Tag Archives: future

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How Your People are the Key to Sustaining Success

We have all heard it said that people are the most important asset your business has. In fact, it is said so much that now we have become somewhat numb to it!

Do we really believe this? Are people truly the key to your organization’s success? What about innovation or leadership or cashflow or customers?

Sustaining Success

According to Tom Peters in The Excellence Dividend there are seven steps to sustaining success. These seven steps start with taking care of your employees. If you can take care of them and treat them with excellence, they will address all the other components of an excellent business!

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Would You Rather Choose the Path of Preservation or Innovation?

Have you ever played the game “Would You Rather? It’s a game where you ask the question;  “Would you rather do X or Y?” It is usually a younger, more “silly” crowd that plays it . . . like my own kids when they were teenagers. They could entertain themselves for hours with outlandish “would you rather” scenarios!

I recently was at a conference where Andy Moore was speaking and he challenged the crowd with the statement; “we can take a path of preservation or a path of innovation.“ You cannot do both. You must choose one or the other.

This really made me think about business leaders and the seemingly innocuous decisions that we make every day that shapes our destiny and the destiny of our businesses and our employees.

Any business that chooses to take the path of preservation rather than the path of innovation will die. Preservation may seem like the safe path because it is the path of least resistance. It may be the path that is the least painful up front. However, it is the path to irrelevancy and decay.

Preservation = Death

What do you think about when you think of the word preservation? Treated lumber is preserved. Petrified wood is preserved. Fossils are preserved. Mammoths are preserved. Egyptian mummies are preserved. And all these preserved things are dead! The path of preservation inevitably ends in death.

There is no future in the status quo. There is no future in preservation!

Innovation = Hope!

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WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us

The book review for this week is What’s the Future by Tim O’Reilly.

O’Reilly outlines the process he uses to understand and successfully identify developing trends that will make an impact in the future. He explains how to build this set of tools and mindset in yourself and in your organization. There are many great examples and personal stories provided to illustrate the concepts that he is teaching.

The last section of the book identifies a number of societal shaking trends that are developing and how we can position ourselves and our businesses to leverage these trends successfully.

My takeaway from this book is what O’Reilly calls the business model map for the new economy which consists of the following seven components outlined below and shown in his graphic:

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What Has Made Our Nations (and Businesses) Great

Everyone knows about Trump’s election promise to “Make America Great Again” but does anyone understand what this means?

I suspect that there are as many opinions on this as there are people! What does “Great Again” mean? How far back do we need to go to determine what was great and what wasn’t? Who determines what was great and what is their decision based on?

Founding Values

Both Canada and the United States were established on Judeo-Christian values hundreds of years ago although we both took different routes to get there. The US was established through their revolutionary war against the British while Canada chose a somewhat longer but more peaceful path to independence.

So, what does this have to do with making our countries great and what does it have to do with business?

Foundation of our Nations

Judeo-Christian values established the foundation on which we have built our nations at every level; our governments, our judicial systems, our correctional systems, our economies, and our system of business.

Our success as democratic and free-enterprise nations could never have been built on the values of totalitarian systems like; communism, fascism, socialism, dictatorship, or an extremist religion based regime. These regimes simply cannot and do not provide the fundamentals necessary to create an environment that fosters a strong economy and nation.

One does not have to look to far to see failed totalitarian states like the old Soviet Union, North Korea, Iraq, Eritrea, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and the current destruction being wrought by regimes like ISIS!

So, what are the Judeo-Christian values that established the foundation for our great countries?

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The Inevitable

Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

This week’s book review is The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly.

Kelly is one of the founders of Wired Magazine and is a well-respected futurist. The Inevitable describes 12 trends that Kelly predicts will have a major impact in our society over the next 20+ years. These are listed below: