Daily Inspiration: "Stop waiting. Start doing!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Get stuff done.
That's it.
That's all you need to do.
That's strategy #24 of this 24 Strategies for 2024 series.
As the shoe people said, 'just do it.'
When former US President Barack Obama was asked to share his most important career advice for young people, he replied... "Just learn how to get stuff done." It's a simple yet powerful answer. You can talk about things all day; you can talk about all the trends you want; you can suggest all the ideas that you can imagine; but if you can never put into action the pathway they suggest for you, then you are essentially failing. As the description states on the video, "the power lies not in what you say, but in what you do."
What happens if you don't act, fail to do, and let inaction drive your action? You fail, you fall behind, you fail to move forward! Remember - "power lies not in what you say, but in what you do."
Get stuff done!
It's the most important thing you need to do - and that’s why this is Strategy #24 of my 24 Strategies for 2024 series. "Stop Waiting. Start doing."
Welcome to another year in your future! Here are my words for 2024:
Explore: spend more time getting involved with stuff you know little about; open up your mind to the possibilities and opportunities by learning more about the things of which you are not aware.
Imagine: as you do this, spend some time thinking about what this new knowledge might do for you; the pathways they might help you create; and the future they can provide you.
Strategize: as you do this, make sure that any idea or opportunity you pursue has a strong foundation; focus on reality, not hype. This means spending more time on realistic strategies rather than fanciful, unreachable goals.
Embrace: take the time to view these new ideas and concepts as an opportunity and not a threat; spend more time ensuring that your mind is one of positivity and not of negativity when it comes to tomorrow.
Challenge: with this new knowledge, do things that you haven't tried to do before; undertake new actions that you might have previously held back on.
Create: the ultimate goal of all these previous steps is to ensure that you are creating a runway for your tomorrow, a launchpad of ideas and opportunities for the year that is to come.
Defy: never let anyone tell you it can't be done; avoid the naysayers throughout the year, the people who would bring you down rather than lift you up
Avoid: that means that as you go down this path of opportunity, avoid the noise. 2024 is going to be wild in terms of volatility, negativity, and hostility.
Persevere: keep at it. Don't give up. Persist always! Harden your outer shell of optimism, and fortify your resolve with personal courage.
Do: be action-oriented, rather than waiting. Accomplish things, don't just think about them. My action word for the year - based on my post of yesterday suggesting that 2024 should be your year of action.
Daily Inspiration: "Shift from obsessing over what you've done wrong - to celebrating what you are doing right!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Start 2024 by abandoning your 'guilt trips' - go on an 'accomplishment' trip!
Think about it - if you are someone who is driven to succeed, you can often end up being pretty harsh on yourself. Every mistake is magnified, every misstep is overblown, every misjudgment is taken out of proportion. With that in mind, let's take a look at how you can turn your feelings of regret for what you did yesterday into opportunities for what you can accomplish tomorrow.
Something I've been thinking about in the last little while is that, through AI, I've been 'learning to talk to myself.' What do I mean? Over the last few weeks and months, I've been busy feeding some of my material to an AI, to quiz, query, and ask questions about the material. In some cases, this has allowed me to quiz the many thousands of pages of research I've collected for past and upcoming keynotes. Two recent examples involve keynotes on the role of AI in manufacturing and the medical sciences - and this has been an absolute game changer in my ability to go through vast volumes of material to hone in on key statistics, trends, and examples. For example, I can quickly discover powerful stories and examples of the actual use of AI in the manufacturing industry, which feeds directly into the keynote slides I use in my leadership talk.
In other cases, I've been spending time learning how to quiz my material to gain insight into what I've been thinking about, or to find themes and trends that I tend to focus on. With today's inspirational quote in hand, for example, I decided to take a look at how I might have already covered this theme.
Daily Inspiration: "When everyone is working together to stay the course, you've got a bigger problem than you think!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
I want to start 2024 by sharing a few snapshots about a recent offsite corporate leadership meeting held by the team at Legacy International. The organization finds itself in an interesting situation - markets are changing as new competitors come into the industry, new ideas involving disruptive new business models are being implemented, and customers are becoming more demanding. The organization has, over the years, come to understand that the future belongs to those who are fast, but it has perfected the art of moving slowly, believing that what worked yesterday will still be effective tomorrow.
