Did the Founding Fathers issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) when they started the American Revolution?  Did John F. Kennedy issue one when he called for a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s?  How about Nelson Mandela when he stood up against apartheid?

I’m pretty sure there were no RFPs issued for these or during any revolutionary time.  They were sailing in uncharted waters and were defining their needs as they went along with the help of trusted partners.  Only one thing guided them - their desire.

It’s hard to ignore that we live in a revolutionary time.  Digital media is fundamentally altering how we communicate and redefining basic human interaction.  YouTube has been a domain name for just three years.  For the majority of the world, Facebook and MySpace came out of nowhere last year.  Twitter is exploding this year.  

What’s next?  No one truly knows.  The only thing anyone can agree on is that we live in a very dynamic time.

As defined by Wikipedia, an RFP is “an invitation for suppliers, through a bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific commodity or service.”  By their very nature, then, RFPs are ill suited for revolutionary times, because they are based on the premise that we know exactly what we need.

If you are leading your organization to where it has never been in a way not possible before, do you really know what you need?  

When you consider there are 17 new forms of digital media and that this number will only continue to increase, there is a better way.  Find someone you can trust to deepen your understanding of digital media and help you create and execute a well-conceived strategy to achieve your revolution.

What do you think? Is there a place for RFPs during revolutionary times?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 11:46 pm and is filed under change, strategy, transformational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.