The New Future of Business:
Predictive, Smart, and Mobile
The year is 2025. A vibrant global hyperconnected Innovation Ecosystem has emerged, generating millions of jobs and businesses. Innovation Ecosystems are high-performance collaborative global web networks that are predictive, real time, and mobile. Innovation Ecosystems will be highly agile and enable innovative entrepreneurs to create new global digital markets. They bring together talent, innovation, supply chains, markets, makers, capital, and experts—both humans and technology—to produce commerce. Most jobs are entrepreneurial and project based, working across borders and engaging deep, collaborative networks of people, companies, and technology. Digital Tribes, specialized networks of people, companies, and Smart Machines, collaborate and compete across the many Innovation Ecosystems.
There is an explosion of innovation that is shaping opportunities and electrifying buyers, sellers, makers, and producers across 150 nations that fuel global trade in yottabytes (1 YB = 10008bytes = 1024bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = 1,000 zettabytes = 1 trillion terabytes) and in nanoseconds by the speed-of-light web networks. Business by the speed of photons fuels a dynamic global Innovation Economy.
Products and services are designed and sourced in real time across Innovation Ecosystems that bring together talent, supply chains, digital markets, and projects on demand, serving billions of customers every minute of every day. These Innovation Ecosystems are agile, predictive, postindustrial networks in which products, services, and ideas which serve a global marketplace of customers. Moving from new idea to product can take seconds in the New Future of Business. Automated intelligence plus humans will make markets, create innovations, and monetize ideas instantly. Smart Prediction will be a new competitive advantage.
Multiple Innovation Ecosystems with domain-specific expertise in materials, electronics, and customer service interact with freelance experts from specific industries, such as security, health, real estate, finance, and media. Knowledge-Value Specialists interact with Smart Machines, distribution, and robots.
Drones, flyables, digital personalities, avatars, and Smart Machines are integrated into the global business culture. Individuals have digital clones that serve customers and conduct commerce while their Authentic Personas—actual humans—create, play, travel, or work on other projects. Entirely new digital business models create Super Gigs—freelance projects for hire in alternative energy, health enhancement, consumer genomics, adaptive finance, predictive simulation, Big Data, and immersive entertainment, all of which didn’t even exist five years, or even five minutes, before.
In this New Future a fundamental global shift in the way business functions has emerged. Smart Prediction, the evolution on the convergence of Big Data, Analytics, and Cognitive Computing, has transformed business. Customers are producers. Competitors are collaborators. Crowdsourcing drives marketing.
This is business reinvented at the speed of light.
Producers make things and sell things, but what is made and the how it’s made is different. On-demand virtual foundries and connected supply chains from off-world factories in space drive a vibrant marketplace of 3D Makers to simulators as digital currencies electrify new choices for commerce. Product designs are simulated and uploaded to 3D Maker factories that produce and distribute across this planet as well as other off-world orbiting cities.
Companies predict customers’ desire and market those Big Data Desires to Knowledge-Smart businesses offering health enhancement, deep learning, gaming, entertainment, and finance.
The emergence of the Global Innovation Ecosystem—a convergence of mobile, TV, auto, habitat, computer, sensor, and wearable platforms—is the largest global marketplace in history, linking up 8 billion people who are not only both consumers and producers but also who share knowledge and talent in dynamic ways. It is a constantly evolving, morphable digital platform that adapts based on who you are, where you are, and what you’re searching for. This Innovation Ecosystem links networks, smart devices, people, smart machines, and markets. This is where talent, projects, trade, and innovation converge—the Makers World.
3D nano-manufacturing has transformed health care, consumer products, industrial products, and entertainment. Most homes and businesses have 3D Maker-Bots at their location so they can make on-demand personalized pharmaceuticals, food, tools, clothing, and even complex devices. Everyone is a 3D Maker—the self-sufficiency of the population has altered business. 3D Makers are linked up to cloud networks, where they can download programs, power, and tools when they need it to be functional. Knowledge as a product is the most demanded product offered in the world, enabling finance, health care, manufacturing, trade, media, and entertainment to reach new heights of personalized commerce.
Entirely new business value is spawned, hive networked, crowdsourced, exchanged, and traded across dynamic real-time markets, channels, and virtual pop-up e-commerce universes. Everyone is a creator, maker, producer, and, at the same time, a customer. Business in the future is a fast-evolving network of people and Collaborative Smart Machines—cognitive cloud computers networked to deliver value to customers and companies.
The collision of advanced mobile web networks and free enterprise is the chief enablement of the future of business. Free markets, free trade, and free enterprises operating over mobile web-based Global Innovation Ecosystems accelerate growth, entrepreneurship, and global commerce. Most individuals and companies will prosper in this fast-paced, kinetic New Future of business.