They recently hired this new fellow, pictured above, Ian Batelemore, who is taking on a newly created position within the organization as the Senior VP of Innovation Inhibition; this is a snapshot of his new job announcement above. The CEO - who was responsible both for the new position and hiring of this fellow - thought it would be a good idea to introduce him to the rest of the organization, to solidify the message that the most important thing the organization could do would be to stay the course.
Here's a photo of this newest hire, Ian. The photo is actually from his previous position at a company in a completely different industry, where he did his best to shut down new ideas, slow the organization down, and essentially communicate a message that the status quo would be good enough.
The CEO thought that these attributes would make him perfect for this newly created position.
I was out on the ski hill this morning and thought I should do a show. The thing is, I'm at my chalet - my green screen studio is at home.
No problem. Hacked together some gear, had some lights kicking around and a green sheet from when I did things up here in 2020. I'll use a Rode Mic I had laying around through my phone, and the Facetime camera on my Macbook.
Add some green screen Canva overlays I generated, and I'm in business.
And back out on the slopes tomorrow morning.
I should aim to do a live green-screen based show from the hill!
Daily Inspiration: "Strapbooting: The ability to implement an instant bootstrapping solution at the spur of the idea!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Perhaps the most innovation-oriented movie scene of all time had to do with the moment that the team at Mission Control came together to come up with a quick solution to the fact that the carbon dioxide level in the cabin was becoming critical. If not solved, the problem would fatally end the mission. An engineering team took a quick assessment of what was available onboard the cabin 200,000+ miles away - and based on that inventory, managed to figure out a way to put together a unique air filter contraption that would solve the problem.
It's a remarkable moment within the movie and in reality - and marks one of the most successful moments throughout the entire history of spaceflight. It's also an inspiration for anyone who might consider themselves an innovation nerd since the moment has it all - teamwork, creativity, ingenuity, and attitude that it must be done. Failure was not an option. (The scene also bears particular relevance to me, as I have shared the stage at events with several of the people in the film, including Gene Kranz and Jim Lovell.)
I've long looked at this moment as the type of thinking that we can always apply when suddenly faced with a unique situation. We should all have in our back pocket the ability, when confronted with a difficult problem, to quickly figure out a solution for going forward.
This was the case with a short little live broadcast that I did yesterday featuring a look back at my '23 Trends for 2023' series which I wrote last year.
I decided the other day I should do a short 'show' about this series. The problem? I'm up at my ski chalet this week.
Not a problem - I successfully strapbooted myself into a bootstrapping solution!
Daily Inspiration: "The best way to challenge your fears is through involvement!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Skill? It’s that thing you develop by trying to do that thing you’ve never done before. Knowledge? It's that thing you enhance by studying up on the new world around you to learn things that you previously knew nothing about. Competence? It comes from your efforts to master that complex thing that you've never really been good at. Persistence? It's that quality that keeps you going, pushing you to practice and learn, even when the challenge seems overwhelming.
Have you ever thought that your biggest challenge with your skills for tomorrow might simply be the issue of involvement?
Involvement. It's a word that is often not much used in the context of skills and knowledge, and yet, it's one of the most important words that you can adapt as part of your mindset for moving forward. That's because often, the only way to move forward is through your involvement in new capabilities today.
I was thinking about this through the weekend, as I noticed that there was an increasing number of page views on a blog post I wrote a few years ago - "Our Challenge: Involvement!" - The Makings of a Unique Career! For some reason, it was suddenly shared around by a group of people. The sudden interest in this post got me thinking about the phrase within the title - with my Daily Inspiration always on my mind, I began to think that mixing the word 'involvement' with the word 'challenge' could offer up something inspirational or motivational when it comes to our ability to master the skills of tomorrow
The post involves how I began my speaking career around 1970 at the tender young age of 11 - read more!
Daily Inspiration: "Your moment is right now. Are you ready?" - Futurist Jim Carroll
What are you waiting for?
More clarity? Greater certainty? A guaranteed outcome? A completely reliable forecast? Are you demanding a crystal clear outlook before you can bring yourself to a decision or even gather up the momentum to begin moving forward?
