Destroy a 250-year-old industry and rebuild it in 25: future scenarios at BoB 2022

Four years have passed since the last edition of the Best of Belron, the event that was held in 2018 (it is biennial) and which in 2020 was canceled due to the pandemic situation. In the 2022 edition I find the same spirit, expressed however in a society completely changed by everything that the pandemic has brought with it.

These two years, in fact, have changed the way society approaches issues such as inclusiveness and sustainability, there has been a small-big revolution in the way employees see companies and what they are willing to accept in the workplace.

Carglass is one of those international realities that perhaps anticipated the times on some issues on everyone’s lips today. The Best of Belron is an example: in a highly competitive context, where employees are pushed to give their best, events like this are the way to making people feel at the center of the company because, as CEO Gary Lubner points out, they are the ones who pay the salary at all other levels. These are the gears that play a central role, and that the company involves with national and international initiatives like this one.

The central event, the competition, is flanked by an attention to issues that represent corporate valuesand which are well represented by the conferences: you can move from the hall with the speakers to the one with the competition stations for the replacement of glass / windshields and ADAS recalibration.

The spirit is that of a competition aimed at achieving maximum results, the same that the company applies at all levels. Being the best technician is a very coveted goal, between the stations you can breathe the competition and the public, albeit insiders, is like a stadium.

Abandoned the lights, the music and the timers of the arena where you fight to the sound of rehearsals, lhe conference room tells us how the world is changing and how today sustainability and data are keywords. About data, Carglass is fighting a war (link in Via) against the limitation imposed by the Stellantis group (with the Fiat and Chrysler brands) which has adopted a behavior that discourages competition making it more difficult to access vehicle control units.

On sustainabilityinstead, the data on the screen is shown recycling: 80% worldwide, 100% for Italy. It is precisely with this introduction, linked to data and sustainability, that Kjell Nordström, economist, writer and speaker, takes the stage who recently dealt with the evolution of society in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The world has changed, the pandemic is the focus of Kjell’s speeches and we are monkeys, represented at the wheel of a car in an image that indicates that men are reluctant to change out of laziness. This is why, according to Kjell, when the war is over we will not go back to the old routinesbut most of those already consolidated during the last two years will remain, because the pandemic has forced change, but our innate “laziness” will lead us to Do not come back. In short, the changes we have been forced to are now settled.

Which are we talking about? One of all concerns urbanization, where a “hole in the center of the donut” has been created: cities have seen a return to the less crowded suburbs, and in the centers there has been a flight of people and businesses. Will it really be like this?

The other change concerns globalization, which will suffer a setback: there will be “empires” (Kjell hypothesizes 6 or 7) that will close in on themselves, creating a geopolitical division whose first consequences we have also seen in the world of industry. The European Union, for example, is trying to keep the value chain of electric cars within its borders by pushing for battery recycling. Russia has been cut off from the economy and trade by virtually all producers, while China has often closed its borders with the zero contagion policy (and the quarantines to obtain them).

The topic of climate change has now been accepted and integrated in the business and production world, speeding up the processes. On the other hand, for many, the blame for the changes undergone by the planet is to be attributed precisely to the industrial economy rather than to man himself.

Man has existed on the planet for a long time, Lucy is 3 million years old for example, but human influence on the world is much more recent than we think. Scrolling the timeline forward, for hundreds of thousands of years we have been irrelevant to the planeteven in the fifteenth century with the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance or in the seventeenth century with the Scientific Revolution.

It will be necessary indeed wait for the “giannetta” (Spinning Jenny) towards the end of 1700 to enter the era of industry andinfluence of the economic system on the company e on the planet Land. The industrywith a capital i, it was created in a couple of hundred years and, despite being so young, today it must be completely rebuilt. And we have to do it in 25 years.

Crops, steel, cars, everything must be rethought in the light of climate change and the goal must be achieved in a few decades, at least in Europe. It will be the biggest tsunami of Industry and it will have to happen in a tenth of the time which was used to build the great original cathedral.

Urbanization, the other big issue to be addressed. At the time of the Great War (andSpanish influence), there were few “millionaire” cities in terms of inhabitants: London and Beijing were the first of the modern era, but not the first ever if we count the oldest empires.

Today history repeats itself with many similarities compared to the early 1900s (War in Ukraine and Covid), but 63% of humanity lives in large cities, in about 600 cities around the world Those 600 cities represent, on balance, the world market to which the producers turn. But will it be true that technology will “kill” urbanization? Despite all the talk about smart working and the possibility of working from home, many experts agree that technology will not kill big cities in favor of a return to the countryside or to smaller urban centers: the city, the big city, seems to be a machine that produces hope. Hope to find a job, hope to find a partner, and so on. And we humans are attracted to light and hope, no technology can erase this.

For practical reasonstherefore, the scenario that is painted is that of a world population that will live on a single-digit percentage of the planet’s surface.

Curiosity: women move to cities earlier than men in areas where urbanization is on the rise.

Precisely for this reason, on the one hand there is one push to make big cities more liveable at the level of local pollution (we are simply talking about direct effects on humans, not CO2) and hence the push towards electricity. On the other, closely related, there is the need to reduce car ownershipespecially in urban contexts.

The goal is clear, to sell fewer cars at a higher price and earn more on added services. It won’t happen todaybut cars will tend to be for a few, as has been happening for some time in eastern megalopolises, linking the possible possession of cars, for example, to the obligation of a parking lot owned / rented, to an additional tax to be paid, or the limitations of assigning a single license plate per family and so on.

Point number three of the future scenario imagined by Kjell: Intelligence as a Service. Once upon a time a world in which, and electronic geeks or those who experimented with the first rudiments of programming know it, accessing information was not easyeven when the Internet already existed, even though it went to 56K…

The information was created by fans online in the forums, there were no tutorials for everything. 2022, on the other hand, presents us with a different scenario, with Internet that offers a condensed and prefabricated answer to any question or need. For example, how to change the thermal paste on a notebook.

The trend is that of a development and categorization of online information, even of quality and at an academic / scientific level, which will be usable with a “subscription” exactly like today Spotify allows us to access the entire music catalog, without going to retrieve it on Napster one song at a time for example.

Information today follows the same path as music, you pay a small price (the connection or a subscription) and you have all the knowledge of human beings at your disposal. And this has accelerated the times, even of Science: at the beginning of the pandemic it was said that it would take 10/15 years to create a vaccine, but the shared and accessible knowledge from all over the world has allowed to significantly reduce the timing.

The last point concerns capitalism, now established as universal given that the main countries, even those furthest from Western thought, they took the form of market economies (excluding North Korea).

In the world we all speak the same language of the economy, and today this language is subordinate to the theme of sustainability. Someone shouts at “greenwashing” to be followed as a corporate compliance rule, but this is not the case at all: today (and tomorrow even more), sustainability means having a competitive advantage.

The industry, in fact, works in temporary monopolies, where temporary can also mean lasting years or decades: iPhone, Ikea, Coca Cola, are all brands that have long been in command, in various sectors. Whoever does things a little better wins of the others and the winning company retains the scepter if it continues to be a little better, while performing the same function and offering the same service as its competitors.

Today, in that concept of “doing a little better”entered powerfully the theme of sustainability and inclusivenessand it is clear that for companies that want to stay at the top of the charts it is something essential.