Back in December of 2008 I put this post together “2009 and Beyond – Threats and Opportunities”

I have been a subscriber to The Future of Work newsletter for a year or so, and Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham are definitely two of the most astute observers of what is happening in this rapidly changing world. The most recent newsletter has a couple of articles that bear further review, and I will share some of that with you this week.

As we move into the new year, many of us in the Social Media field have been making some predictions about the marketplace. Ware and Grantham have gone a step further and made some predictions about the global economy and political landscape. See The Virtues of Near Death for some remarkable observations:

In our very humble opinion, the next several years will bring a number of near-death experiences to many businesses, public agencies, and, yes, even sovereign nations. And we’re sorry to say that some of those near-deaths will result in actual extinctions. Not every corporate dinosaur is going to survive the global cataclysm that we’re facing today.

Being futurists at heart, then, we’d like to close with a few predictions.

We’ve already seen the meltdown in financial services. Look for similar events and patterns in:

* Health care (in the United States)
* Higher education – both public and private
* Transportation – both local and long-distance
* Local municipal governments

It does look like these industries are teetering on the brink of some sort of big, big changes.

Read the whole article at “2009 and Beyond – Threats and Opportunities” and share your thoughts.

More on the great disruption from Harvard Business Online’s Scott Anthony

Thriving in the Great Disruption requires a particular breed of innovator. Specifically, innovators should look to master three disciplines:

1. Placing a premium on progress.

While more and more companies recognize the name of the game is transformation, the tolerance for blind experimentation has never been lower. Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.

2. Mastering paradox.

Leaders in most Fortune 500 companies grew up in an era where they could succeed largely by exploiting their existing business. Today’s leaders need to master both exploitation and exploration. They need to develop the ability to rely on precise data in their core business and intuition and judgment when they are creating new growth businesses. They have to live the old F. Scott Fitzgerald mantra, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the same mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

3. Learning to love the low end.

In the dark days of October and November [2008, ed.], consumers flocked to discounters like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Increasingly value conscious consumers and hungry low-cost competitors mean that innovators have to learn how to love low-end business. That doesn’t necessarily mean that companies have to slash prices. Rather, they have to figure out how to deliver what consumers in low-end segments consider value.

On Progress in the down economy

Rapid prototyping and faster iteration cycles will become much more important as businesses look to create excitement about new products/services and re-invigorate old ones. Look for amazing advances in cloud-based web applications and computing, mobile applications and hardware, and the increased use of online video.

Overcoming the paradox of control

This has been eaten to death but it is none-the-less an axiom: Businesses no longer have the ultimate say about their brands. Conversations in the blogosphere rule the interpretation of brand names and an army of savvy, connected, social media literate consumers drive the discussion. This army must be engaged and guided, rather than confronted. The businesses that thrive in 2009 and beyond will be the ones that bring these leaders into the development process and embrace co-creation as a business model.

With activities that blur the silos of online marketing, customer service and public relations, Rasmussen’s interactions now hinge on seeding community brainstorms and prototyping new product ideas with online collaborators in forums, blogs and persistent virtual environments like Second Life.

“A lot of our online customers are eager to share their opinions, not just on new products, but also on how to improve existing products,” says Rasmussen. “Participation in these conversations provides customers with a genuine connection to a brand they care about, and a voice in the direction that brand takes.”

The low end and the long tail

The Long Tail is a concept that is transforming business, even as the concept itself continues to evolve. “Learning to love low-end business” is a good idea. A better idea is to push the low-end products/services into the tail of the sales chart, and drive the newest, most innovative work to the fore. New tracking tools and measurement methods that identify long-tail trends, and support them, will be essential to marketing success.

Measuring traffic and “eyeballs” haven’t been enough for a long time now, and the business that thrives will take advantage of new metrics such as:

• The number of downloads of the free whitepaper, trial version of software, etc
• Analyzing the context of inbound links
• Vigorous search and tracking of positive vs negative blog/forum posts & comments
• The tone and volume of Twitter posts (try “Motrin”)

Scaffolding will replace silos in the businesses that thrive

Amber Naslund makes a fantastic observation:

Building Without Walls

Flexibility is going to be key in a nimble digital world. Plans are going to be made, reworked, and all out broken. The days of the tabular marketing and communications plan are long gone. What’s next will be frameworks, scaffolding. Structure without permanence so that communicators like me (and you) can adapt and mold to the shapes that the conversations are taking online.[Emphasis mine, ed.]

Value is no longer a one-way street, it is more like a fiber-optic cable. The market has more value than simply a source of revenue. The market is growing into a marketspace, leaving behind those businesses that do not realize that it is a source of inspiration, innovation, and collaboration.

What say you?

A note on a suggested name for this time of economic change and turmoil: The Great Disruption – by Scott Anthony

Why the Great Disruption? In the Great Depression, demand, output and wages declined across the board. Today’s times are different. It isn’t just that demand is sagging. It’s that change is ripping through markets at unprecedented pace. Competitive advantage that took decades to build disappears seemingly overnight.

The Great Disruption didn’t start in 2008. Over the past decade, technological improvements have made starting and scaling businesses easier than ever. The rise of China, India, Brazil, and Russia mean market leaders have to deal with more sharp-elbowed competitors than ever before. And industries are frantically converging and colliding.

Certainly the pace of change has accelerated over the past few months, but leaders in media, retail, defense, health care, automotive, and high-tech can attest that they have been grappling with the Great Disruption for some time.

