Embracing Changes, Expanding Horizons

Embracing Changes, Expanding Horizons.

The end of the year is for everyone the reckoning, the time for balances and reflections. It's useful for each of us to draw conclusions and then start again: a year older, more aware, conscious and mature. 

What has 2021 left us and, above all, what do we expect in 2022? 

When the Covid-19 pandemic erupted, we immediately thought that changing was the answer. Many business-as-usual approaches to serving customers, working with suppliers and collaborating with colleagues—or just getting anything done—would have failed. We had to increase the speed of decision making, while improving productivity, using technology and data in new ways and accelerating the scope and scale of innovation. And it worked. Rethinking how to move to our Next Normal was the Opportunity, not a challenge any longer.

And, while doing so, we didn’t lose sight of five imperatives that will position us for success: rethinking in a sustainable way, innovating, redeploying talent, improving productivity and shifting operations with proximity principle.

Embracing and accepting changes wasn’t enough. We aim to be the game-changers, and through an open ecosystem - Center of Excellence - we created a peculiar place where people, technology and ideas interact in a unique way leaded by excellence. 

CoE is All4labels' innovation hub dedicated to foster and spark innovation, adopting a collaborative mindset in an open common table that see involved customers, universities, centers of researches and partners. Thanks to the cross-pollination approach we aim to ideate, prototype and execute the most innovative and sustainable solutions for the good of industry and the planet. Together.

I couldn’t think of not connecting my general reflections to Metaverse term meaning – introduced on 1992 - by Neal Stephenson in "Snow Crash".

After 30 years, including two years of global pandemic that have revolutionized the sense of man, the way of being, acting, behaving and doing business, the Metaverse becomes reality. 

The new frontier of the internet, a great new virtual world, where users, through their avatars live interactive multimedia experiences. In short, a universe where everything is virtual except emotions and economy. With the Covid-19 pandemic, being unable to go anywhere, the obvious development is toward smart living and smart working, meaning less communication in person, with or without the Metaverse. But with it, business collaboration can feel like the real thing in terms of focused discussion and personal interaction – by being in the same room with your colleagues. This is what we already doing today, no matter how primitive or rudimentary.

What I feel is that the most dramatic impact that the Metaverse could ever deliver on our core values and society at large is by enabling people to actually transfer their consciousness into the virtual reality and allowing them to live on in a purely digital form, ideally forever. That would be a literally life-changing event.

Perhaps, this is what Mark Zuckerberg has been planning for the Metaverse all along.

As discussed on the "Finat Label Congress review in Finat" where I was honored to be interviewed by  Andy Thomas, I am very much in favor of what in many calls "digital humanism" - a process in which innovation must be put at the humankind's service and therefore digitalization and innovation become the means, not the end. Innovation can be valuable only if it responsible. The winning companies should be responsibly sustainable - there is no responsibility without sustainability and there is no responsibility without rethinking the sustainable packaging of tomorrow.

To conclude, no matter how many great deals you may make, no matter the figures, turnover and KPIs, in the end, it's only to your heart that you have to account for what you've accomplished. That's the only accounting that matters.

Always take the smiles that are offered to you, but give more of them away. There are no budgets for happiness because the future will remain Human!