Future of Business
The End Of Control By Gerd Leonhard
I’m up late every night trying to find new ways to teach you the ins and outs of where business going, the future of business. It’s my hope you are actually learning something here. You’re probably seeing it’s not business as usual, that things have been changing rapidly, and it’s painful too. I hope I’m making you think long and hard about what to do next in this new open economy. As I’ve mentioned many times, the future of business is not a skill set, it’s not mechanical, it’s not even about technology, it is however, about how you and I think.
Throughout this blog I have covered a variety of topics, I even share local events in my community, I do that for couple of reasons, to keep it interesting (I hope), and that I am a real living person practicing what I preach. The difference between you and I is, I see things you don’t, and I share that foresight with the intent of helping you take your first steps toward this new world of commerce. The Future of Business is a broad topic really, there are so many paths to go down but there isn’t enough time in a day to cover it all. So I tell you about what I find in my research, in my collaboration with other futurists, and then hopefully you can see the same patterns and trends being presented before us.
You probably find it difficult to implement strategies and tactics to an uncertain future, to something you can’t see clearly. That’s why I write about it, the best way to figure it out is to learn, find sources that can help you understand the paradigm shift we are going through. I pay attention to other futurists, 265 of them, I collaborate with some, and I do countless hours of research of my own, and I don’t get paid to do it! I’ll talk about that another time.
One of those 265 futurists I refer to is Gerd Leonhard, he lives Basil, Switzerland. He heads up The Futures Agency, The Futures Agency is structured as a virtual organization with global reach, deep knowledge and domain expertise, and extensive experience as strategic advisers. He is a digital mentor of mine, I respect his work, and he makes it interesting.
Now you may have noticed there’s push back from the corporate world, most Industrial Age businesses, they are throwing up paywalls everywhere, trying to control you, trying to prevent you from having information freely. Gerd talks about the end of control regularly, he even wrote a book on the topic a few years ago, so I’m not even going to try preaching it, I’ll let you read his book. You can get it here: End Of Control By Gerd Leonhard
The Future Of Business – Access Trumps Ownership
As business re-invents itself, as it stumbles into the future, much of what we know to be tried and true is no longer working. As trust of big brands and certain industries continues to shrink, we need to consider newer ways of building that trust we took for granted. In 2006 Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine shared in his book, The Long Tail, Free is a business model. Jeff Jarvis writes about the model in his book called, What would Google Do? Gerd Leonhard talks about putting things out there, in the jungle, give much of your value away, where getting paid is a walk of faith, if you bring value, you will get paid. He has some interesting insight in his talk The Price of Freedom, he explains why ‘free’ content can still pay in the long term. I may be over simplifying the free model, but there is a bigger model to discuss, and it is related to the free model, it’s far bigger and a much more interesting model to consider.
People want something that allows them to participate, something of value that can’t be simply copied, something scarce that is worth paying for, but want to try it, taste it, smell it, before they hand over the cash. This is a faith walk because you don’t know where or if the money will come, it’s a YES / NO / MAYBE, complete ambiguity, complete faith in the consumer. Even if you are not giving it away outright, you may be letting them have access to it, to your product, your service or platform. The key word here is platform as I discussed in an blog post a few days ago.
We are entering a society that doesn’t value ownership, we would rather rent it or borrow it when shared, long before buying it. The longer you sit out here on the NET, the world gets smaller, you find like-mined people much quicker, and some are sharing the same message you may be sharing. That doesn’t matter, each of us has a voice, each of us has something of value to share, each of us sees things differently, our voice matters, so share your take on things. Give yourself away, let people rent you and your content. Build a platform that can’t be ignored, then share it.
I came across an interesting TED talk by Lisa Gansky called, The Future of Business is The MESH. In this talk she shares that access will trump ownership, that a brand is a voice, a product is a souvenir, we are in the pursuit of better things to easily share. The need for aligning value with the true cost. I love finding new people sharing the same message you find here on this blog, and I love sharing their work with you.
Here is Lisa’s talk, it’s a short 15 minutes, enjoy!
The Future Of Business – Turn Your Business Into A Platform
This idea of platforms has been talked about for years now, new start-ups are popping up everywhere, many are trying to convert and become a useful platform. Why a platform? The business of the future needs to become a destination and useful, a place where people can come together and do something useful. People always return to things and places that are useful to them.
The best example of a platform to date is Google, they provide an environment where you can run your entire business. That in itself is very useful. Crisis mappers wasted no time responding: In under 2.5 hours Google launched its person finder application, which was also used when New Zealand’s 6.3 quake. A platform can be built upon and used, think of all the things you can do at Google, problems you can solve, and dare I say it, the time you can save. Today you can view your street via Google Maps, you can get images, videos, news, books, you can use Gmail for your primary email service, you can use Blogger to put your content on the NET, you can translate the language of a site. Google provides all these tools at no charge to you, an open & free business model to the extreme, it’s what the cloud is meant to be.
If you have a platform, you will need developers and other entrepreneurs to build on it, creating more functionality which brings more users. FaceBook did that. Networks are built upon platforms, the Internet is a platform, services like Flickr, WordPress, PayPal, self-publishing company LuLu.com, and business software Salesforce.com.