Billions of individuals who did not have access to global markets to buy and sell, produce and trade, build and distribute are now connected together. New ideas are floated in the Innovation Ecosystems: Smart Machines and Transmedia Tribes compete for Maker Rights to turn ideas into products for the commercial markets. InstaMarkets, emerge quickly, connecting a global mix of buyers and sellers, makers and developers, investors and digital Banker-Bots—then dissolve away. Different InstaMarkets emerge and dissolve away every day, 1 million times a day, generating over $1.5 trillion a week. You need to have a Future Smart organization to be able to manage the Game-Changing business opportunities in this future.
The global market of 9 billion customers are online NOW. Will you be ready to go?
Free enterprise over the Global Innovation Ecosystem of makers, producers, agents, sellers, and buyers will do more to transform the world’s economy—creating wealth and reducing poverty—than what any government could hope to do to improve the future of their citizens or economy. Governments will need to support this or get out of the way. The Global Innovation Ecosystem will transform the global economy, where the fusion of free enterprise, individuals, and digital technology, lifts up economies and society.
It’s a New Future in which the rules have changed, the opportunities are global, and only the Future Smart will thrive.
The Top Game-Changing Trends That Will Shape the Future of Business
1. Innovation is the chief competitive advantage: embrace it and thrive; resist it and perish.
2. Every enterprise must embrace socially responsible business practices.
3. Predictive Knowledge-Value business models will change every enterprise and career.
4. Disrupt and reinvent your business model, products, work processes, talent, strategy, and values—before you create your competition.
5. The Mobile Web Marketplace will connect over 7 billion people by 2025.
6. Automated bots, computer algorithms, and Smart Machines will transform every business—learn to leverage this revolution.
7. The Global Innovation Ecosystem will create collaborative and connected networks of markets, companies, entrepreneurs, and commerce.
8. Predictive analytics, the cloud, Big Data, social media, and mobile are the top trends that will transform business in this century.
9. A new kind of customer, the Click-Streamer, points to a new digital global culture.
10. The Start-Up Culture will change every business, making every enterprise more entrepreneurial.
Digital Money: The Future of Transactions
Your cell phone is your new bank. Person-to-Person (P2P) transactions can use a variety of digital currencies in the future to conduct business. Every day new digital banks will manage billions in global digital currency markets, such as M-Pesa, P2P Money, DigiCash, MyBucks, Bitcoin, and Mobil$. Digital money—or what was first called crypto currency—is now an accepted form of money for all transactions.
In real time people can create digital currency based on virtual or hard assets such as commodities and then use them for conducting business. People even trade the algos—the formulas for creating digital cash. You will be able to design online your own digital cash and use it to conduct business. Even today you can customize your own digital money based on the Bitcoin platform and use it for transactions—assuming you can find someone or some business to accept your digital cash. This opens the door for a new era of customized digital currency—on demand and personalized for the moment or the business. The implications for a world where you can customize digital currency will create new opportunities for commerce, especially over mobile networks.
There are over 100 million people on the planet that have access to mobile digital money. From Africa to Asia, to the poorest to the richest nations on the planet, mobile digital cash—money on your mobile—is the not just the future; it is the Now Market and growing fast, every second. By 2025 there will be over 1 billion people who use digital mobile money as their primary transaction platform.
MK Ultra: 2022
The hacker group MK Ultra’s specialty is cyber-hacking—or “liberating,” as they say—crypto currencies. By 2022 there are numerous crypto-currencies, or digital cash, as they are known. Led by an early experiment by Bitcoin, digital cash models were developed in the early part of the twenty-first century as an alternative to sovereign-issued currencies like US dollars, Euros, and Chinese Yuan.
Today the digital cash that MK Ultra is looking for is called DigiTrade, and it is used for energy trading by major energy companies in an attempt to manage currency risk. One program, hacked wirelessly via the Google Glass worn by a careless risk manager in London, gave MK Ultra the codes they needed to steal more than $150 million.
In order to adapt to this new economic reality, businesses developed new ways to secure transactions, so customers and suppliers who prefer to use digital funds can interact with them. A Digital Central Bank monitors all digital currencies larger than US$1 billion. Person-to-person (P2P) digital currencies number in the millions as individuals develop new ways to exchange value and commerce outside of the traditional currency marketplace. This disrupts traditional monetary controls but will persist, as the central banks will learn to adapt to this New Future of money.
The Freelancer Market: 2025
Global digital businesses that crowdsource talent with few full-time employees drive a Freelancer Marketplace that is responsible for over 70 percent of all new jobs. Though this seemed hard to believe in 2015, by 2020 this trend exploded. Every organization will need to adapt to this New Future. Freelancers have become a valuable talent asset, as they are mobile, virtual, and have innovation skills that many organizations rely on for projects.
