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2013 slips gently into tomorrow. Today is the last day of the old year.

For those of us in the Northlands, it’s also right in the middle of our winter season. Our celebrations, and our thoughts, are about survival and a hope for re-birth into another year.

But that is pagan thinking; hunter-gatherer beliefs that we have hugged close to our collective chests for more that two thousand years.

The idea that a ‘winter’ must be survived, that when the sun starts to stay a little longer in the sky it can be back to business as usual.

The economic winter which bit in 2009 is still with us; there are limited prospects for growth in 2014. There is no ‘business as usual’.

There is no more, ‘usual’.

In fact, the global recession wasn’t a winter; it was an ice age. A period of change that killed off high-street mammoths and financial tigers; whether they saw themselves as ‘sabre toothed’ or not.

The ice age changed the climate and the landscape and, thereby, those who could survive and thrive in it.

Out with the old, in with the new.

2013 slips gently into tomorrow. Today should be the last day of thinking as you used to.

Digital marketing likes to think of itself as very ‘cutting edge’ and up-to-date and compared to 60-second TV commercials and full pages in the national press, I’m sure it is.

But if you start to ride that tiger, you have to stay on it.

The social media gurus encourage you to embrace the change and get on board with the latest thinking – as neatly presented in their latest book, downloadable or otherwise.

Marketing software developers tell you to download their latest app or program and get ahead of the curve.

Really?

Simply the lead times involved in producing a book or writing a piece of software dictate that this is actually yesterday’s news, last year’s curve, old thinking.

You follow these guys, gals and gurus on Facebook and Twitter and that is just what you are. A follower.

The social media world tends to be very self-referencing; we ‘like’ the latest insight and ‘share’ the most recent wisdom and those things colour our view of the world and how we behave within it.

And that tends to point us towards ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions.

It’s all too easy to take clients and try to shoe-horn their business challenges into the model that we’ve read up on in that last downloaded eBook.

But all businesses are different.

And the digital landscape changes every day.

So why not look at it this way; every new challenge is just that, a fresh situation that demands original thinking.

Is that scary? Or empowering?

Out with the old, in with the new.

2013 slips gently into tomorrow. Behave as you used to and you might not survive.

As real, live human beings, we like to give a meaning to New Years Eve and New Years Day that goes a little beyond having too much to drink, kissing a stranger and waking up with a sore head.

So why not see it as an event horizon; a line in time, on the other side of which everything is new.

In 2014, think for yourself.

Respond to your own environment.

See every challenge as new; therefore every response must be new.

Out with the old, in with the new.

2013 slips gently into tomorrow. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.

Enjoy.