Where are we going? Steve Jobs, Wayne Gretzky and Malcolm Gladwell

Steve Jobs gave a glimpse into the concept he believed in at the end of the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007 by quoting hockey legend Wayne Gretzky:

    “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.”

But in order to skate to where the puck is going, you actually have to be able to figure  out where the puck is going. That is one of the more fascinating things Steve Jobs and Wayne Gretzky had in common; the ability to determine where the puck is going.

Maybe Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” in Outlier’s helps explain this - Gladwell  claims that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

At hookflash I’m lucky to be working with a team of 10,000 hour experts, world leaders in IP communications. People like Erik Lagerway, Robin Raymond, Alan Duric, Cullen Jennings, Larry Lisser and Andy Abramson and many members of our hookflash development team with this kind of deep expertise, working hard to “skate to where the puck is going.”

We think a lot about where communications is going. I’m reassured we’re headed to where the puck is going by comments like this from one of our early users, Evan Kirstel, on twitter earlier this week: “So when I’m on a video call with LinkedIn connections via @hookflash is that social or UC? Feels like both….and the future.”