The result is flatter network-based organizations that maintain freelancer networks of talented people who may work their entire life on projects for many companies on demand. These projects might last minutes, days, and, sometimes, years. Freelancers with specialized talents in specific industries have become valuable resources for most organizations.
Freelancers bring a much-needed entrepreneurial culture shift to business, in which compensation is based on the project performance, thus creating new business value and the return on innovation (ROI). This trend has changed how people work with organizations, introducing a new agile era of high-performance innovation. These are Future Smart companies that are emerging.
Genomic Analytics: The Future of Marketing
DNA sequencing combined with neuromarketing and Big Data is used to predict customer needs, design products, understand workforce compatibility, redesign work, and formulate careers. As DNA tests got cheaper and the science of genomics was developed for understanding how people, companies, and even products might interact, a new industry was born.
Genomic Analytics is now used throughout the world, offering new insights into marketing, employment, and digital services. Specialists called Genomers provide customized forecasts of the Genomic market profiles so businesses can better identify new opportunities.
Neuro-Ads
Adaptive Personalized Advertising connects billions of consumers and businesses with a massive predictive real-time capability, identifying what you desire. Sound intrusive? It can be. Neuro-Ads can enable, interpret, and predict what you need and then even provide it. The massive global automated advertising system uses neuroscience with cloud networks to generate billions of personalized ads customized for your desires, needs, and problems.
These ads don’t just sell but also empower people with information that is highly relevant for what business predicts individuals will desire. People are paid with digital credits for the use of their time and attention by choosing to interact with the advertising. They may also Ad-Produce customize advertising, with themes for their interests such as the Pepsi Treasure Hunt, Taco Bell Auto Racing, and the Great Race Travels to the Future.
Digital Maker Networks
Digital Maker Networks that specialize in different industries will emerge. If you’re a struggling media maker, an entrepreneur such as the Transmedia Smart Machines from the Bangkok Network can generate that new online game show you have developed and are now shopping around for a paying audience. Real-time tests show that a remote part of China is hungry for this type of entertainment and will prepay in Bitcoins 40 percent of the production cost.
The rest of the costs will be offset by a loan from the Bangkok Bank Network to you, secured by 50 percent of your orders, or you can borrow against those carbon Bitcoin credit contracts you have—that’s if they can produce and sell the special effects to a corporate sponsor and get the digital marketing rights to Southeast Asia, of which they will prepay. Each week millions of media productions are made this way. Now you are ready to go.
Big Data Revolution
Every business will be transformed by Big Data. It is also important to understand our world by analyzing and unlocking the data that defines our world. Big Data is used to better predict which drugs work best, what services and brands deliver superior quality, and what innovations will produce the highest customer value.
Big Data is about extracting meaning from the data that captures how employees work, and this enables them to succeed as well as mine the customer data generated by sales. Big Data is a way to visualize, conceptualize, and operationalize how to create entirely new lines of business as well as enhance the business opportunities you have now. Big Data is a weapon for competitive advantage if you understand the data science that unlocks the mysteries of information.
Big Data will also reveal what customers will need in order to predict with accuracy what will enable, empower, and deliver value to citizens from government and to customers from business.
Headlines from the Future: 2025
Personalized Adaptive Advertising Anticipates Your Secret Desires
Brain-Streaming: Future Marketing Trend 2025
Direct-to-Brain (D2B) broadcasts games and entertainment, and this will generate over $200 billion a year in sales. D2B, also known as Brain-Streaming, has become a huge global industry, generating millions of jobs and spawning new services almost daily. D2B is highly immersive and engaging as it stimulates the brain.
Entertainment media that analyzes consumer interests and then auto-generates gaming and media personalized for billions of individual profiles is now both a feature on WebTV and a standalone media service. Though illegal in some nations, D2B has also become a powerful tool for education and learning, used by both online schools as well as businesses to train people.
The Human Performance Enhancement Market: 2025
The Human Performance Market (HPE) focuses on augmenting intelligence, regenerating organs, and enhancing cybernetic human mobility. Creating healthy aging now dominates over 45 percent of consumer digital wallet share. With over five hundred new business sectors and over 100 million jobs, HPE is a growing global industry. The augmentation of intelligence has become a highly in-demand service for business and individuals, and 40 percent of all jobs require an enhancement certification.
Managing age-related diseases has become the number-one challenge facing our world. As the next generation ages, Generation X reaches middle age at sixty-five, and with depopulation threatening lower productivity throughout the world, HPE has become the largest industry on the planet. Government and corporate subsidies as well as insurance support large-scale HPE for the population.