The only certainty that you have right now is that tomorrow is tomorrow, and there's not a lot you can do about that fact. It's pretty guaranteed that in major ways or subtle fashion, it will be very different than today. In that context, if you keep on doing what you've always done in that context, you'll keep getting what you've always got.
Here's what separates successful people from marginal performers: Successful people do. Marginal performers don't. That's because successful people know that their moment is right now, and they seize upon it through action, not indecision. Successful people decide to move forward with confidence. Marginal performers? They hesitate!
How do you get your momentum going? Understand what drives success:
Successful people seek solutions. Marginal performers focus on problems.
Successful people take calculated risks. Marginal performers play it safe.
Successful people learn from failure. Marginal performers avoid it.
(There's a long list on the original post!)
Get moving. Get going. Start doing. Momentum is better than motivation.
Daily Inspiration: *“When expectations accelerate, accelerate your expectations of yourself!”*
During the global pandemic, I spent a good part of my 10,000 hours down in my basement, working away in my virtual broadcast studio, mastering the task of virtually going live. I got pretty good at it, working with clients to put out virtual keynotes that looked pretty good. You can see screenshots of much of the work in a slideshow over at https://virtual.jimcarroll.com.
I continue to do some work in the studio, putting out content related to upcoming or past keynotes, topics I’m tracking, or other stuff. It’s not only important to my work, but the studio has also become my ‘happy place’ – it’s just a lot of fun working with the technology and my ideas.
Yesterday, I put out a short ten-minute show, primarily aimed at a LinkedIn group of meeting and event planners – essentially, the people who plan, organize, and manage the large-scale conferences and events I am often booked into.
The show took a look at the trends impacting the industry into 2024; I put it together to summarize some of the key trends I’ve seen happening all around me – including the impact of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour staging!
The point I was trying to make in that section was this – through what she has done with the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has set the bar extremely high when it comes to the meetings, events, and conference industry going forward. The use of sophisticated and ever-changing staging setups, the lighting and video production, the massive number of set changes, the customers, choreography, and costumes – it’s all way over the top.
Even if you are not a Swiftie – a Taylor Swift Fan – you should go and watch the show just to see the level of production that is involved. It’s available for rent on AppleTV and other streaming services.
It's all a part of our world today in which expectations of all types are accelerating!
@pukima@troetbu.de p.s. "Northern Germany" --> my wife is first generation German Canadian. Her dad - Opa to my sons - was from Peine, outside Hanover. Visited it a few times.
Daily Inspiration: "In a world of lemmings, be the unicorn!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
I've been cracking up since I came across this video - and I must be driving my wife mad with my constant giggles.
And here's the thing - leadership motivation need not be boring. Nor should it be formulaic, routine, dull, predictable.
Sometimes, we just need a simple visual to inspire us to think differently - to not be like everyone else but to be our own self. Hence, I give you the Snowblower Unicorn.
When everyone is doing something, do a different thing!
The video popped up late yesterday in my social media feed while I was busy pulling together my thoughts and image for today's post - and I immediately knew I had to abandon that idea I was working on for now and run with this. I did a bit of a remix from the original with a music track licensed from Pond5 to give it a bit of levity and fun.
And there you have it - perhaps the most powerful leadership insight you might seen yet this year.
Bottom line? Be different! Be unique! Be yourself!
Daily Inspiration: "Real leaders don't try to cost cut their way into the future! (They reinvent!)" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Really?
Are we going to do this all over again?
My interest was drawn recently to a headline in a newsletter I got from Korn Ferry, with an outlook for 2024. This mindset exists in the context of the Great Recession of 2023 That Was Predicted But Never Happened.
"In one survey, four in ten firms say they plan layoffs in the New Year; in another, 53% of CEOs say they expect economic conditions to worsen in the first half of 2024. This is in sharp contrast to the investors supporting them, 94% of whom expect things to improve in the near term (only 16% of leaders do)."
Are these CEOs continually ingesting some sort of doomster-gloomster drug that the rest of the world doesn't know about? Because as I have pointed out many times, history has taught us that it is those who reinvent through investment - not those who cost-cut - are those who survive and thrive into the future.
"I own a Tesla Model 3 already, so not sure why I am getting this survey. I did ask for a resale value so perhaps it was related to that.
