Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Jim Blasingame

Why, how and when to change your business’ DNA

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In nature, all life comes in two forms: plant and animal.

In the marketplace, all business entities are found in two forms: human and non-human. But unlike plants and animals, a human business can morph into a non-human entity.

A human business is a sole proprietorship or a partnership. Of the non-human species, there are three: C Corporation, Subchapter S Corporation (aka, Sub S, or S Corp) and the Limited Liability Company (LLC). All corporations begin as a C, and some, typically small businesses, “elect” to morph into the Sub S structure for reasons revealed in a minute. The LLC is the new kid on the block, only being available for about the past 30 years. It can be a very handy legal structure, but not for everyone.

So why should your human business morph to non-human? There are at least three excellent reasons:

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3rd Ingredient® Part 8: Six marketplace motivators besides fear and greed

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Fear and greed, it has been said, are the two primal emotions that have propelled human civilization.  Of course, both have their dark side, too. 

Greed is positive and productive when channeled toward personal and professional improvement. But it turns ugly in pursuit of a single-minded or selfish outcome. When fear delivers important information it’s not only useful, it’s essential. But it can also morph into paranoia, or cause inaction.

As I’ve discussed recently in this space, at this very moment, the nature of fear and greed is changing. For 10,000 years, the only form humans have known is analog. This means any leveraging of them was likely mechanical, moving no faster than the speed of sound. 

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Naisbitt’s Razor: The great small business advantage

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On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dialup over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.  

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

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