The Autonomous Economy
Fully automated buildings, homes, autos, and devices buy and sell energy over an online global energy microgrid network. Automated factories in space build customized pharmaceuticals, autos, agriculture, and computing devices. Smart Machines, both autonomous and human managed, will shape the Autonomous Economy, as they will be running the factories, Innovation Ecosystems, Maker Networks, and global businesses that will dominate economic growth in the future. By 2025 the Autonomous Economy will be well defined—in fact, it is emerging now.
The Autonomous Economy developed out of the convergence of automated machines that run factories based on computing, geo-intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to create Smart Machines based on what we used to call AI, or artificial intelligence. The New AI is based on cognitive computing, neuroscience, genomics, and nanotechnology and is used to create a new era of Smart Machines that perform all types of industrial and Knowledge-Value work. They also upgrade themselves and operate entire global enterprises independent of humans.
Cloud computing delivers, on demand, 70 percent of all products direct to the consumer, including the local molecular manufacturing of products. 3D printers generate most products, even complex devices and machines. As nano-assemblers became inexpensive and almost given away by governments and companies like microwave ovens had been decades before, every person came to have access to 3D printers linked to cloud networks for the personal production of certain goods.
Microgrid Marketplace
The development of distributed energy networks, known as microgrids, has transformed the energy marketplace, increasing efficiency and eliminating waste. The combination of rising energy costs and the concern for better managing our global energy resources and dealing with climate change has led to this innovation.
Microgrids are networks of smart, efficient collaborations of traditional and renewable sources connecting energy resources, producers, and consumers. Microgrid development has merged with the Autonomous Economy to better manage cost-effective energy usage for businesses and consumers.
The Sustainable Planet
The risk factors facing the planet due to climate change, pollution, and the demands of a rising population on natural resources such as water, food, and energy has led to a new global agenda on sustainability. The failure of governments to take decisive action to address the challenges pressed the business sector to take a leadership role in tackling these issues.
Consumers have made businesses accountable for making sustainable choices and embracing an era of social accountability. Consumers vote with their wallet, supporting businesses that embrace a sustainable planet and rejecting those that don’t. Business leaders are now influencing politicians to support more sustainable policies that over 90 percent of consumers demand—climate change management.
What the Marketplace Teaches
The future of business is emerging now. The power of digital Knowledge-Value goods is accelerating more so than labor-intensive goods. In the future, by 2025, Knowledge-Value goods will dominate the marketplace. There are millions of entrepreneurs who have companies that sell online, every day around the world. These companies may sell products or services, but the most profitable are those that enable others to succeed. These digital entrepreneurs have found the ability to connect with customers over the mobile web to be the basis of a radical new business model. These digital entrepreneurs enable other entrepreneurs to succeed. They help them sell more, get found by customers, digitally market over social networks, and get their businesses noticed over the Internet. Their work processes and services are digitally enhanced to optimize productivity and profitability.
The fusion of online marketing, analytics, and computer science has created success where there was no business model prior. The key has been to create an Innovation Ecosystem to serve customers and automate the sales of digital Knowledge Products that others find of great value. This is a vastly different marketplace from what the universities are teaching and how most people were taught as well as how most businesses operate today. But this is what the future will bring.
Are you ready to play in this game? Becoming Future Smart will require you to think and operate completely differently from how you do today. Sustainability, social accountability, social media, exponential technologies, Always Aware Web, mobile commerce, connectivity, the innovators mindset—this thinking should change how you lead, invent, predict, and understand reality: markets, cultures, business, and organizations.
The New Future is altering what a business does and challenges the very idea of what a business is. To see this future, consider what companies like Facebook make billions at—monetizing relationships. Twitter enables global publishing and communications. Google enables search and commerce over markets that connect people. Baidu has transformed China by connecting a billion people and creating a vibrant market of entrepreneurs that were not connected before. Bitcoin offers a new mobile currency that is agile, digital, and used for trade.
Uber is disrupting every business. That future is coming fast. Unrelenting change from new markets, new technology, new competition, and new innovative business models is unfolding.
You cannot use yesterday’s tools, ideas, business models, or tech to deal with the changes coming in business. You need an entirely new mindset, tool set, organization structure, and supply chain. We, as a civilization, are inventing a New Future that business can thrive in. The New Future is a radical morphing of the economy, society, and culture that will electrify business. The New Future is the state of tomorrow—kinetic and explosive change. Best to prepare for the storm that’s coming.
Every aspect of business is changing. What a market is, how to sell, where to connect with customers, what customers want and expect, how to attract employees or freelancers, and even what the products and services will be will change. The entire idea of what a business is, does, and how it acts to create value is changing. You have to change with these trends to survive.
