Time to Develop
We tend to overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in the next ten.
If I’d opened YO! Sushi at the end of the first development year it would not have been half what it is today. At the time I was thinking how we could serve drinks in a more useful way and I’d come up with motorised trolleys on rails, but I was worried about ladies’ heels getting stuck in the tracks.
Then I thought “robots” (isn’t that a great word) but where to get them?
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I’d heard that if you were a big company you could call up the universities for help. Here’s a chance to fail I thought and I tried Loughborough University in the English Midlands telling them my story. “Try Edinburgh,” they said and gave me a number, and guess what? The phone rang and was answered with the immortal words “Robot Department – how can I help you?”
Well three hours later I was speaking to Martin who had developed a system for robotic wheelchairs and was willing to help me.
A few weeks before we opened I saw a robot drinks trolley go round a corner unaided and speaking too.
“Move your fat arse, some of us have a fucking job to do round here,” it said, and I thought to myself that at least people were going to come in and have a look.
Only a robot could be rude to a customer and get away with it!
Life does not get better by chance. It gets better by change.
Jim Rohn
The future is invented in the minds of men, so we already know what is going to happen. Remember those comics you read as children; now you’re grown up and all those things you read about like computers and monorails and robots have come true.
It took longer than we imagined and the next future has already been written.