As promised these are the slides from this afternoon’s talk about telling negative stories with a positive, business development spin.
Tim Powell, via his Knowledge Value Chain (KVC) blog reminds us that rough economic times can be fertile ground for companies that go on to succeed on the world stage:
some companies we think of today as world-class leaders were founded and/or grew significantly in recessions or depressions? GE (1876), Hewlett-Packard (1939), Hyatt (1958), Burger King (1958), Lexis-Nexis (1973), FedEx (1973), and Microsoft (1975), to name a few.
Keep thinking. And keep it positive.
This weekend I came together with philosopher Chris Largent and “America’s Top Ego Rancher” Sue Snyder for an event called “The First 100 Days of the Future.” This all-day seminar was designed to bring participants quickly up to speed on major trends and to apply them right away to a “Template for Recovery” that they could use immediately to move themselves and their organizations to a more positive future.
The major takeaway for us: people are tired of bad news and excited to begin the process of creation. The best feedback we received was, “I came in here nervous about the future of the world and walked out full of hope, new ideas, and new tools I can apply today.”
And that, folks, is why we do this.
I really enjoyed last night’s event at the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. True to this year’s theme, we discussed the future trends of 2009 and beyond, but moved immediately to positive action. About 25 of us put our heads together on the toughest problems of humanity, and tons of new business ideas came flowing out. Despite dire economic statistics, the mood is lighter and more positive than I’ve seen in years.
Here are last night’s slides for those of you who want to play along at home. We’ll likely have a webinar on this topic soon – we’ll keep you all posted!
With the release of Future, Inc. in Korean and Chinese, I’ve had the great opportunity to do interviews with Asian business magazines. I find that they ask more interesting, more insightful questions than many of their Western counterparts, so they are often fun interviews. The only problem is, once they are translated, I have NO IDEA what they said.
I just finished an interview with Korea’s KRX Magazine, which covers the Korean stock market and business in general, and I decided to post the whole text in English, so someone can appreciate it.
The questions:
The most important trend is away from the philosophy of growth at all costs. For years, particularly in the United States, management has followed a typical playbook – get big, quickly, through borrowing money from private venture capital or public offerings. Then, you can go national or international, reaching bigger markets and gaining leverage over vendors and distributors. Once you have leverage over vendors and distributors, you cut costs by firing excess employees and force downward price pressure on the market. With the extra cash from operating expenses, you buy more national or international companies. For around forty years companies have repeated this formula.
The theme here was BIG BIG BIG. The problem with “big” is that it sometimes comes at the expense of “smart.”