Having sad that, while very happy with the car, I probably would not buy one again. While the car is brilliant, your CEO is not. I was once a huge fan of Elon, but in the last year he has become an absolute wreckless, hateful, arrogant dick.
I am now at the point that he has become so toxic with his right wing alignment, his promotion of conspiracy theories, his denigration of DEI initiatives, and his obvious white racism that I feel embarrassed every time I get in my car.
The Tesla brand was a great brand and is a great car, but it is being destroyed by him
Jim Carroll jcarroll@jimcarroll.com jimcarroll.com"
@molly0xfff This is wildly funny because I'm literally running the migration at the very moment that your post crossed my feed. If all goes well, I'll be at ghost.jimcarroll.com
I started up on ghost two days ago after reading the Platformer story.
I'm wildly small on Substack, but Ghost looks better anyways.
I'll start out on the platform, but after reading your post, might self-host.
@molly0xfff "xNext up was email. In order to send bulk emails from Ghost, you need to use Mailgun. Mailgun is actually the priciest part of my setup, at $75/month"
Do what you are using Mailgun but for pennies, via Amazon SES (their bulk email service). I run my newsletter and other things off it; its very straightforward, has a great interface, and ALL the options.
@markstos@molly0xfff So I can't use SES for bulk? That kills my initiative to do a standalone then. No sense paying Mailgun $$$$ for what I can do for pennies.
I've now got a working self-hosted site at https://daily.jimcarroll.com ... managed to get my Substack import working fine. The biggest issue was tuning the server size to accept the import of my file - 897MB.
I'm struggling with the mailgun config though; I'm not familiar with JSON and have tried to run this through a few JSON validators without luck.
@molly0xfff - thanks for your pointer to Ghost - was never really aware of it and I will build out on it now. To build mine - I'm a huge fan of Runcloud.io for server builds - and they had this handy document that made the process all quite straightforward.
Backstory - based on a post by @molly0xfff , I was intrigued by the idea of Ghost - and leaving Substack. I read the Platformer newsletter last week about all the controversy and will bail out of there shortly.
I started out creating a site over at Ghost.io, but I like self-hosting my stuff, so on a cold wintry day, I went down the rabbit hole.
I'm a huge fan of RunCloud for my server management, and so I followed this handy guide.
I'll use it as another path to post my Daily Inspiration post, which I have been writing every morning since early August 2016 (when some personal circumstances drove me to a life of clarity.) My next one goes out ... tomorrow morning.
If you could help me stress test my setup by signing up, that would help me out. You might like my posts too. You can leave at any time.
Daily Inspiration: "You can always look forward by looking back!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
---- "16 years ago, Futurist Jim Carroll spoke in Washington DC on the future of healthcare.
He challenged the audience to think about what the world of healthcare would look like one day in the future - picking an arbitrary, random date of January 15, 2020.
Now, 16 years later, take a look at how he did with his predictions!
----
One of the things I always emphasize to an audience is that one of the best ways to try to predict the future is by projecting yourself into it and looking back in time.
I did that back in December 2008 - I was in Washington D.C. as the closing keynote speaker for the 4th Annual World Healthcare Innovation & Technology Congress. To give my talk some structure, I took a look at what the industry might look like 12 years out - picking a random date in the future - January 15, 2020 - and pretended to look back from that date to the date of the conference to emphasize how much change had occurred.
It was a fascinating conference at the cutting edge of the promise of the transformation of healthcare at the time. There were some 'heavy hitters' on the agenda: Newt Gingrich (I guess as head government policy-wonk); Scott McNealy (Chairman, Sun Microsystems), and a few CEOs and authors. And me - the futurist who takes the conference into the reality of what comes next.
While preparing for my keynote in mid-2008, I hit upon a theme that I will often use in my keynotes - what would a certain industry look like on a certain day in the future? And so without really thinking about it, and since 2020 seemed to have a cool resonance to it - and for who knows whatever reason - I chose January 15, 2020. I wrote an article for their (since vanished) blog, and created a fine-looking PDF based on that material.
My keynote went into these issues in a lot more depth.
