These days, the future comes at us faster than ever before. We live in an age of accelerating returns, in which technological advancement moves at an exponential rate. In ten years, no industry will look like it does now. In twenty years many, if not most, of today’s jobs will be completely obsolete.
Yet the future is about more than just technology. Health and economic trends, population growth and climate change, just to name a few, will also create massive challenges—and massive opportunities. The time to prepare for the future is always the present.
Dr. James Canton, author of the new book Future Smart, knows more about the future than just about anybody. Yet, when I spoke to him, he wasn’t fixated on any particular trend, like artificial intelligence or genomics, but on helping companies to become “future ready.” They key is not to try to be an oracle, but to shift our thinking to what the future will bring.
On September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district in Lower Manhattan. Declaring, “We are the 99%,” they captured the attention of the nation. Within a few months, however, the park was cleared and the protesters went home, achieving little, if anything.
In 1998, a similar movement, Otpor, began in Serbia. Yet where Occupy failed, Otpor succeeded marvelously. In just two years they overthrew the reviled Milošević government. Soon after came the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East.
While Occupy certainly did not lack passion or appeal—indeed its core message about inequality continues to resonate—it was unable to translate that fervor into effective action. Otpor, on the other hand, created a movement of enormous impact. The contrast is sharp and it is no accident. Successful movements do things that failed ones don’t.
Steve Jobs didn’t want to build an app store. As Walter Isaacson describes in his biography of Apple’s founder, the famously controlling Jobs was wary of the “bandwidth” needed to police a veritable army of third party developers. At first, he wouldn’t even discuss it.
Yet eventually, even Jobs had to relent and the App store has become an enormous success. Last year, developers reaped $10 billion on the platform. In fact, third party apps have become so central to the iPhone, it’s hard to imagine it without them. Increasingly, products are becoming platforms.
It’s become kind of a Joy’s Law for the networked era—the best resources and capabilities always lie somewhere else. So unless you can pull in people outside your company to improve your product, you’re going to be at a distinct disadvantage. Yet for all the talk about platforms, there’s little guidance about what makes them tick. Here’s what you need to know.
Business runs on certainty. Investors want predictable profits and will punish companies that vacillate up and down. Managers want accountable employees who they can trust to get things done. Customers want to deal with firms that they can be sure will be around next week.
When things are uncertain, penalties are imposed. Valuations tumble, people get fired, customers flee. That’s why managers learn to eliminate complexity from the system and keep it simple. They strive to remain within their realm of expertise and not stray too far into the unknown.
Yet to manage complexity we must do more than just ignore it. We can, of course, limit uncertainty by sticking with what we know and avoiding what we don’t. Still, uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature of any system that is exposed to the real world. Sooner or later, no matter what we do, it’s going to catch up with us. So, in the end, we need to meet it head on.
Self-interest has always been a primary tenet of capitalism. As Adam Smith famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Private interest, in the aggregate, is often a public good.
Yet in an article inHarvard Business Review, William Lazonick argued just the opposite. In particular, he accused greedy CEO’s of advocating for public research, while at the same time pumping money into share buybacks in order to gin up their stock based compensation, enriching themselves while impoverishing the rest of us.
His argument, while sensational and superficially persuasive, is ultimately flawed. First, he cynically selects his facts to suit his argument (more on that below). Second, he seems to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between public and private investment. The reality is that stock buybacks are often positive and healthy for the economy and the country.
In his novel The Castle, Franz Kafka tells the story of a man named “K” who is summoned by mysterious authorities for unknown reasons. He finds himself at the mercy of their bureaucracy and endless paperwork, which is carried out for a purpose that nobody can fathom but everyone seems to accept.
Most people can relate to the story. 20th century era bureaucracies often seem as if they were designed by Kafka himself. From governments to corporations to international institutions like the IMF, we are often at the mercy of a monolithic central authority we don’t really understand, but must submit to.
Yet although we’ve mostly come to accept the realities of central authority, digital technology is creating a titanic shift toward distributed models. Rather than assets managed by centralized institutions, we have ecosystems managed by platforms. While most welcome this change, it does create new challenges. We’re all going to have to learn to adapt.
For decades, marketers plied their craft according to a simple formula: Advertising creates awareness which in turn produces sales. This was not, as many would argue, a mistaken belief. Virtually all of the great brands of the 20th century were built using that model and many still prosper with it today.
However, it has become incomplete. A variety of trends, including community marketing, digital technology, social media and mass personalization—just to name a few—have conspired against the traditional view that message and media are sufficient to create sales.
So today’s marketers have a serious challenge. If the old model is broken, what should replace it? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. Media budgets continue to play an important role in successful marketing programs, just as many of the trendy new tactics often fall short. What we need is not a new model, but a more strategic way of thinking.
Humans are natural pattern recognizers. Whether, as in prehistoric times, we were recognizing danger in a telltale rustle of the bushes or skimming a page of letters and numbers today, we use patterns to derive meaning without having to do a more detailed inspection.
Futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil considers pattern recognition so important that in his recent book, How to Create a Mind, he argued that pattern recognition and intelligence are essentially the same thing. Expertise, in essence, is the familiarity of patterns of a specific field.
It’s earnings season again and Amazon, for the first time ever, has broken out the financial results of its cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The results are impressive. In less than a decade, Amazon has grown AWS into a $5 billion business that is still growing at 50%.
Yet even more impressive—and strangely unnoticed—is that IBM cloud services is now a $7.7 billion business growing at 75%, according to IBM CFO Martin Schroeter’s prepared remarks during the company’s recent earnings call. Even for Big Blue, that’s a big business.
Amazon and IBM run vastly different operations, so making a direct comparison between the two announcements isn’t exactly apples to apples. Still, I think two things are clear. First, the cloud is becoming an absolutely massive business. Second, that much like the PC business back in the 90’s, most of the value will be in software and services, not hardware.
Most of us live busy lives. There is work, family, maybe a hobby or two and the need for some leisure time to refresh our batteries. So the amount of things we devote serious thought to is necessarily small and we get in the habit of not paying attention to much that goes on around us.
In the great majority of cases this is harmless, even prudent. We conserve our cognitive energy for things that are meaningful to us and let the rest sail by. Yet often, when tragedy strikes, it becomes clear that many people were aware of the problem, even laughed about it, but chose to do nothing.
Yet once you get into the habit of ignoring things, it becomes increasingly likely that you will miss something important. We often feel something is wrong, but look away and let the pangs of unease subside. There’s comfort in numbers, so it’s easy to go along with the crowd. However, crowds are often stupid. Simply going along with them can lead us horribly astray.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
, knows more about the future than just about anybody. Yet, when I spoke to him, he wasn’t fixated on any particular trend, like artificial intelligence or genomics, but on helping companies to become “future ready.” They key is not to try to be an oracle, but to shift our thinking to what the future will bring.
, Franz Kafka tells the story of a man named “K” who is summoned by mysterious authorities for unknown reasons. He finds himself at the mercy of their bureaucracy and endless paperwork, which is carried out for a purpose that nobody can fathom but everyone seems to accept.
, he argued that pattern recognition and intelligence are essentially the same thing. Expertise, in essence, is the familiarity of patterns of a specific field.