Innovation is the only competitive advantage. Innovating work processes in business—increased collaboration and connectivity, blending Smart Machines with human operators, harnessing Big Data, leveraging the cloud, building in predictive analytics—is the application of leading-edge innovations that make the difference. It’s doing what others cannot see, what they are not doing or missing that you could embrace—a new distinction in business. Understanding this will build your future success and empower your workforce, customers, and competition. Innovate fast and often and build innovation cultures that embrace the radical ideas, talent, and work processes before your competition does.
Social media is how customers influence customers who then adopt or reject your brand. The power shift to the customer who is more social media savvy than business is a challenge.
Simulation and games are new, emerging ways to simulate, with computers and games, real-life and real-market challenges. Using sims and games to better understand the changing business or customer landscape may reveal new opportunities that were missed before.
Digital marketing is the chief interaction with your brand and the market. Traditional marketing is dead. The mobile web will be the dominant marketplace—prepare for this now. Stop moving atoms—move bits.
Analytics is what you can learn about the market, the customer, or your competition that can help you compete and grow. Create analytics teams of Big Data wizards to figure out how customers are changing and how to interpret their changing needs.
Embed Knowledge Value into every product and service: What is the Knowledge Value that can be added to excite, enable, inform, or empower the customer? If you have not figured that out, then STOP everything and do so.
The Predictive Enterprise, at its core, leverages data, ecosystems, digital tools, and markets. If you understand how prediction will transform competition and your industry, have another hard look around you. Change is endemic. Competition is growing. Customers are looking for change agents to help enable them. You’re either predicting your future or someone else is.
Seven Business Trends
The very idea of what a business is, what it does, and who it does it for is changing. How a business creates value for customers will change as well. From new business models and new innovations to new customers and new markets—there is a New Future emerging. This New Future requires a different perspective on decision making in organizations, with fewer hierarchies and more distributed power networks.
Business that leverages Knowledge Value is creating a new enterprise distinction, a new way to think about what a business is. Innovation that creates new opportunities to collaborate and solve problems will be key to navigating this New Future. The New Future is an era of business defined by speed, accelerating digital innovations, Knowledge Value, and globalization.
The customer is driving change in this New Future. Customers discovered the Internet, put computers to work, told companies how they wanted to shop online, made smartphones the next computers, and will make wearable computers the next marketplace. The customer lives in the New Future, and your job is to catch up, to predict faster, to give them value before someone else does.
The New Future is a dynamic global marketplace of new ideas, innovations, and trade and talent collaboration. The New Future is also an expression of a new complex and sophisticated way that humans and machines work to produce value.
The New Future will be defined by
• Accelerated change
• Connected markets
• Fast innovation
• Digital everything
• Smart technology
• Mobile commerce
• Predictive systems
Of all the business services produced in all of human history, over 80 percent were created in the past decade. The global innovation economy is in its infancy. Computers, smartphones, and the Internet have accelerated business productivity, creating entirely new industries, new markets, and millions of new jobs. Global trade is in its infancy.
Developing nations are growing faster than those in the developed world. Innovation continues to have a positive impact on GDP. We still don’t have half the people on the planet on the Internet, and this will be the largest marketplace in the future. The prospects for the future of business could never be better.
Overall quality of life on the planet is improving. Global prosperity is rising. Since 1980 over 1 billion people have come out of poverty. Since 2000 over fifty developing nations have seen their GDP grow, on average, about 5 percent per year. Despite the tumultuous events of the last few years, global prosperity is increasing.
Big technological advancements drives this growth, as more and more people gain access to the tools and knowledge vital for business and entrepreneurship to thrive. Also driving global prosperity are huge advancements in global health and a reduction in war. Life expectancy is rising, especially in Asia and Africa, where there are emerging huge markets that will be game-changing opportunities for growth.
There are also great challenges that will face business and the economy in the future, such as unemployment, social stability, available talent, crime, uncertain financial markets, slow growth, and sustainability. These challenges and others are part of the evolution of our civilization toward a better world, where quality of life, prosperity, peace, and freedom are the long-term endgame. My forecasts of this future are, overall, positive, but they are not without the risk factors that could derail this forecast. I forecast more upside opportunity than downside risk. I believe the private sector is uniquely qualified to manage risk, yet every person needs to manage his or her risk own as well.
Four Future-Smart Domains
To grow an existing company or grow a new business there are four Future-Smart Domains that need to be integrated all together, like parts of a high-performance race car that are finely tuned for performance. These are: people, process, product, and technology. It’s not enough to be adaptive, predictive, and to embrace innovation as well as other factors; you must also achieve a values balance with people, processes, products, and technology to be successful, to become Future Smart. Get it right today, and thrive in the future.
1. People
• What values should you embrace to attract the right people to grow the future of the business?