Daily Inspiration: "Move fast and make things!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
It's long been the key phrase of Silicon Valley - 'move fast and break things' - the entire thinking being that in the race to build a new market and dominate within it, speed is of the essence and that its ok to see a few things go wrong along the way. There's a lot of debate as to whether that is a worthwhile strategy or not, and I won't go into that here.
I've certainly used derivatives of the phrase around here before, suggesting it in the context of fast-moving trends and ideas - you should 'move fast and chase things!'
Or the idea that you should "move fast and fix things,' as an antidote to the whole 'move fast and break things' mantra.
Or that simply the idea of 'moving fast' will help your creativity engine. But what if you simply move fast and do things? What if you simply set out to do something and get it done, rather than seeing it exist in a state of perpetual implementation and development? What if you started a project and simply finished it? What if you had momentum but didn't let it peter out - but saw an initiative through to completion? You can have an idea, but if you don't implement it, it's a failed idea.
And so that's what I did this weekend with the creation of a new Website for this Daily Inspiration series which can be found at https://daily.jimcarroll.com.
So, I left Substack. I'll leave my content up there in the vain hope that matters might change but spun up a Ghost server on the weekend at https://daily.jimcarroll.com
Here's how I spun up my Ghost site over in a matter of hours.
- created a basic Ubuntu 22.04 server over at Vultr. 2gb, 50gb disk, $10, using Runcloud.io, my go-to server management tool
- logged back into my Mailgun account (required for Ghost) to make sure it was config'd for the free tier (I stopped using it when I moved my bulk email over to Amazon SES) and grabbed the API
-- overcame a few minor hiccups along the way but quickly logged into Ghost admin and set up a rudimentary site
- used the "Migrating Content" instruction at https://ghost.org/docs/migration/substack/ to get 587 posts out of Substack, and imported them into Ghost ... and it all came in flawlessly, pictures, formatting and all
That's it. Pretty straightforward. The benefit of using Runcloud to spin up the server is I can do a lot of what I might do at the command line simply by pointing, clicking, choose options. Fail2ban and other tools are automatically built into the server too.
I hope you'll join me. I've been writing a little Daily Inspiration since August 2016 - and folks seem to like it.
And aside from my main Website, it now has a new home.
Daily Inspiration: "If you keep planning for the worst, you'll never get the best!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
I like optimists. That means I like farmers - because farmers are the ultimate optimists!
With that in mind, I will be speaking later today in Brandon, Manitoba, at the annual Manitoba AgDays show, which bills itself as Canada's largest indoor farm show. (It will be a lovely day with an early morning temperature of -25C.) My focus will be on the role and potential impact of AI within the sector.
So why are farmers so optimistic? The first thing to keep in mind is that it is only some of them.
----- The first type of farmer is what we might call the ‘apathetic minority’, who share these attributes:
- they are not optimistic about the future
- they tend to seek the “same old advice” from the “same old sources”
- they have a high intolerance for risk
- they’re not convinced they can continue to make a comfortable living despite all the contrary evidence -they’re skeptical of their potential since they feel they’ve seen too many ups and downs in the industry
Then there is the second group we might call the ‘future positive‘ type of farmer. They share these attributes :
- they’re quite optimistic about the future
- they’re very business-minded, using all the latest tools and ideas at their disposal
- they are very innovation-oriented, willing to approach everything in a new way with new ideas
- they are very collaborative for advice, seeking ideas from anyone and everyone
- they’re often focused on planning, profit, and growth, with clear objectives in mind
So here’s a good question: when it comes to you, or the organization that work for, what type of farmer are you? -----
Daily Inspiration: “An imagination is a machine that can see tomorrow!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Part of the art of helping people understand tomorrow comes from encouraging them to think about what they might encounter once they get there.
At this moment in my keynote I am holding up my iPhone, and asking the audience to imagine what they might be doing with it just 5 short years from now. I suggest that 10 or 15 years ago, they didn't have such a device in their life, and had no idea how important it would become to them.
I then suggest they imagine that same phone 5 years out - loaded with a whole series of new apps based on AI. They'll be doing things in a few years that they aren't yet aware of, and yet will be indispensable to them!
Second, I give them an example of this type of thinking - by bringing up a picture of this diseased strawberry.
I show them how I use ChatGPT to examine the picture and identify the type of disease that is found on the strawberries in question. I tell the audience to imagine the world of agriculture just a few years out, in which they've got a magical device in their pocket that can identify plant disease, growth rates, maturity, and other factors.
