Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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How to starve your business’s alligators

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Small business owners know all about that metaphorical business reptile – the ubiquitous alligator. They slither in from everywhere, continuously chomping holes in your business, tearing apart projects, taking a bite out of performance and eating away at momentum.

As the CEO of your business, if your enterprise is to survive, let alone flourish, you have to deal with each alligator that pops up.

To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, your business’s sustainability and organizational effectiveness depends on the ability to keep your head when all around alligators are trying to take it off.

We know three things about these caustic crocodilians: 1) every small business has them; 2) they don’t go away on their own; 3) besides the operational intrusion, they take an emotional toll. And as good as we may get at dealing with the damage they can cause, we’re not usually as good at dealing with that emotional thing.

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It’s the Age of the Customer – the rules have changed

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For 10,000 years, customers refined their search for products and services down to a couple of semi-finalist sellers based almost entirely on the classic competitive value proposition: price, product, availability, service, etc. I’ve termed this period the Age of the Seller.

That was a nice trip down memory lane, wasn’t it?

The new prime differentiator today is no longer the competitive model, but rather a customer’s appraisal of how relevant a seller is to them, often before they even know if a seller is competitive. So, does this mean that sellers no longer have to be competitive?

Not at all – no one will pay you more for less. But consider three new marketplace truths:

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All hail the Quantum Leap Generation!

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It’s been more than a half-century since the advent of three legendary Digital Age markers: the printed circuit board, the first IBM mainframe, and Moore’s Law. So, by now it would be reasonable to presume that we analog humans would have our digital adoption corn flakes together.
Alas, 21st-century reality doesn’t bear out that reasonable assumption, as the dynamism of digital leverage has matched almost every sweet opportunity with a distasteful disruption, creating a lot of anxiety in the process.

Indeed, when the Fraternal Twins of Innovation – Disruption and Opportunity – set up shop in the Digital Age, they imposed transformation on every market participant. And since Disruption is the Twin that typically shows up first, those adjustments were likely brutal until Opportunity arrived, often fashionably late. Of course, we all know stories where the rude cousin of the Twins, Irrelevance, wrote too many tragic, final chapters.

Thankfully, on the Opportunity side of the Twins’ balance sheet is a list of unprecedented sweetness: awesome communication options; digital leverage at lightspeed; amassed information about everything from local to global to galactic, and all literally at our fingertips. And entrepreneurs benefited further from lower barriers to entry and competitive advantage from the incrementalization of digital leverage at prices we can afford. But the Twins only convert to sugar on the bottom line when we transform them into something customers will pay for today and tomorrow. There’s still much consternation over yesterday’s analog model being tomorrow’s digital fish wrapper.

Today, when I talk with business audiences about their level of anxiety from the urgency created by 21st-century innovation – these are all technology high-adopters, mind you – most admit to still being anxious about the awesome implications of the Digital Twins. Even balanced against the amazing benefits, humans continue to be unsettled about the unabating digital disturbances coming at them from all quadrants.

But, it must now be revealed that what’s causing all this anxiety isn’t technology: The Internet is just a new way to harness fire, and a computer is merely a fancy wheel. In truth, change itself has been an abiding part of the human experience since Adam and Eve. What’s really causing all this unsettledness, intimidation and anxiety is what I call the Sudden Increased Velocity of Change. No previous generation has ever experienced this level of innovation compression, and it’s doubtful any future generation’s innovation ramp will be as steep as ours has been.

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Success will come from relationships you build with people

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Dave was the fifth of twelve children raised during the Great Depression. His father worked at a sawmill and was a part-time basket weaver.

Dave had some problems:  He was a stutterer, he had epilepsy, plus a learning disorder, all of which prevented him from graduating high school until he was 21. How do you like Dave’s chances in life so far?

But Dave was a good employee: first, a Fuller Brush salesman and next, a route man for two bakeries. Then, with all of his personal challenges, he purchased and successfully ran a restaurant and a grocery store.

Remember Dave’s father’s part-time basket weaving? Well, he started selling baskets: first from his father’s hands, and later from Dave’s factory. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t know Dave had a basket factory. Well, it was the basket factory Dave sold his two very successful businesses to buy. Turns out Dave had serious entrepreneurial sap rising in his bark.

Dave’s friends, family, and bankers were incredulous. Why leave a successful and sure thing to make baskets? By the way, they knew Dave didn’t know anything about how to make baskets himself. Would you have invested in Dave?

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Your Blockchain close encounter of the first kind

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This is the third article in a series about Blockchain technology and its implications. The first was an introduction, and the second was how Blockchain works and its role in creating digital trust. This article is about your likely first contact. 

As small businesses have increasingly become vertically integrated with Big Business customers, they’ve had to step up their Main-Street-Mom-and-Pop game to become more sophisticated while continuing to be nimble, quick, versatile and efficient. With this integration, larger customers have notified smaller partners of their evolving expectations, as driven by macro events and trends.

Consequently, over the past 25 years, millions of small businesses have received letters requiring compliance with four of those macro markers: the first was about new quality standards (e.g. ISO 9000), the second was about Y2K preparation, the third was about cyber-security standards and practices, and the most recent is about sustainability/climate change expectations. In addition to ongoing compliance, these expectations accumulated as elements of future bid specifications.

The next expectation “letter” may be your business’s close encounter of the first kind with Blockchain. A larger customer will inform you that future business won’t be established with an inert, analog contract you’ll sign and return, but rather using a “Smart Contract” powered by one of the Blockchain platforms. If you haven’t been keeping up with Blockchain business applications, that will be a maddening, expensive and potentially perilous moment. You just got T-boned by a Quantum Leap Challenge because, as you should know by now, you can’t get up-to-speed on Blockchain overnight.

Now that you’re on notice, let’s get you ready with a few likely first-use Blockchain applications.

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Blockchain isn’t the end of trust, it’s the future of trust

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This is the second of three articles about Blockchain technology and its implications. The first was an introduction, this one’s about how Blockchain works and its role in creating digital trust, and the third article will be about how you’re likely to make first contact and use it. I’ll remind you that Blockchain is a complicated topic, so thanks for your continued patience.

To understand Blockchain, we must first contemplate the primordial role of trust. Just as every chemical process in the human body takes place in the medium of water, every human interaction – every one – takes place in the medium of trust. As civilizations, societies, and markets evolved, all were made manifest by the existence of, and singular devotion to trust. It’s the cornerstone, the keystone, and the capstone of our civilized existence. As the original open source model, trust is the intangibly awesome foundation of equilibrium and creator of order.

This will be on the test: For 10,000 years, humans required analog trust. In the Digital Age, humans will require digital trust. As open source technology beyond cryptocurrency, Blockchain is enabling trust’s metamorphosis from analog-to-digital, as it becomes synonymous with digital trust.

For Satoshi Nakamoto, creating Bitcoin was easy. But making his peer-to-peer cryptocurrency deliver on the human trust expectation was complicated by the fact that fiat currency – trusted as value-in-exchange – is backed by the full faith and credit of the issuing sovereign government. To become a viable fiat alternative, users had to trust Bitcoin to be authentically tendered by its true owner, just as merchants trust bank technology to verify in real time that customers have the money they’re spending. So, to eliminate the “double-spend” concern, Satoshi created his Blockchain, which has the task of delivering a trustable Bitcoin.

Now let’s take Blockchain beyond currency. The essence of analog trust intermediaries, like government, banks, lawyers, title companies, etc., is to facilitate a transaction that doesn’t require the parties to trust each other. As a practical alternative, Blockchain can do the same thing, but faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost. But what about those trust expectation?

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