Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Technology / General

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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Blockchain is here – are you ready?

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This is the first of a three-part series about a technology that’s likely to create a level of disruption, unlike anything we’ve seen. This article is to introduce the technology and put its disruptive implications in perspective. The next article will explain how the technology works. And the third will be about your likely first contact, and how you’ll use it in your business and life. First, some perspective.

Since the advent of the Digital Age, the number of business model disruptions brought on by new technology has been unprecedented in human history. Legacy paradigms – complete with red-letter rules and legendary success stories – have shifted dangerously for multi-generational industries. Think Kodak. Other examples include email’s impact on fax machines and the letter/parcel delivery industry; Airbnb hindering the hospitality industry without owning any real estate; and don’t ask a cabby about Uber unless you want to hear cursing.

There’s one thing all these disruptions have in common: The most breathtakingly-fast shifts of the past have been on a level that I call “next-step understanding.” Previously, when an innovation disrupted and possibly even surprised us, what we saw happening was next-step understandable. As dramatic as any innovation may have been – personal computer, Internet, e-commerce, social media, etc. – we took it in stride because it was a single unit of variation above where we were operating.

But, now it’s time to buckle up. What’s coming at you won’t be next-step – it will require what I call “quantum-leap understanding.” A quantum leap requires at least two steps – maybe more – at once. Understanding this next disruption won’t be like taking a course in Spanish or French. It will be more like learning Klingon. Almost maddening at first, it will seem like you’re passing through a wormhole into another dimension. Tech writer Adam Greenfield said this: “This is the first technology I’ve encountered that’s difficult for even the most intelligent and highly capable people to understand.”

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Cloud computing is awesome. But not always.

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In aviation, being “in the clouds” is a universal flight condition referring to a pilot’s inability to see the ground.

It’s also a common lament of parents about the troubling coordinates of a teenager’s head, which might seem to be “in the clouds.”

In the 21st century, “in the cloud” is a reference that has established itself in the marketplace vernacular as the interaction and delivery point between providers of “cloud-based” digital applications and customers.

Cloud computing is the availability of incremental processing power that resides on an application provider’s servers, instead of your hard drive. For example, community-building technology, like social media platforms. When you post something on Facebook, you’re in the cloud. When you conduct online banking, sell a stock, or hail an Uber from your smartphone, you’re doing that in the cloud. If you use Google’s G Suite of office products, or Microsoft Office 365, all are cloud-based.

No question, cloud computing is another example of technology increasing business efficiencies and leverage. And for small businesses, it’s been a godsend, because it not only gives us access to Big Business-like leverage, it’s also offered at an incremental price that fits our diminutive budgets.

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It’s the Digital Age: Ethically speaking, things here are different

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As arrogant occupants of 21st-century Earth, who can rightly boast of creating exciting innovations, like the computer, talking paint, and the margarita blender, it serves us to believe we’re also the more enlightened generation.

But honesty demands acknowledgement that contemporary applications of wisdom, morality, and ethical behavior are in fact derivative of concepts first proposed long ago by the ancients.

For example, in addition to the almost four-millennia-old, legendary Mosaic Laws, consider the 10,000-year-old Chinese wisdom, I Ching, The Book of Changes. Then there’s the 5,000-year-old Upanishads from India, and finally, King Solomon’s first millennium BCE wisdom from Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. It must be noted that some of this awesome self-awareness was first contemplated at a time when receding Ice Age glaciers were still carving Scotland’s Loch Ness and the Great Lakes of North America, while others came to light barely on the threshold of the written word.

Alas, ethically and morally speaking, we moderns are merely the new models, not the better ones. Hold that thought.

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Jim Blasingame’s 2019 crystal ball predictions

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Here are my 2019 Predictions — my 20th set — by major category. Through 19 years, my record is 73.6% accuracy.

Small Business
 
Prediction: Small business confidence will wane slightly, but still maintain record levels above the NFIB’s 45-year average.
 