Will this happen? Most certainly - because I then walk a series of slides that show how quickly this capability is coming together. My examples involve a company called Keymakr, which is in the business of what is called 'data annotation' - in essence, developing tools that help various AI systems identify and interpret the world around us. (ChatGPT does this through their own data identification tools.)
The future is coming at us quicker than we think, and it is by imagining what it might look like when we get there that we can best understand where we are going.
That comes from accelerating your imagination with the real-world research that is underway - and which will become a part of our world in just a few short years.
Daily Inspiration: "The fact that we have 'fitbits for cows' should inspire you to think bigger about your future!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
We live in the era of the 'connected cow' - that fact alone should boggle your mind about our future. I was thinking about this two days ago when I visited the trade show portion of the massive agricultural event that I was speaking at!
This short article tells you what you need to know.
------
More than half of Americans now track their daily activities with some kind of wearable device in an effort to stay healthy. These include the Apple Watch, Garmin Vivo series, Samsung Fit and Fitbits. Researchers at Tarleton State University's Southwest Regional Dairy Center in Stephenville say that digitally tracking dairy cows' eating, sleeping and other movements helps them take better care of the herd for milk three times each day.
Dr. Barbara Jones, director of the largest university dairy operation in the Southwest, has equipped each cow with two Fitbits. "They help us monitor health and to keep them connected. And that matters to us because we truly do care about cows, as all producers do," she said in a news release from Texas A&M University.
Fitbits for Cows 30 October 2019, Meridian Tribune
------
They aren't really 'fitbits' but are known as rumination collars, and they provide the rancher and farmer with a tremendous amount of real-time insight.
The fact is, if there are fitbits for humans, why not for cows?
- I wish I knew back in 2016 that I really should spend more time tagging each post. I've got to do a lot of work now to go through and tag things in a useful way.
- I wish I knew how to find and fix CSS
- I wish I had decided early on to have a consistent image size
But wow - you can accomplish a lot in one week with a fun side project!
It's a new little micro-site I've set up to support the distribution of my daily posts.
It's based on Ghost, a fantastic newsletter publishing platform. And even if you don't join, come over and have a look since it's a pretty cool design!
Daily Inspiration: "Success is the inevitable result of persistence" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Persistence is the art of making repeated mistakes until you get it right - and it's a critical pathway to innovation and success.
Don't give up.
Abandoning your effort is never a great idea!
After all, James Dyson went through 5,126 prototypes over 15 years before creating the first bagless Dyson vacuum cleaner. Colonel Sanders was rejected over 1,000 times before finding a partner for his fried chicken recipe, which became the basis for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Thomas Edison made thousands of prototypes - and suffered multiple failures - before inventing a successful incandescent light bulb. Walt Disney faced multiple bankruptcies and rejections before creating Disneyland and achieving success in talking films. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a garage, facing skepticism and financial challenges, before turning Amazon into an e-commerce giant. Howard Schultz had to persistently pitch his coffee shop idea, which was initially rejected by Starbucks' founders, before transforming the company. Rovio Entertainment created 51 unsuccessful games before hitting it big with Angry Birds.
The list goes on. Success comes not just from having the right idea, but from sticking with it to completion - and beating back the barriers that exist with the path forward.
What do people do to develop persistence?
They celebrate small victories along the way, recognizing that many small wins might help to lead to a big win. And much, much more!
Persistence should be your goal - not just success - because it is a necessary element to the very success you chase!
Daily Inspiration: "Innovation never waits for the slow fast-follower!” - Futurist Jim Carroll
For a long time, when it comes to new disruptive technologies and business models, organizations have had to decide whether they will be a 'first mover' (or 'market leader') or a 'fast follower.' The former will charge ahead, doing everything they can to try to define and own a new market or industry before others catch up; the latter adopts a strategy that involves studying and following the leader -- and adapting to their mistakes and successes to eventually overcome them.
It's long been debated as to which strategy makes ultimate sense, but one thing that seems clear to me is that the period to be a fast follower is shrinking. It's seen in the graph - the time available to be a 'fast follower' is collapsing as time speeds up and the era of acceleration takes hold. Markets, industries, and new products or services used to take years to appear and evolve so the time available to a 'fast follower' was abundant; but now, with fast-moving technologies, the available period for a fast follower to study and learn from the first-mover is shrinking.
