Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

In his preamble of A Tale of Two Cities, the immortal Charles Dickens delivered an appraisal of the disruptive state of affairs in 18th-century London and Paris. Today, seeking perspective for the past 12 months, Dickens’ perfectly paradoxical passage continues to serve – our heads nodding resolutely as his 19th-century words overlay our 21st-century reality.

Let’s employ Dickens’ literary device in pursuit of our own perspective on America’s currently disruptive state-of-affairs. 

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As The CEO, You’re The Futurist Of Your Company

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“For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy

Was America’s 35th president encouraging each of us to be a futurist? Some people dismiss that term as pretentious and stuffy, but as a small business owner, holding that attitude will hold you back. Because as the CEO, being the futurist of your company is your most important assignment.

To be a futurist, you don’t need a fancy education, nor do you have to be a genius. Futurists aren’t inspired by God, they’re not clairvoyant, psychic, or have ESP. But they do look at the world differently than everyone else. Futurists see things others don’t because they’re looking for those things.

Perhaps it will help to introduce the product of a futurist, which is foresight. A futurist’s job is to deliver foresight to an audience. As a small business futurist, your audience is made up of four groups that need to believe in your vision for the future of the enterprise: family, employees, customers, and bankers – in that order.

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Don’t Drag A Stinking Fish Across Your Future

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For centuries, one of the great pastimes of the English landed gentry was foxhunting. Part of that fun involved the occasional need to distract the hounds away from the scent they’d been following, which was accomplished by dragging a red herring – a real fish on a string – across the trail of the little furry guy.

Since this smelly practice was essentially lying to the hounds by leading them in a false direction, in time it produced a handy and enduring metaphor. Today, instead of being associated with horses, dogs, and stuffy English nobility in red coats, a “red herring” is more likely to represent someone attempting to divert attention from the real issue at hand in a conversation, debate, or negotiation. Magicians call it sleight-of-hand, and politicians call it politics. My grandmother would have called it lying.

Sorry, Grandma, but there are examples when introducing a red herring into a conversation doesn’t have to be sinister. For example, in a negotiation, it can be a handy defensive tactic, and in sales, it can confirm how important an objection really is to a prospect.

But there are other conversations when we introduce a red herring without realizing it – the ones we have with ourselves. And in those cases, since we know both sides of the debate, the result is what Grandma said: we lie to ourselves. I call that the personal red herring. It’s one thing to use red herrings as a communication tool, but when we use them on ourselves, it’s unproductive at best and disastrous at worst.

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What’s Latin For Delivering On Digital Customer Expectations?

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Why do we put locks on exterior glass doors? Why would a business extend credit to a customer with merely an illegible signature on a purchase ticket? Why do we make promises to customers based on the future performance of vendors?

Yes, there are laws and consequences that address missteps or misbehavior in all of these scenarios. But are those elements really what make us extend and expose ourselves?

Post hoc is Latin for “after the fact.” Laws, regulations, contracts, and other such elements are part of the post hoc process when Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall. They remediate, redress, and reconcile – after the fact. But as important and effective as they may be, they’re not really what drives our behavior.

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Five Post-Pandemic Rules For Business And Life

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Almost a half-century ago, a list of rules really caught on. Without the benefit of the Internet, email, or social media, but with no less an endorsement than syndicated newspaper oracle, Ann Landers, “Ten Rules For Being Human” quickly circulated around the globe.

Initially, the author’s name didn’t make the trip, resulting in attribution to “Anonymous.” It remained that way even when Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen included The Rules in their original Chicken Soup For The Soul book in 1993. Still attributing it to “Anonymous,” they somehow didn’t know that the wisdom of The Rules came from their long-time friend, Dr. Chérie Carter-Scott.

Chérie has been my friend since she first told that story to my radio audience over two decades ago, as she launched her first book based on The Rules, If Life is a Game, These are the Rules. Using Chérie’s numbering, here are five of the ten Rules that are handy for small business owners any time, but especially so just now. And, of course, each rule is followed by my thoughts.

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Ten Reasons The $15 Minimum Wage Is A Harmful Blunt Instrument

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Arguably our first primordial tool, humans owe a lot to blunt instruments. Indeed, the world could not have been built without hammers and such.

But thousands of years ago, even Og and Gog knew a boulder wasn’t an appropriate tool to stake a hide to dry. Alas, in the 21st century, that “appropriate” concept is still lost on the largest and most unwieldy blunt instrument in history: the U.S. government, which has a sad history of inappropriately hammering square policy pegs into round resolution holes. Remember these two legislative pile drivers?

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