Muchas veces he escuchado que en Navidad, nos olvidamos de recibir al Señor. Y muchas veces también, he escuchado un sinfín de consejos y explicaciones acerca de cómo en verdad hemos de recibirlo.
Sin embargo, en más de una ocasión, si bien los consejos han sido bellos e incluso poéticos, pocas veces me han resultado sinceros y prácticos. Finalmente ¿Qué significa recibir al niño Jesús en nuestro corazón? ¿Qué significa preparar el camino para que el niño Dios nazca en nuestra casa? ¿Es verdad que debemos olvidarnos de los festejos para enfocarnos puramente a las celebraciones religiosas?
Como inquieto curioso, he investigado al respecto y a continuación, presento respuesta a mis interrogantes, dando 4 consejos prácticos para festejar esta Navidad los cuales espero sean útiles a nuestros lectores en este tiempo de Adviento, que hoy comienza.
Consejo Número Uno: ¿Quién fue Jesucristo, si no el redentor del mundo, el Dios hecho hombre que vino a redimir a la humanidad del pecado? Esto significa que Dios, en su infinita misericordia, al tiempo que nos crea libres, nos quiere perfectos y limpios de pecado.
Por lo tanto, el primer paso para recibir al Niño Jesús, no es poner un bonito nacimiento, ni un árbol de Navidad, sino pedir perdón por nuestros pecados, hincándonos en el confesionario y disculpándonos con Nuestro Padre Dios (y con las personas a las que hemos ofendido) por todas esas actitudes que nos han alejado de Él.
Este sí que sería un excelente primer paso para comenzar el Adviento y preparar la Navidad. Por supuesto que no significa que omitamos el arbolito y las luces y los adornos y el nacimiento. Esas cosas bellas también le encantan a Dios. Pero primero lo primero, ¿no creen?
Consejo Número Dos: Navidad siempre se relaciona, en nuestras sociedades urbanas, con un despilfarro excesivo y derroche, no sólo de dinero, sino también de tiempo con todas las fiestas y parrandas que pertenecen a la famosa Maratón Guadalupe-Reyes. Si bien Jesucristo sabía que los festejos del ser humano son una forma de agradar a Nuestro Padre Dios (no por nada convirtió el agua en vino en las Bodas de Caná y celebró la Pascua con sus Discípulos), estoy seguro de que le entristece ver que, con la excusa de los festejos, las personas pierden su dignidad embriagándose con alcohol y drogas, favoreciendo la violencia y la desintegración de la familia.
Un excelente segundo consejo, es tomar los festejos Navideños con mesura y nunca olvidar que la Navidad se festeja porque Jesús vino a enseñarnos que Él es el camino que lleva a Dios… Esto significa que creyendo en Él y (sobre todo) SIENDO COMO ÉL, SIGUIENDO SU EJEMPLO, podremos participar del Reino de Dios.
Consejo Número Tres: ¿Recuerdan aquél pasaje del Evangelio en el que Jesús nos recuerda que toda aquélla obra de misericordia que hiciéramos para el más pequeño de nuestros hermanos, realmente la haríamos para Él? Pues caray, hagamos un pequeño esfuerzo. Uno pequeñito. ¿Por qué no, en este tiempo de Adviento, en vez de despilfarrar nuestro dinero y planear lo que regalaremos en Navidad a todas esas personas que todo tienen (nuestros amigos, nuestros padres, nuestros hijos, etc.), en vez de eso, mejor organizamos un intercambio de regalos con las personas que viven en la calle (y les regalamos esas cosas buenas que le regalaríamos a nuestros hijos), o vamos a la sala de urgencias de un hospital y llevamos uno de esos manjares que cenamos la noche del 24 a la gente que en esos momentos vive una situación de dolor)? ¿Por qué no vamos a la cárcel a hacerle más llevadera la noche a los presos y a sus familiares, o invitamos a esa tía o amigo amargados a los que nadie invita porque “son conflictivos” o “no son de nuestra clase”, o “nos caen mal”?
Seguro que alguna de estas acciones, sería una tercera gran forma de recibir a Jesús en nuestro corazón.
Consejo Especial: Y por último, concluyo con lo mejor. ¿No les parecería genial, poder disfrutar en Navidad del Cuerpo y la Sangre de Nuestro Señor a través de la comunión? Ése sí que será un acto sublime que podremos realizar para REALMENTE recibir a Jesús en Nuestra Alma. He aquí el cuarto y último consejo para festejar esta Navidad. Finalmente, Comulgar sí que es motivo de Fiesta porque Jesús no sólo vino a salvarnos, también se quedó aquí, con nosotros, para siempre.