• What kinds of people do you need to work with who could make a big difference in the business?
• How do people in your organization create a culture that is innovative, adaptive, and open to change?
2. Process
• How should you rethink your business processes to accelerate innovation, customer service, productivity, or competitive advantage?
• What work processes must change for us to be more effective at delivering customer Knowledge Value?
• How is your business changing, and how can you better predict and adapt to these changes?
3. Products
• What are the innovations you could integrate into products or build into services to enlighten, delight, or serve?
• What are the most amazing products that deliver the most customer value?
4. Technology
• What type of technologies are emerging that could create an entirely new competitive advantage in your business?
• What technologies might be game changers for your customers or marketplace?
• What business innovations require an investigation into technology?
Disrupt Yourself First
Are you ready to disrupt yourself before your competition disrupts you? If you don’t swiftly adapt and innovate with courage, this is what will happen: you will crash your organization. It happens often.
People crash organizations by not adapting to change fast enough to embrace the future. Narrow-minded, change-resistant thinking is a common challenge in business today. This myopia will be tolerated less in the future, when the speed of prediction and adaptation will be furious and the very survival of business will be at stake. Only the Future Smart will survive.
Leaders who don’t understand this, who think the future will be identical to the past, who resist change will be left behind. Or, unfortunately, this form of Dysfunctional Leadership that breeds Dysfunctional Organizations will become the norm in some industries where change is slow and governments unknowingly subsidize this dysfunctional type of business. This is the opposite of Future Smart and is unsustainable over the long term.
Actual statements I’ve overheard:
“Innovation is something those other folks do, not us.”
“Why would a customer trust another customer’s review more than us?”
“Social media, that Facebook and Twitter, is for kids with too much time.”
“We don’t need to adopt a social agenda.”
“I see no reason to change how we operate just because customers want us to.”
How could you crash your organization, you might ask? Of course, not on purpose, but there are those leaders who will not innovate or who resist deep change and are looking to the past to know what will happen in the future. This is dysfunctional thinking—the opposite of being Future Smart. Not surprisingly, this type of thinking, which is not sustainable, is the enemy of business growth.
The Top Ten Ways to Resist the Future
1. Ignore investing in new technologies and innovation such as mobile, social media, or cloud computing.
2. Stop listening to customers’ needs and complaints.
3. Ignore the redesign of your business processes.
4. Limit your future vision to the next quarter.
5. Don’t hire talent that wants to change, innovate, or grow.
6. Think that your competition is slower or less innovative.
7. Believe that customers are not interested in innovation.
8. Build a culture that resists innovation daily.
9. Think that the future will look just like the past.
10. Don’t build a learning, collaborating, connected organization.
Now the point is that no one would purposely set out to resist the future, ignore change, or crash their organization, would they? Of course not—that sounds absurd. Yet everyday most organizations, big or small, expend energy on working hard to accomplish one or more of the Ten Top Ways to Crash Your Organization. I see it every day. Many organizations just don’t get it, and that is great for companies such as mine, which advise companies that are stuck and struggling with dysfunctional business behaviors and want to change.
Many more organizations just continue to resist the changes that have come and are coming, and they think that the head-in-the-sand strategy is sustainable, but it is not. This lack of insight into the Predictive Awareness that being Future Smart is about has held back entire industries.
I often hear from leaders of teams and organizations who could change if they understood the impact but don’t choose to change. They resist the future.They will let the next guy take care of that. But there will not be another leader to always step in and save the day. Leaders who avoid dealing with the hard realities of the future marketplace or disruptive forces of change, such as technology, do a great disservice to their organizations by not looking forward.
By avoiding decisions that could help make the organization more Future Smart—ready for the future challenges that are coming by investing and growing talent and innovation today—these leaders doom their companies to the trash heap of history. It does not need to be like this. Organizations need to develop and educate their people to become Future Smart—agile and ready for what’s coming. This is a shift in mindset, culture, and behavior, not just some words on the computer screen.
The Annual Future Smart Awards: Who Got It Right
There are leaders and companies that demonstrate the ideals of being Future Smart today. The common elements are an attention to innovation, bold new visions of the future, and a focus on creating new ideas that form new markets not envisioned before. Some of these are:
• Elon Musk from Tesla and Space X, who invented the electric car and private-space industry by not following everyone else but instead creating agile new innovation projects.
• Virgin Galactic, who decided that the space tourism market was real and invested early to create the first consumer space industry.
• Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome and went on to invent an artificial cell that is destined to transform health care.
• Ratan Tata, who bought and redesigned the classic Jaguar car and built a global empire of innovation industries based on cool designs.
• Apple Computer, for never compromising on future design and innovations that lead the market in music, phones, and computing.
