier provider of information for green industry contractors – we must embrace technology and accept that the best way of running our business today may not still be the best tomorrow. Even if that means making mistakes. I’m sure this is true for green industry contractors as well.
Explore the June 1998 Issue
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