It’s not just you. It really is getting harder to outpace the other guys. Our recent research finds that since the middle of the 1990s, which marked the mainstream adoption of the internet and commercial enterprise software, competition within the U.S. economy has accelerated to unprecedented levels. There are a number of possible reasons for this quickening, including M&A activity, the opening up of global markets, and companies’ continuing R&D efforts. However, we found that a central catalyst in this shift is the massive increase in the power of IT investments.
To better understand when and where IT confers competitive advantage in today’s economy, we studied all publicly traded U.S. companies in all industries from the 1960s through 2005, looking at relevant performance indicators from each (including sales, earnings, profitability, and market capitalization) and found some striking patterns: Since the mid-1990s, a new competitive dynamic has emerged—greater gaps between the leaders and laggards in an industry, more concentrated and winner-take-all markets, and more churn among rivals in a sector. Strikingly, this pattern closely matches the turbulent “creative destruction” mode of capitalism that was first predicted over 60 years ago by economist Joseph Schumpeter. This accelerated competition has coincided with a sharp increase in the quantity and quality of IT investments, as more organizations have moved to bolster (or altogether replace) their existing operating models using the internet and enterprise software. Tellingly, the changes in competitive dynamics are most apparent in precisely those sectors that have spent the most on information technology, even when we controlled for other factors.
This pattern is a familiar one in markets for digitized products like computer software and music. Those industries have long been dominated by both a winner-take-all dynamic and high turbulence, as each group of dominant innovators is threatened by succeeding waves of innovation. Consider how quickly Google supplanted Yahoo, which supplanted AltaVista and others that created the search engine market from nothing. Or the relative speed with which new recording artists can dominate sales in a category.
Most industries have historically been fairly immune from this kind of Schumpeterian competition. However, our findings show that the internet and enterprise IT are now accelerating competition within traditional industries in the broader U.S. economy. Why? Not because more products are becoming digital but because more processes are: Just as a digital photo or a web-search algorithm can be endlessly replicated quickly and accurately by copying the underlying bits, a company’s unique business processes can now be propagated with much higher fidelity across the organization by embedding it in enterprise information technology. As a result, an innovator with a better way of doing things can scale up with unprecedented speed to dominate an industry. In response, a rival can roll out further process innovations throughout its product lines and geographic markets to recapture market share. Winners can win big and fast, but not necessarily for very long.
CVS, Cisco, and Otis Elevator are among the many companies we’ve observed gaining a market edge by competing on technology-enabled processes—carefully examining their working methods, revamping them in interesting ways, and using readily available enterprise software and networking technologies to spread these process changes to far-flung locations so they’re executed the same way every time.
In the following pages, we’ll explore why the link between technology and competition has become much stronger and tighter since the mid-1990s, and we’ll clarify the roles that business leaders and enterprise technologies should play in this new environment. Competing at such high speeds isn’t easy, and not everyone will be able to keep up. The senior executives who do may realize not only greatly improved business processes but also higher market share and increased market value.
How Technology Has Changed Competition
The mid-1990s marked a clear discontinuity in competitive dynamics and the start of a period of innovation in corporate IT, when the internet and enterprise software applications—like enterprise resource management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise content management (ECM)—became practical tools for business. Corporate investments in IT surged during this time—from about $3,500 spent per worker in 1994 to about $8,000 in 2005, according the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). (See the exhibit “.”) At the same time, annual productivity growth in U.S. companies roughly doubled, after plodding along at about 1.4% for nearly 20 years. Much attention has been paid to the connection between productivity growth and the increase in IT investment. But hardly any has been directed to the nature of the link between IT and competitiveness. That’s why, with help from Harvard Business School researcher Michael Sorell and Feng Zhu, who’s now an assistant professor at USC, we set out two years ago to compare the increase in IT spending with various measures of competition, focusing on three quantifiable indicators: concentration, turbulence, and performance spread.
In a concentrated or winner-take-all industry, just a few companies account for the bulk of the market share. For our study, we focused on the degree to which each industry became more or less concentrated over time. A sector is turbulent if the sales leaders in it are frequently leapfrogging one another in rank order. And finally the performance spread in an industry is large when the leaders and laggards differ greatly on standard performance measures such as return on assets, profit margins, and market capitalization per dollar of revenue—the kinds of numbers that matter a lot to senior managers and investors.