One of my reflections from this summer is that the entire western world seems to be concerned with protecting the status quo. To do what we can to avoid having to change. New technologies and applications are subject to heavy regulation to slow down their introduction and to ensure minimal impact on existing ways of doing things. Incumbent companies and governments team up to keep the status quo and to avoid these companies being disrupted, causing thousands of tax paying employees to lose their jobs. The European Commission is releasing laws, acts and regulations that increase the cost of compliance enormously. The news reports virtually everything from the perspective of how the news item will change things and how this is bad. In some way, the current state is viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement and any chance will simply result in reduced quality of life. In my view, that view is completely wrong. Over the last century we saw massive improvements in life expectancy (about 40 years since the 1920s!!!), child mortality (from 25% to less than 4%), extreme poverty (from around 70% of the human population to less than 9%), etcetera, etcetera. All these improvements did not come from keeping things as they are, but rather from accepting and encouraging the introduction of new technologies, new products, new tools and new ways of working. We haven’t reached the end of the road, but rather we’ve barely started to scratch the surface! So, as a reminder to all of us: improvement comes from change, not from keeping things the same!