Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist or The Spirit Of The Times, or temporary craziness, occurs in business, too. Over the past few years watching disintermediation of industry after industry has not only terminated scores of businesses, but also dramatically changed the business processes of the survivors. 

There are still top down organizations trying to hold off new customer-driven competitors, while increasing pressure strains remaining resources. But fewer of them. 

Remember reengineering? That worked pretty well...for a while. 

The management pyramid? Was that in Egypt? 

Took a while to figure out that best value just means lowest price. And figure out, figure out, figure out. 

Y2K? Dodged that bullet. Whew! 

Participative management? Fewer places to participate these days. 

Doing-more-with-less seems to keep morphing, popping up like a champagne cork on the tide. Maybe because it’s not a prescription but a description. 

In How To Create A Mind, Ray Kurzweil says that being early is just as bad as being late. He’s been successful in the inventing business for almost 50 years, and has been early, on time, and late.

Taking advantage of the now

How do you sift the media-anointed from the real? 

Alan Kay recommended, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  For many of us, we’re moving the ball smartly, trying to find the end zone.  

Which means throwing out many of the analytical tools that will tell you when you’ve committed too much, adopting the tools that encourage carrying on until game’s over.  

I liked Bonnie Raitt’s observation, “Wow! Twenty years to become an overnight success.”

The future shows up regardless.

Springtime. We need a rainmaker! 

Kids’ Books

Right after I finished reading Pirate Cinema, the United States Congress passed the six strikes law to take people off the internet. I guess they hadn't read the book. 

I was looking for some reviews of the book because I wanted more context about the story. Good criticism is supposed to either explain more fully or supply context.

I read one derogatory post about Cory Doctorow’s books for children. Apparently that disappointed the reviewer, who wasn’t as concerned about what Cory had written as about what Cory should have written. That’s like taking a downwind position in a urinary olympiad against Wikipedia.

That review reminded me of a derogatory review about John Varley’s Red Thunder a couple of years ago, where that critic dismissively thought kids’ books were lightweight.

I remember Red Thunder as a potboiler adventure story, full of true love and high adventure. I also remember that the two kids had graduated high school in Florida and found out they hadn’t been taught anything that would allow them to make a living.

I remember they were cleaning hotel rooms around Cape Canaveral to satisfy their food addiction, and had built two laptops that would enable them to attend Internet University.

That sounded like truth to me, since I graduated high school and then college without learning much that was valuable.

One of my classmates wrote, “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”

I needed the reinforcement I read in that book that two people learning together often work better than one learning at IU. Jack and I are constantly feeding what we learn to each other, and piles of facts often lead to more highly developed ideas. Apparently that had slipped past the reviewer.

A third thing I liked about Red Thunder was how a couple of fellow members of the IU student body were blending life, high adventure, and education. Gave us a model we have slavishly imitated.

If you’re going to get a grip on the future, kids’ books like Cory Doctorow’s Pirate Cinema, Little Brother, and John Varley’s Red Thunder, and Orson Scott Card’s Magic Street are instructive. Kids are the ones inventing the future.

I remember when I started reading Makers. Some of the my fellow IU students, Seth Godin and John Battelle recommended it. I started reading thinking, “Oh, this is a near future business fantasy.”

I got 50 pages in and realized this stuff was happening right then! What was different was the author’s perspective reporting the facts. Fantastical? Farfetched? No more than this morning’s 6 am news.

Rainmakers – Competitive advantage five minutes at a time.

Makers – The Future Is Now!

Makers is a future business fantasy by Cory Doctorow with the view of a society where traditional business structure has broken down and the economy is in the tank. Sound familiar – like what you read in today's newspaper?

Instead of relying on organizations to provide jobs, plan what to do and produce, and sign paychecks on regular intervals - in Makers, individuals or a few collaborators are making and selling things. Others are buying things that meet a need with a value to the buyer.

For raw materials, makers reuse already manufactured parts from discarded items – junk – adapted for innovative uses - much different from their original purpose.

They focus on what users want and need to make something to fill that void, by adding some dreams and ingenuity. As inventors, impossibility just a challenge; as entrepreneurs, simplicity and low expense are core principles.

In the book, makers reused boogie-woogie Elmo parts to make smart cars, created 3D printers, and developed self-replicating machines (machines that make working copies of themselves).

Rewind the tape to present day.

Today we have self driving cars in prototype (Nevada has approved these cars) and self parking cars are in the showroom of five major auto brands.

3D printers are being used by several industries – there are 32 parts on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner fabricated by 3D printers. In addition, physical objects can now be copied in three dimensions – like this bust of Doctorow:

Machines that can make copies of their parts exist now – development of self-assembly is moving closer to self replicating reality.

When Xbox came out with the Kinect to sense game player movement – tinkerers immediately bought them to reuse the components to create cheap 3D imaging capability for the home PC.

The old Heath Kit and Erector Set crowd of tinkerers is still around, but has evolved to an open-source knowledge-base approach of developing innovative ideas. Code, concepts, and applied experience are shared and this collaborative environment fosters creativity and permits people to develop their ideas into products or services for sale.

One of the most visible maker communities today is app developers – individual coders who find a need and create a smartphone, tablet, or computer application to fill the void - “I have an app for that”. Agile, quick, and effective in satisfying user wants, priced cheap, and available directly to the buyer.

The New Normal is the changed structure of how we do business. The individual now plays a more significant role in the 'how' of business than merely being a cog in the machinery. However, because of the rapidly changing reality, we must keep current and continue to learn and evolve to remain viable in the workforce.

To learn about the current business environment, read Makers – a book about the future. Even its distribution is non-traditional...download it free from the internet.

The future is now. How do you see it?

Please join us 6 pm, March 13th, at the Capital Technology Management Hub, where Sales Lab’s Jack Gates presents Rainmaker 12, Lessons from Makers, followed by the featured CTMH Presentation, Sales Lab’s Dick Davies speaking about The Direct Economy, How to Profit from The Most Lucrative Market in the History of the World!