This might mean there is less of a benefit to adopting a fast-follower strategy.
Does that make sense? Organizations need to be thinking about this, given how fast change is now happening. companies used to have the luxury of time to weigh the pros and cons of a fast-follower strategy - but in an era in which there is less time left to study the first movers, the benefit of trying to be a fast-follower might completely disappear!
In effect, we might be seeing the end of the fast-follower concept.
You either get into a new disruptive ideas quickly - or don't bother at all!
Daily Inspiration: "Stop waiting for the right time - because you'll eventually run out of time!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
There's a cost to indecision.
There is a penalty for waiting.
There is no benefit from procrastination.
Setbacks come from postponing.
One of the most common leadership failures that I see has to do with the inability of many organizations to commit to going forward. They spend too much time waiting for the right time. They try to seek perfection in the timing of their decisions. They attempt to try to move forward only when they have perfect clarity.
And in doing so, they won't just fall behind - they'll engrain the barriers of slow that hold them back in a world that's fast.
You shouldn't be afraid of inaction.
Terrified by indecision.
Frightened by complacency.
Anxious about procrastination!
Rather than hiding in fear, be motivated for action!
(Today's post is shorter than normal. We are in Dublin, Ireland for a keynote tomorrow. Today, and are driving down to a small town called Kilmachtomas. It's the town down the coast where 3 brothers left in 1749 to make their way to North America. One of them was my ancestor!)
Daily Inspiration: "Dazed and confused? There's still time to change the road you're on!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
(I'm over in Dublin, Ireland, and spent the day yesterday visiting the town where the ancestors on my mom's side are from. The result is that I've had little time to prepare today's quote. On occasion - and in the spirit of posting every day as I have since 2016 - I will sometimes share an older blog post that still bears relevance today. I wrote this post on the idea of "Led Zeppelin Leadership" way back in 2008, and it still seems to resonate today!)
At a particular keynote last week, I met several senior executives who certainly agreed with my main message - we need to constantly realign our company to the reality of the fast change that surrounds it. That's where innovation comes from. But they also indicated that they found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapid change occurring all around them - and are uncertain about their path forward.
That's not surprising. There's been an increasing number of these individuals in my audiences, and I've come to call them the Led Zeppelin refugees: they're simply dazed by the changes occurring in the high-velocity economy around them, and are confused about what to do next. They might be undertaking some of the worst possible steps forward or are uncertain as to what to do next - but the key thing is that there is still time for them to change the road they are on. (My apologies to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.)
That's why there's such a good question that flows from this conundrum: just how do you become an organization that is focused on innovation?
Daily Inspiration: "Is your future happening in a garage at this very moment? (And are you even aware what's happening?)" - Futurist Jim Carroll
We live in disruptive, transformative times, in which new companies are developing new products and services that might displace legacy organizations. Some of them might be working at this very moment in the ubiquitous 'garage,' and are set to become tomorrow's billion-dollar company before you know it.
As I cautioned my audience yesterday at a senior leadership meeting: "At this very instant in time, there might be someone working in a garage with a blindingly disruptive idea, and in 5 years, they will have completely changed your market, your product, and your future. Are you aware of who they might be? Or even more important - shouldn't YOU be the company in the garage?"
The fact is, many successful companies were born in people's dorm rooms, garages, and basements - using this space as a launch pad until they were able to outgrow their early, innovative roots.
My challenge to my audience at a leadership event is to consider several questions, first and foremost of which is "Who might be working away in the garage that might come up with the ideas that will disrupt and transform the industry?" What ideas are they pursuing that you, as a legacy organization, are not considering, And can you think and innovate in the same free-flowing, unrestricted way that the 'garage-based innovator' can?
In other words, can you be the garage?
That's not an easy thing to do by any stretch of the imagination, but the key idea is that you need to be aware that at this very moment, your future might be being determined in a garage somewhere. Be cognizant of it, wary of what it represents, and refuse to rest on the legacy of your laurels.
Be the garage - don't be the one impacted by the garage!
Daily Inspiration: "Stop trying to be like everyone else. Just be yourself!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Don't twist yourself into knots trying to conform! If you are unique, celebrate it and run with it - because that is often the key pathway to success.
Think about it - when you are true to yourself, you are more likely to pursue the passions and interests that bring you genuine joy and satisfaction, rather than doing the things which cause you misery and heartache. When you get rid of the shackles of conformity and the structures of groupthink, you can open up your mind to your true potential. Unique individuals have a much better opportunity to work in an environment that will foster, not hinder, their creativity and innovation. That will lead them to their true potential - because they see the world differently, their wandering mind can lead them to creative solutions and innovative ideas that they might not otherwise see. And that makes the journey rewarding - if they can create enough space for their uniqueness, they will often achieve a greater sense of self-fulfillment.
And yet, the fact is, in a world of conformity, it's not easy being unique - embracing your uniqueness often involves stepping out of your comfort zone, which is a critical aspect of personal and professional growth. But doing so is very much a journey of self-discovery - it encourages you to explore and understand your strengths, weaknesses, interests, and values.
The very process of doing so can help you identify not only what it is that makes you unique - but the ideas, innovations, and opportunities that can come from actually being unique.
Daily Inspiration: "If you aren't thinking bold enough you'll never be ambitious enough!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
The world will not be transformed by people using chatbots and ChatGPT and drawing pictures with AI generators.
It will be fully disrupted by the other AI trends that really matter - what I call the AI Megatrends. That's been the key message in many of my recent and upcoming keynotes, and it might be helpful to understand how this particular storyline unfolds from the stage by looking at a series of slides I recently shared.
Take the world of healthcare, medicine, and pharmaceuticals - and step away from AI for a moment into the bigger, long-term trend transforming the industry. The simple fact of the matter is that we are moving from being an industry that just fixes people AFTER they are sick, to one in which we have a better understanding of what they might become sick with BEFORE they are sick. With that knowledge, we can rearchitect the delivery of healthcare resources to where it matters - a world of preventative medicine - one based on complex science, genetic medicine, medical device connectivity, pharmacogenetics, and so much more.
And so while many medical professionals will be learning how to incorporate ChatGPT-like information searches in their day-to-day lives - and learning how to deal with the accuracy issues - the spending on AI beyond large-language model technologies like this is set to explode - going from perhaps $10 billion to $177l.4 billion in but 8 short years. That's a huge leap!
For legacy companies, this type of insight matters - because if they aren't thinking big and bold enough about how their future is changing, it's pretty much a certainty that someone else is!
And that's the key to the future - thinking BIG and BOLD about tomorrow. Because, after all, nothing great was ever achieved by being small and timid.
@unixjunk1e I NEED this. I basically have been trying to block the entire nation of Bangladesh, because I am getting flooded with spam from YouTube SEO marketers about my Youtube channel.
Daily Inspiration: "If you keep chasing the same old business model, you’ll never find the magic in the new one!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
I had a post the other day over on a LinkedIn group that has drawn quite a bit of interest; at the moment I write this, it's approaching 24,000 views. That's pretty significant.
My post was to the 'Skift Meetings Event Professionals Community" - essentially, it's a community where the folks who organize the world of corporate, association, trade shows, conferences, and conventions hang out, seeking tips, sharing ideas, and offering up answers to questions posed by others. It's a pretty active group, drawing interest from around the world from meeting planners, trade show experts, speakers bureaus, speakers, staging and AV companies, and more.
My post - reproduced in its entirety below - had to do with something that has been very much on my mind as of late - and that is that this industry is changing in a significant way. There is a pretty significant shift in spending, a change in the individuals responsible for organizing an event, as well as the speed and purpose for which these events are being pulled together. Opportunity is to be found by aligning to and adapting to this trend, instead of simply staying focused on the old business model that has been in place for many years.
My post was trying to get across the scope and urgency of this change, knowing that many event professionals might still be stuck in the old way of doing things, and might not be seeing the real opportunities in this fast-emerging and growing market.
But I know I am - it's become very much the core of my business, with this photo in front of my stage for my event last week in Dublin. Old business models change. New ones emerge. You must always keep chasing the new one - because opportunity is at the end of the rainbow of initiative.
