Futuring

We Made The Experiment, And The Fruit Is Before Us

October 3, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

For more than 20 years in our online poll, we’ve asked our audience for their thoughts on a wide variety of Main Street subjects. Recently, we asked the following question with four response options, and results in parenthesis:

“Based on your observations, will younger generations – currently under 45 – be able to take full possession and manage the transfer of America’s business?”

• Absolutely. Just as well as any other group – maybe better (23%).

• Not looking great so far – high in entitlement and low in work ethic and critical thinking (26%).

• It seems they’re behind, but there is a minority – about 20% – who could save them (28%).

• Time marches on and each inheriting generation shapes their own future (23%).

In the hundreds of polls we’ve published, rarely has the tightness of the spread of responses been as noteworthy as the leading vote options. For now let’s set aside the 23% who defend the younger generations and the same group who equally defends humanity in general, and focus first on the leading responses.[Continue Reading]

Your Blockchain Close Encounter Of The First Kind

September 19, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

This is the third article in a series about Blockchain technology and its implications. The first, in June, was an introduction, and the second, in July, 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: [Continue Reading]

Blockchain: It’s The Future Of Trust

July 25, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to how Blockchain works. This offering is about how it can create digital trust. But first, let me remind you – Blockchain is a complicated topic, so thanks for your continued focus.

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 – each one – takes place in the medium of trust. As civilization, 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[Continue Reading]

In The Age Of The Customer, Relevance Trumps Competitiveness

July 14, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

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: [Continue Reading]

Bring Your Customer’s Customer Into Focus

March 10, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to show depth, where images in the foreground and background are all in focus.

In photographic terms, the range of focus front to back is called depth of field. The best way to expand depth of field so more of the subjects in the photo are in focus is to add light. Light contributes to depth of field.

If you were given a photo of people who were the most critical to your success, you’d easily recognize your customers in the foreground in perfect focus. But as you look deeper into the photo you’d notice the images behind that first row increasingly drop out of focus with each receding row. The reason is that for most of the history of the marketplace, businesses have gotten away with having a very narrow customer depth of field.

When the coin of the realm was to be competitive, that meant you spent all your time thinking about how to serve the person in the foreground, the first row of your business world: your customers. But as I’ve revealed in the past, being competitive has been trumped by being relevant. And in The Age of the Customer, perhaps the most important component of being relevant to business customers is helping them serve the most important person in their photo: [Continue Reading]

Implications of the Pandemic Workforce Diaspora on Corporate Culture

September 20, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

“Frankly, I’m amazed at how well we’re working right now. We’ve experienced zero drop in performance.”

That quote, and variations of it, came from several CEOs during the second half of 2020, in response to my question: “How have your teams performed so far during the lockdown?” These CEOs were guests on my weekday, syndicated radio program, “The Small Business Advocate Show.” In fact, they were so pleasantly surprised that one executive even asked rhetorically, “Tell me again why we’re spending $5million a year on office rent?”

For date context, that was the initial period when the marketplace was essentially locked down, and the workforce was sent home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, millions of workers across the globe started working remotely and, ready or not, subsequent teamwork, collaboration and meetings were conducted in the two-dimensional digital domain, like on a Zoom call.

Based on the answers to my question, it seemed that this emergency, once-in-a-career, global workplace disruption had revealed some previously unknown magical management formula [Continue Reading]