How To Improve Your Future Thinking

Below are some random thoughts and ideas to help with developing your point of view about your business(es) future.

• As markets mature they commoditise and the race to the bottom begins. Choose a different race, build new sorts of value and differentiation.
• There is a new psychological contract forming between customers and suppliers, one that will have a profound impact in the way new value propositions are developed. A partner organisation of SalesPathways,  live|work, is doing some groundbreaking work for clients is this area, check them out.
• What is happening in China? (standing agenda item).
• We increasingly live in a world of discontinuous, not linear change. The future cannot be extrapolated from the past. This creates huge opportunities for the insightful.
• Your ability to generate insight is directly proportionate to the number of connections you can make in a given space.
• The ability to aggregate, mine and personalise customer data will become a major source of competitive advantage.
• Google stats are a great place to find something striking, interesting or just plain thought provoking.
• It’s much easier to keep up with technology than catch up.
• Why are some people able to mobilise large groups around a future change agenda? Because they have two things in abundance: a coherent point of view about what the future could look like, and influence beyond their sphere of control. These two qualities act in dynamic combination in motivating people to buy-in to change.
• Culture defeats strategy.
• The engaged employee is a significant enabler of growth. Definition of an engaged person: someone who freely gives their emotional commitment to creating mutual success.
• Most organisations seem to have no idea how to engage people. Speak to Predaptive if you want to build an engaged organisation.
• Finally, Arthur C Clarke’s three  laws of prediction are still very pertinant:
  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Claudine McClean
T:  01789 734400
E:  claudinem@salespathways.com

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