Prediction: With research showing younger generations less entrepreneurial than Baby Boomers (Kauffman), millions of divesting business owners will have to be more creative than ever to maximize the value of their business.
 
Prediction: Stronger balance sheets and better financial management than any time in a half-century will help the small business sector weather a maturing expansion and contribute to a quicker recovery.
 
Prediction: For the 12th straight year, small businesses will continue to limit borrowed capital to fund growth. This is why higher interest rates, the kryptonite of Wall Street, is less of a Main Street threat.
 
Prediction: Unlike corporate America, small business appraisal of the TCJA tax bill of 2017 will fall in the tepid category of “a mixed bag.”
 
Prediction: First under assault from Obama’s NLRB, and now Democrats and the courts, the U.S. franchise industry will face its greatest challenge over the attempt to create a labor organizing nexus between the mothership franchisor and employees of the separately owned small business franchise. This is the sleeper issue for Main Street in 2019.
 
Prediction: Trump’s beneficial regulatory abatement of the past two years will succumb to the reality of having to negotiate deals with Congressional Democrats.
 
Prediction: Artificial intelligence (AI) leverage will become increasingly available from granular applications for small businesses, but they will be slow to adopt.
 
Economy
 
Prediction: The greatest fundamental economic growth headwind will continue to be a lack of qualified employees to help businesses seize new opportunities.
 
Prediction: The Federal Reserve will raise rates at least once, a sign of strong economic fundamentals and inflation concerns.
 
Prediction: For the first time in decades, wage increases — both organic and by government edict — will put pressure on inflation, causing the Fed to respond (see above, and Dec jobs report).
 
Prediction: The U.S. economy will average above 2.5% GDP in 2019. Perspective alert: We were proud of 3% when the economy was at $6 Trillion; 2019 GDP will be $21 Trillion.
 
Prediction: If there is a recession in 2019, it will be due more to a cascading of Wall Street’s toxic hysteria about the Fed, Brexit, trade wars, if Apple’s Tim Cook suffers a kidney stone, or a possible attack by the planet Rhordan from the Andromeda Galaxy than from the underlying economic condition.
 
Prediction: U.S. stock markets achieved record levels, irrespective of economic fundamentals, and Mr. Gravity will lower them by the same metrics — whatever those are.
 
Prediction: The global safe-harbor of investing in U.S. assets will contribute to preventing a major stock market collapse, even if indexes descend into “bear” territory.
 
Prediction: Good news/bad news — A slowing global economy will hold crude oil in its deflationary trend, averaging under $55/bbl during 2019.
 
Prediction: China’s considerable internal challenges will help Trump accomplish significant trade deal progress if not completion.
 
Prediction: The U.S. will accrue unprecedented, multi-faceted benefits by becoming a net-exporter of energy products, from economic to monetary to trade to geopolitics.

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The real price of free information

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Standing here on the threshold of the third decade of the 21st century, we’ve watched the Digital Age transmogrify into the Information Age. Now awash with a digital record of everything that’s ever been said, written or happened, from area news to Aristotle’s ethical teachings, the barrier to whatever else we need or want to know is literally no higher than the tap of a finger. And if being up-to-the-minute isn’t fast enough, we now have the world, and parts of the cosmos, available in real-time.
 
And all of this information is a good thing — until it isn’t. In his song, “Against the Wind,” Bob Seger lamented that deadlines and commitments made him have to decide, “What to leave in, what to leave out.” As digitally driven information morphs from handy to firehose overload, we have to learn how to consume it with increasing discernment – what to leave in, what to leave out.
 
As the children of the Information Age, we’re constantly and increasingly at risk of becoming victims and/or purveyors of a potentially dangerous phenomenon: Availability Cascade. It occurs when we’re exposed to something so much — a maxim, a meme, misinformation or disinformation — that we begin to accept it as truth and reality, and worse, act on it without confirming accuracy or relevance. Here’s an old story from the Analog Age that demonstrates the power of Availability Cascade.
 

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