• Alibaba, which developed a combination of Amazon and eBay all rolled into one in a huge China-focused company that offers probably the largest Innovation Ecosystem in the world.
• Amazon, the largest book and media seller in the world that redefined the online retail experience.
• Netflix, which broke the movie business distribution paradigm by offering direct downloads first, producing direct-to-consumer shows, and captured the market.
• Google, which transformed the advertising industry by creating a digital juggernaut based on giving away software services online and watching, analyzing, and predicting what consumers want.
• Salesforce.com, which realized that sales had shifted to the cloud and thus empowered tools to reinvigorate the virtual business offered.
Ten Game-Changing Power Shifts Every Business Must Prepare for Today
1. Social media impact on the enterprise
2. The coming Data Tsunami
3. Cyber Risks and industrial espionage
4. Purpose before profit business strategies
5. Geo-intelligence as a business enabler
6. Wearables, drones, and flyables as new business models
7. Attracting and keeping Future Smart talent
8. Building and using Innovation Ecosystems
9. Mobile and the Internet of Things as markets
10. Impact of customer’s Big Data on the enterprise
How to Create Your Competition
This is an easy forecast because the logic is impeccable and easily proven. I have seen this dozens of times: The company that refused to create a customer portal or offer computerized online billing. Ignoring customers’ demands for new services to help streamline productivity. Being irresponsive to customers’ value shifts, such as sustainability, cultural diversity, or social accountability.
Most companies create their own competition because they are not being Future Smart. They are not working on adapting for the future; they resist change, avoid innovation, or don’t plan for what’s coming. They miss how the market is changing. They don’t really listen to customers’ needs and how they’re changing. They avoid the front-line employee feedback about what new services are needed. They avoid having to change, and in so doing, they create their own competition.
No one has a death wish, but most companies who are conducting “business as usual” will not make the final cut when it comes to competing in the New Future. Too much resistance to change is deadly. Denial is not a management competency that helps you look to the future. Innovations like mobile commerce, cloud networks, predictive analytics, and Big Data are not cool innovations—they are how business is conducted in the New Future of one minute from now.
This is not the standard of excellence but rather Business 101. If you are reading this in 2015 and this makes no sense, then I humbly suggest you do a lot of thinking. Read the rest of the book first, then go invent your future.
Lessons from the Start-Up Economy
I have enjoyed my work over many years with both start-up companies and big organizations that wanted to learn how to become more like start-up companies. Having an unfair advantage to have grown up in Silicon Valley, first working at Apple Computer in the early days and then with numerous start-up companies, I have come to realize that big companies will not be sustainable unless they become more entrepreneurial, especially as we move into the New Future. Being sustainable, adaptive, and predictive is at the core of what this book is about.
Forecast: The Future Smart Enterprise must embrace the Start-Up Economy and change their work cultures and business models, or they will not survive. The cultures of a start-up company—to learn, experiment, have passion for innovation—are values every company should embrace.
We see this radical game-changing shift starting, but as we move into the future of five to ten years from today, it will be unfortunate if organizations don’t change quickly enough. I don’t think leaders understand how fundamentally important this transformation is, and I don’t think business leaders understand how to get there, how important it is to embrace the Start-up Economy now.
Most of the failures and problems I have seen in business, with large corporations, is that they develop an entrenched and hardened culture that too often resists innovation, cannot attract or retain the top talent, and loses its way when it comes to dealing with accelerated change initiated by consumer, marketplace, or technological factors. They cannot seem to get out of their own way.
Ten Lessons for Building a Future-Smart Organization
1. Be curious—be persistent in embracing innovations.
2. Innovate or die—spawn a culture of consistent innovation.
3. Fail fast and frequently—failures are part of learning.
4. Embrace leading-edge tech—before your competition does.
5. Pay attention—to how and why customers are changing.
6. Get the talent-to-job fit right.
7. Find out what do customers and employees need to better prepare for the future.
8. Investigate how your industry is trending—looking to the future.
9. Create brief strategic plan to map your new business strategy.
10. Consider how leaders, teams, and culture could be Future Smart—ready to adapt to future changes.
Twitter had failed in their first business model and, as a backup, had this idea about texting short messages over a network. It was not the first big idea, and they were on their way out of business because the first idea failed to catch on with consumers and investors. Now they are the social media platform for collaborating with short communications.
Google didn’t even have their own search engine when they started the company. This evolved later. Now they own the search market.
Apple’s Lisa Computer was too expensive and failed to catch on with consumers, almost leading the company into bankruptcy. Macintosh was born out of that experimentation, as was iTunes and the iPhone.
GE, an industrial giant in energy, reinvented itself as an innovative leader in addressing the global ecological challenges that had been a risk factor for them in the past.