The Great Disruption creates real challenges for managers who have made a career out of focused execution. Smart management and prudent cost controls might have been enough to survive the Great Depression, but they are wholly insufficient for surviving the Great Disruption. For example, all the operational acumen in the world won’t help U.S. newspaper companies handle the seismic shifts in their industry.

Anthony will be writing a series of posts on navigating this era, and publishing a book about it ( The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. ).

Related posts for you:

• Leading Change? These 5 Obama-Approved Tactics Get Buy-In 19686401
  Stew Friedman
• From Innosight, an Innovator’s Survival Guide 19366466
  Scott Anthony
• Remembering a Master of Leadership 18832588
  Stew Friedman
• Whole Foods Needs a Holistic Approach on Climate Change 20385723
  Mindy S. Lubber
• Your Blueprint for Managing Through a Downturn 16258218
  Orit Gadiesh & Hugh MacArthur

I have been a subscriber to The Future of Work newsletter for a year or so, and Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham are definitely two of the most astute observers of what is happening in this rapidly changing world. The most recent newsletter has a couple of articles that bear further review, and I will share some of that with you this week.

As we move into the new year, many of us in the Social Media field have been making some predictions about the marketplace. Ware and Grantham have gone a step further and made some predictions about the global economy and political landscape. See The Virtues of Near Death for some remarkable observations:

In our very humble opinion, the next several years will bring a number of near-death experiences to many businesses, public agencies, and, yes, even sovereign nations. And we’re sorry to say that some of those near-deaths will result in actual extinctions. Not every corporate dinosaur is going to survive the global cataclysm that we’re facing today.

Being futurists at heart, then, we’d like to close with a few predictions.

We’ve already seen the meltdown in financial services. Look for similar events and patterns in:

* Health care (in the United States)
* Higher education – both public and private
* Transportation – both local and long-distance
* Local municipal governments

Some industries and organizations will survive, some will go away. Just think about it. How many businesses enterprises “lived” even 100 years? How many governments have lasted more than 500 years?

For us this time in history means opportunity (there’s that optimism shining through again). Finally, maybe firms will be in a state where they are willing to suffer the pain of change – a change toward agility, increased performance, and community responsibility. And a few firms and individuals – those with a clear vision and at least a little capital – will invest in the future and come out of this mess as the new captains of industry.

Failure can be a good thing

Should some big, old, hidebound companies be allowed to fail? Companies like GM that, even though they have embraced Social Media and participate in conversations with their market are still failing because other practices remain mired in the 50’s. Consider:

• An out-dated distribution model with too many fingers in the pie
• A sales model with a history of corruption and dishonesty
• Management and payroll practices dictated by the desires of the Labor Unions, rather than economic realities in the marketplace
• R&D and production models that spend too much, take too long, and produce products that people don’t really want

Momentum is the Enemy of Change

Once again Ware and Grantham hit the nail on the head:

We can’t resist observing that one of the reasons for size and scale of the current meltdown may just be that we as a nation have been too willing to keep too many dying organizations on artificial life support for way too long.

This condition affects governments as well as corporations. Consider the disaster of “Urban Planning”, apparently designed to maximize profits for developers and real-estate taxes for the municipalities. No longer is it possible to walk to a school, church, or grocery store in most of suburban America. The citizens are forced to drive everywhere while even downtown areas, once bustling centers of human interaction, roll up the sidewalks and turn out the lights at 5:00. Orson Scott Card discusses “Walking Neighborhoods” at length:

It’s as if government looked at the beloved old neighborhoods that people drive through with yearning and nostalgia, and banned them.

The result is that the poor are shunted off into isolated islands, where crime thrives, employment is remote, and the poor have to own cars just to get a job. Meanwhile, most people can’t walk or bike to any useful destination, because the law has forbidden retail or office buildings anywhere near where people live.

…our city should be ashamed of intersections like North Elm and Pisgah Church [in Greensboro, NC, ed.], where sidewalks are only intermittent, and two directions across the street have no crosswalks, and there are no crossing signals.

And yet this intersection has been worked on twice at great expense to “improve” the way it handles cars. Nothing for the pedestrian, everything for the automobile. This mindset in government has got to go.

And provides specific recommendations for change:

Local transit inside the city. Buses will be frequent, regular, clean, comfortable, safe, and quick. They go everywhere, from everywhere, and if a hub system is used, there are many hubs, not just one, so that each trip doesn’t take half the day.

Telecommuting. Businesses should get substantial tax breaks for every day that fulltime employees stay at home, working by computer. Control-freak managers hate telecommuting, but in professions where working on a home computer is possible, the best employees thrive best when they are not constantly supervised (especially since they are often supervised by people who know less than they do about their jobs).

…we could have grocery stores every few blocks — competing on quality of tailored service as well as price and selection. Those regular-customer cards could become memberships or subscriptions that bring the privilege of having the things you buy regularly always in stock for you.

Regular customers could easily be rewarded for letting the store know when they’ll be out of town so they won’t be making their regular purchases. They would come to think of it as their grocery store, with far higher loyalty.

Grocery stores are the foundation of neighborhood retail. Once they’re in place, you have a neighborhood; until then, you don’t. But the corner grocery model, with just-enough stock management, would quickly be adopted by other stores.

Keep development in context

Is there a best solution? I think so, and it has everything to do with intelligent development. Personal development, corporate development, and urban development. Everyone has to work smarter, leaner, and become more agile in thinking and doing. These are tough times, make no mistake. Many on the right and left think that it will get worse before it gets better, yet I suspect we will see much more finger-pointing and blame-fixing than real solutions, at least in the short-term.

The long-term will bring a convergence of best practices from the business world, the personal development sphere, and massive changes on how government works.

What say you?