Future Here Now: The Future Ready Business
Observation
This month’s newsletters, video and other content focuses on the Future Ready Business. Spoiler alert: many of the businesses that have been sold to us as **the** success story are actually deeply mired in the Industrial Era - fragile, outdated dinosaurs being propped up with flimsy supports. And a lot of those dinosaurs dress in hoodies and crow about VR and AI.
We’ll examine the huge cracks in their foundations and how to make your own business Future Ready. That doesn’t require big expenses or massive ad campaigns, but it does require disassembling and rebuilding some of the most basic operations of virtually any businesss. And like most things Future Ready, it starts with our understanding of what we’re doing, and how it no longer fits reality.
We can see all around us that businesses of all types are floundering. Established brands crash, dominant retailers watch their stock prices tank. The store that used to be "at the corner" now tells you how old it is - ignoring the increasing number of vacant corners sporting that store's ghost sign. Manufacturers that used to do no wrong watch their value plummet because of their CEO's psychotic decisions outside of the company, and even local businesses fall apart because of a video of bad behavior or a heated and tone-deaf post.
The calculus of business has flipped on its head, even as shallow corporate news and clickbait gasp breathlessly over each twitch of the titans, while popping up stories like those above as random but entertaining outliers. And most business schools and business how-tos still proclaim the old conventional wisdom.
The examples I cited in the first paragraph are not the outliers. They're not even the canaries in the coal mine. The number and variety and scope and distribution of these supposedly minor stories with such echoing trajectories tells us that something profoundly new is underfoot, tearing apart our expected business operandi and forcing us all into a profoundly new foundation for how we work.
This month, we will examine how the core underlying expectations and assumptions that we use to drive our business decisions completely clash with the realities that we see in our everyday lives. The scary thing is that we often don't realize we're making those assumptions, unless we've learned to look for them, and to consciously design systems for our business that fit these new realities better.
No one taught us to do that - and most of us were taught to do the opposite. But this adaptation is no longer a choice.
Remember that dinosaurs died out because they could not adapt to a colder, darker world. The ones that had the capacity to change their behaviors to fit that new reality are the ones who survived.