IBM got out of the declining PC business to focus on business services and innovative new technologies such as cognitive computing, cloud computing, and Audi, which was once known for quality issues but now makes some of the highest-quality and well-designed autos in the world.
Seeing the Invisible
Experimentation. Persistence. The ability to see the invisible. That is what Future Smart companies do, but the most important thing they do is that they Shape the Future through a strategy, business model, product, or service. They Shape the Future of what is possible by creating value that the customer embraces. The action that validates the value is more than sales revenues; it is a Customer Engagement Experience that rewards the company and the customer. It is a collaborative culture of exchange, well beyond the traditional supply and demand, of “we make a product and you buy it.”
Google does this by constantly tweaking their programming to offer more personalized and relevant information when you search for something. Amazon, working invisibly in the background, watches what you like—in books or products—and then instantly crowdsources with a recommendation software agent that matches people with likes: people who bought this book about magic also bought this magic wand.
Companies’ ability to leverage the invisible to better engage, predict, and present offers or information that are personalized just for you is an essential strategy. Most people who use Google or Amazon don’t see it; it’s not obvious what these companies are doing to create Knowledge Value.
In the future, organizations that understand that the rules are changing and know how to be attentive to and understand these New Rules will grow their organizations, be they large or small, into successful Future Smart companies.
Future Smart Leadership
The central challenge facing organizations is how to lead in an era of accelerating change, radical exponential technologies, and innovative business models that offer both risk and opportunity. You cannot look to history and think leadership of the past will be the same in the future. This type of reactionary thinking will doom leaders to lead poorly or even to collapse organizations.
There are many examples of leaders who attempted to lead by following the old rules and were out of step with the current reality or were not prepared for the future. Not being prepared for the future is the most common and lethal strategic error that leaders can make. Unfortunately, this strategic error is too common and results in an organization’s decline. Organizations’ decline is due exclusively to their inability to see what’s coming next, to envision the future, and to being capable of acting on making that future vision a reality.
The Future-Smart Leader thinks differently. His or her mindset is about being ready for innovation, being hungry for change, being willing to learn, being ready to adapt, and even being competent at shaping a preferred future for the organization or even the entire industry. Leaders lead others into unknown waters where, inevitably, they need to change in order to transform the organization into something better, bigger, and more successful for the future. Future-Smart Leaders have a future plan. They recognize that it takes a plan to get from today to tomorrow. It’s amazing how few leaders have a plan for the future. Their time frame for adapting and planning for the future is the next few months. This is short sighted.
Future-Smart Leaders are bold in marshaling their troops to go after a big objective that may stir the soul or seem impossible or even chock-full of hubris. That’s what sets great leaders apart from the common fare. Future-Smart Leaders have a vision for the future that they enroll others to embrace, collaborate on, and contribute to making a reality.
They inspire greatness in others and evangelize the future vision. They embrace new talent and change the organization’s culture, structure, and work processes to attract and retain talent. This is a different way of leading from what we see today. Most leaders mold the employee to the company culture; in the future this will be reversed.
Future-Smart Leaders are unafraid of the future; they embrace the changes that are coming. They shape the future. They are inventors of tomorrow, pioneers of the future. They are the Bransons who dreamt of a different type of airline, The Elon Musks who invented an entirely new electric car. Space X that took us to space. The Steve Jobs who saw the future of music and built the iTunes store. All around us there are examples of Future-Smart Leaders who are creating the future—a better future for their customers and the world.
Future-Smart Leaders must forge a bold vision of the future they wish to create. This is different from the dominant paradigm of leadership today. Future-Smart Leaders will have evolved a new set of values that embraces purpose, sustainability, and innovation, and most of all, these leaders will have a compelling vision of the future.
Game-Changing Business Trends
• Managing Knowledge-Value will be the growth engine for business.
• High-level talent, the people who will be required to manage the complex organizations of the future, must be developed.
• Smart Machines will design, manage, and service 40 percent of all global businesses by 2025—utilities, commerce, finance, and manufacturing.
• Smart Machines that enable humans and provide value will be a competitive advantage in the global economy—right up until they take your job. Maybe.
• Managing the Future Data Tsunami from the collection of health, media, web, financial, social, and geospatial sources will be a competitive advantage for every enterprise.
• Organizations must become learning networks, constantly upgrading and enhancing the collective intelligence of their work cultures.
• Companies that embrace Big Data, analytics, and the cloud will be prepared for the future explosion of customer demand.
You’re either managing your future or someone else is because they are moving faster and smarter or innovating in ways you’re not. Becoming a Future-Smart Enterprise is a change process and a learning strategy to get from where you are to not just being ready for the future but also actively designing your future. The choice is yours.