The Future Is Here! But Is It Shocking?

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Inc.: You couldn't have predicted everything.

Al: No. And we can't be right about everything.

Heidi: No. And we avoid the term prediction because it implies certainty.

Inc.: Arguably, there is less certainty for small businesses. If a small business gets a contract with a large corporation today, the account can completely change in two months.

Al: What's happening is that everybody, as a consequence of the speed of the change, lives with higher and higher levels of uncertainty.

Heidi: And shorter and shorter time frames.

Al: And that increases risk.

Inc.: So what does an entrepreneur do in that environment? What's the survival strategy?

Al: First, have a strategy. There is a fashionable belief that strategy is somehow an obsolete idea because things are moving so fast. That, to me, is a really dangerous notion.

Heidi: And by the way, a strategy is not written in stone.

Al: Yes, exactly.

Heidi: You're going to need fallback positions, you need alternative strategies, and you need what-ifs.

Inc.: So what does a company do?

Heidi: Imagine all of the possible things that could change.

Al: You can't imagine them all.

Heidi: No. As many as you can. Think about what could happen in the future. Challenge all the business buzzwords, all the current assumptions -- first mover, increasing returns, core competence, et cetera, et cetera. You need a business plan, but the business plan has to be a very flexible one to account for changes in your environment.

Al: I agree with that. But first of all, you have to redefine the concept of strategy. It's not marching orders for the next five years.

Taking the time to develop the strategy and a process for changing it -- that's very difficult to do. Easy for us to say, but difficult to do. You need a strategy of the moment, a strategy that you can change, but a strategy nevertheless.

Inc.: You had suggested that future shock might cause disease, yet people live longer than they ever did before. Does that mean that we're adapting?

Al: I don't believe that we said people were going to drop dead, get sick, and die young. To me future shock is not a matter of people lying in hospital beds. It's a matter of people having difficulty sorting out what's the right path to follow and what change will be good or bad in life -- what job, what education for your child, where to live -- and then putting up with the stress of having to change direction again and again.

Inc.: Somebody running a company is going to have similar difficulties?

Al: Exactly. So it's essential to have a grip, a clear understanding, of what your values and priorities are. Without a clear set of values, one decision is as good as another.

Inc.: That goes back to your strategy point.

Al: That's right. If I know what my personal values are or what my company priorities are, I know what not to do, and I know what not to worry about. I can focus on what my task is.

And it also means that you can't just follow some other company's strategy and replicate it. You've got to develop your own. As with products, one size misfits all. You've got to know where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish.

Now, the fact is, you can't know exactly what you need to know. And by the time you do, it's almost obsolete. The world is running faster and faster.

Inc.: So does that make large organizations vulnerable?

Al: Yes. Heidi and I spent five years working with our hands in factories. In foundries and other manufacturing plants, I was the kid on the maintenance gang. And the maintenance gang was responsible for making sure the assembly lines, the furnaces, and all of that stuff worked.

If something broke, the procedure was that the worker on the line would call to the foreman and say, "Joe, something is broke." Joe would stop the line and call to the supervisor, "Mike, something's wrong with the assembly line. Go do something about it." He'd say, "OK, I'll call Jim" (the supervisor of maintenance), and Jim would go down the line and choose a foreman, who would then call me to go out and get it fixed.

Now, look where that information has moved: it jumps up, cross-jumps, jumps down. All the while, people are standing around, doing nothing. We can't afford that now. The pressures of competition and speed are so intense that we want to make that exchange of information, first of all, in real time. And second, we want to give decision making to the worker so that you don't have to go through all of those hoops in order for an important message to get through before an action can be taken. So the pressures are enormous to change the information system and to flatten the bureaucracy or to get rid of bureaucracy.

Inc.: Is the Internet going to make future shock worse?

Al: I think so. There was a famous book that came out in the late 1940s, an anti-Communist collection of literary essays called The God That Failed. Now there is another god that in one sense has failed: the computer. It was supposed to simplify our lives.

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