Google as I mentioned above is not just one platform but multiple platforms, multiple ways of using Google, multiple ways to build upon what Google has built and provides to you for free. What is a platform, platforms help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of thier own. If it’s open and collaborative, those users may add value to platforms.
Questions to ask yourself: How can you or your business act as a platform? What can others build on top of it? How can you add value? How little value can you extract? How big can the network grow atop your platform? How can the platform get better learning from it’s users? How can you create an open standard so competitors will use and even contribute to the network and you get a share of thier value? It’s time to make your business a platform. It’s time to make your business mobile.
As you can see by the list of questions there is much to consider, pull together a team to begin the process of building you platform. If you are looking for help in creating ideas to adopt the future of business, stay here, I will be continually be posting concepts and ideas for you to build upon, or, just e-mail me.
The Future Of Business – To The Cloud And Beyond!
We have to face the fact that the Cloud is where we will store our publicness, our legacy is going to live on forever, not through people, but through Kilobytes cached on servers all over the world. The Cloud is a fact of life, it is only going to grow up and be another reservoir of data, a deep well of information, unlike anything we’ve know to date. You think Wikipedia is awesome, wait till the Cloud matures. The Cloud is not connected computers in a closed network, they are outside, and can connect to any computing device.
Microsoft offers 25GB on Windows LIVE SkyDrive, Online Storage, Google allows you to run your entire business on their servers and with their services. I shared that this was going to happen in 2001 at a conference, I spoke to 500 I.T. Leaders, and they all said I was crazy, it will never happen. Businesses won’t stand for it, people won’t use it! As you can see they didn’t have the foresight an I.T. leader should have, they were closed minded executives, imagine that.
Everything is moving to the cloud for many, many reasons. Business is becoming more social and mobile, and the requires the cloud for that kind of environment to work properly. Location-based services are a perfect fit for the cloud, so going mobile means going to the cloud.
In a previous post I talked about the shift, we’re going from pages to streams, from PCs to the Cloud, Today to NOW, from Me to We, and Items to Data. Where everything will generate a stream everywhere. The cloud is full of storage, full of streams, and filled with the new oil, DATA!
The best way to take advantage of the cloud is to make everything in your business mobile, the cloud lets you access your data and the rest of the worlds data on the fly. Every business will become a platform to use, not unlike Google or Microsoft, people always come back to places they find useful. You can even build your own cloud, well sort of, you can connect an external drive to your router that is accessible from anywhere in the world. That in essence is a cloud, your external drive is where you store everything, so no matter where you are, you can reach your data, but the other options are better.
Almost all major technology corps are offering some form of cloud computing, even though the question of security is still on the table. Security is always going to be a problem, as long as there is humans on this planet, security will be paramount. Having said that, many are clamoring to put their data on the cloud, it just makes good sense for those who work from home / travel most of the time.
The jury is still out on who offers the best solution and I’m not sure it will matter if there is some kind of standard in this environment. Considering the security issue, will you put your data out there, Google has most if not all that you do on the NET anyway. The Cloud opens up new business models based on access, more so than today.
On a different perspective, when clicking the Like Button or Follow, to get access, the dollar value assigned to Likes & Follows will create a whole new metric to measure, one more thing to track, will all cloud environments or storage devices require engagement or just a Like or a Follow.
How will your business use the cloud?
The Future of Business – The Leader of Tomorrow
You don’t have to look far to find a book, a seminar or a website on how to be a leader, what a leader is, and what they even look like. The truth is, the list of characteristics of a leader in the future is actually quite short. As business becomes more and more human, so is the leader believe it or not.
I’m willing to bet that special person in your life, that person that influences you or gets your respect is not your boss. Most bosses have a problem with power and authority, they don’t know how to use it, they are truly bad at valuing people. They typically have a superiority complex, they are authorities on everything, it’s their way or the highway, there’s no compromise. I know you have a boss like that or you know someone like I just mentioned. There is good news though, business leaders are changing, if not today, they will be in the near future.
The leader of the future listens to whats going on, they realize it’s not about them, the also understand the Internet is not an echo chamber. They know the value of people, the conversation, they understand it’s first the fan (follower), then the customer, they know how to grow bigger ears. They have a good idea where the world is going, they understand brands have to be likeable and loveable in order to win in the digital marketplace. They also understand brands need to be human.
Making business human is the strong suit of the leader in the future, they know a brand is is a voice, a product is a souvenier, and that everyone brings value to the table, that the voice of the follower, the fan, and every person that visits their business is precious. The leader of the future knows that Social Media networks are the 1st listening platform to invest time in. That today online and offline are no longer different places, everything is being integrated to be social and mobile.
But the genuine authentic leader has 4 qualities:
1.) They Care on every level.
2.) They Believe in you – they want to be with dream makers, not dream killers.
3.) They are Fair, and they don’t play favorites.
4.) They expect Excellence at all time.
What are your 4 qualities the leader of tomorrow should have, what does your list look like?