New Times Need New Thinking

The comfortable Age of Reason and Logic has come and gone. It has left us forever. We are at a crossroads where the future has no real links with the past - except for a handful of lessons. Like emotional honesty, emotional intelligence, and emotional fitness. Our forefathers taught us to be honest, compassionate, and considerate to others. If anything, these qualities will be required ever more than before for lasting business success.

We are moving towards a strange and amorphous world - one without political, economic, or technological borders. Here are some of its characteristics:

  • Mass markets will vanish. Instead, customers will be bought, one at a time.
  • People will work on four, five, or more jobs and careers during their lifetimes.
  • Global citizenship will put great pressure on patriotism.
  • Loyalty to the corporation will die.
  • Loyalty to one's profession will grow.
  • Branding of individuals will develop into a mega business. The brand called "ME Inc." will become the most important marketable item [a la Michael Jordan].
  • People will do business with people they have never met or seen and will never meet or see.
  • Trust will become a critical factor.
  • Brick and mortar will be impediments to business success.
  • The bean counters will eventually devise methods to include intellectual capital and knowledge in corporate balance sheets.
  • Moore's Law will be overshadowed by Gates' Law which says that in five to ten years computing capacity and information will be almost free.
  • Having information will cease to provide competitive advantage. Instead, it will shift to those who get it faster than others, and use it faster.
  • Innovation, ideas, and intuition will be king, queen, and crown prince.
  • Curiosity, humility, and diversity will deliver more success than conformity, ego, and uniformity.
  • Money in its present form will cease to exist.
  • Universities and schools will disintegrate. Instead, men and women of all ages and races will study what they want, when they want, from where they are.
  • Women CEOs will outnumber men.
  • Downward nobility will replace upward mobility.
  • Time will continue to get more and more miniaturized.
  • Cause will come unhinged from effect.
  • Information sharing will fuel growth, while information withholding will hasten the corporate death knell.
  • Mixed marriages will become the norm across the world.
  • As information becomes ubiquitous, and technology becomes affordable, the ability to repeatedly try and fail will become an integral component of corporate success. This is Sam's Law of Success.
And the logic behind the law? Well, as information becomes universally available, and technology becomes increasingly affordable, corporations, institutions, and governments will have to create ways to unleash powerful thoughts that can leverage information and technology. This means ideas, innovation, and intuition. What do you do when the future is totally uncertain and you have tons of information? You have no statistical measures to determine what will and what won't happen. You can work on one scenario, but you don't know whether that scenario will unfold or not. As soon as you learn that it is not going to unfold, you will have to give up the path you pursued, and move in another direction, perhaps 180 degrees off the earlier one. This can happen only if people warn everyone about failures as soon as they happen. This also means that alternative paths must be reasonably ready for companies to pursue. This is what Intel did when the Japanese and their far eastern brethren decided to get into the memory chip business. Business for Intel dried up like rain water in the summer. Customers vanished, profits evaporated. Intel dramatically shifted gears to microprocessor chips. What's the difference? Microprocessor chips calculate while memory chips merely store. This was possible because Intel pursued two divergent paths simultaneously. Think about it. For Intel, Memories were Us; they now had to shift to Microprocessors are Us, which meant they had to accept that Memories are Not Us in the first place. So the new rule says, "Embrace failure to avoid failure". Oxymoronic? Paradoxical? Yes, but true.

What will the twenty-first century look like? Traumatic, to put it mildly. Here's something for starters:

I see a global 'freedom to learn' - a world in which, for the first time in human history, caste or schooling or economic circumstance no longer limits access to knowledge, a world in which knowledge itself is less important than the skill to access it.

I see the collapse of corporate loyalty and the rise of deal making - a global 'freedom to act' - in line not with professional processes or bureaucratic structures but with one's intuition and entrepreneurial zeal.

I see the dismantling of borders, and the rise of a global 'freedom to move' - a world in which global citizens will enjoy global mobility.

I also see the opportunity for people to create their own reality, a global 'freedom to be' - whatever that may be, and an obligation to exercise that freedom.

In the words of futurists Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker, "We are moving into the Age of Possibility". I call it the 'Golden Age of Fulfillment'.

To each of us, good luck with our possibilities of fulfillment.

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