What is Working is What Will Remain Over the past few weeks, I've been making many public appearances. Some are book signings, while others are events where I'm slated to give a keynote speech. (See http://larrychase.com/seminars.html for some of my speaker topics.) The question I am asked most is, "What will survive the dot com fallout?" To predict what's next or what might happen, I find it useful to look back at history. The best technology doesn't always win. In fact, it often loses. More often than not the current of progress flows in a path that is only obvious in retrospect. Most projections get it profoundly wrong, especially where there are vested interests at stake. At http://larrychase.com/speakergraphics.html you will find a letter written by Thomas Edison to a showman and promoter who happened to be my great-grandfather, Edmond Gerson. In this letter Edison refers to the "musical telephone." This seems to have been a type of "one-way" cable radio whereby music is fed downstream to a passive listener using her telephone. "One-way" because Edison's microphone wasn't as good as Alexander Bell's carbon mike, which was developed one year prior to the letter sent by Edison to my great-grandfather. My point here is Edison got the future wrong regarding telephony. He had a vested interest in seeing it developed as a one-way downstream medium. If the Wizard of Menlo Park could get it wrong, we mere mortals can and often do muff it as well. Why? Because we typically have our own vested interests at stake and look at the future through those distorted lenses. A better way of looking out beyond today is to imagine oneself a year out and then look back just 3 months, which would still be nine months ahead of now. What do you see? What looks obvious in retrospect? Sure, it's obvious to us now that the gold rush of the 1890's meant riches for those who sold pick handles and Levi jeans, and not for those who bought all the accoutrements and headed off to divine their futures. What are the pick handles and Levi jeans of today? They are the practical things that are right under our noses, which we all take for granted and consider too simple- minded to consider. Email marketing springs to mind as one such example. Note: next week's special issue is on Email Marketing. I myself get very skeptical when I'm asked to download yet another five mg app so that my life can be transformed once again. Too much of what's still standing is over-engineered. Buying airline tickets online works. Wireless advertising doesn't. Why? Because there's no room. I don't have piles of stats backing me up on this one, it just seems obvious to me, plus I'm not reading about any great case histories in the field to date. So, if I had to hitch my wagon to an endeavour, I'd do well to ask myself in the most skeptical way possible, what are the chances of this new endeavour working out? The truth is, more will fail than not. So the real question is, will this next job or consulting gig lead to something bigger? Headhunters (executive recruiters) have a saying: "You're not looking for your next job, but the one after that." In other words, what will this next job or consulting gig lead to? Ultimately, most wind up working for themselves, in which case the core question is: "What value do I bring to the table, now and in the future?" LC |
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