Fast Forward into 2023

Welcome to our 2022-2023 edition of the ‘Who’s Who in Trinidad & Tobago Business’. We hope that your journey of discovery, page after page, is as inspiring and informative as our publishing team and content producers would like it to be for our customers.
Whenever I hear the term fast forward, I think of technology and the mechanisms that have developed to allow people to skip over things they do not deem important, spending time instead listening or looking at some form of entertainment or educational content. Those people speed up the unimportant content by as much as five times by using two or three arrows consecutively to move ahead to a specific destination where they use a pause button and return to the regular viewing or listening speed.

The age of fast-forwarding has now taken us to new heights as the use of forecasting and visioning has brought the future to the present, and with a high degree of accuracy. Business has moved from five to 10-year planning, to a two to three-year planning cycle, moving faster every day because of the application of technology in all forms and functions.

In the book Exponential Organizations, the author Salim Ismail gives many examples of how a range of maybe 10 different technologies across many verticals – Health, Education, Security, IT, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy & Hospitality – provides time frames for delivering the cost/performance improvement, subsequently getting better by the day so that we can now understand why over the past four years, some technologies’ average cost has come from thousands of dollars for usage to mere cents.

Why do I speak to this in the Publisher’s Note this year? Because I believe the message in the theme of this year’s edition “Fast Forward into 2023” must be that organisations who have chosen to be in the Who’s Who in Trinidad & Tobago Business see their participation not as a cost, but as an investment in the growth and scaling of their business, and as part of an exponential return on an investment strategy that will result in their customers’ trust and experience.

Who’s Who in Trinidad & Tobago Business is not a magazine, it is a marketing and public relations tool, which puts your greatest asset, your people, in the face of existing and future customers. In every company, systems run the business and people manage the systems. Such is the critical pivot around which success moves constantly.

For fast-forwarding to be successful, investing in the right talent is the number one investment strategy that a company, that wishes to be successful tomorrow, must get right today. With the wrong talent, the gaps will come fast and furious and any idea of fast forwarding will inevitably end in failure or will not achieve its desired future state, in the right time frame.

The business environment for 2023, is not likely to look different in the local and regional sense except for perhaps Guyana, which will continue to boom through oil and gas. The global economy will continue to have its ups and downs, but it would appear that those cycles are now much more predictable, and therefore the next year will be one of opportunity, as a window to the next five years will open to those who have the right people, with the right leadership, and the right culture. Those companies that have these three attributes are once again in this publication and those who are in for the first time, now have risen to the challenge.

In closing, let me thank the Executive Publication Team and the Editorial Contributors for once again punching way above their weight and the decision makers in the companies that are represented here, for their continuing brilliant foresight. This foresight continues to bring a very high level of confidence in the possibilities of business success for all customers, employees, shareholders, and communities of these business ventures.

Let’s create the Exponential Experience for all in 2023.