5 Things That Can Help You Live Better in The Future World of Business

 When we talk about future, it usually seems to be far and unreachable. However, in this exponential time where changes happened at a rate of 10 times faster than the last century and beyond, everything changes in an in a comprehensive way. Some of us are already feeling tired in coping with the change but it could only be a warm up period of change!

In ten years time from 2016, 47% of all jobs in America will be replaced by technology(robot, algorithm). This trend will eventually spread throughout the globe where no one can evade. This is truly a worrying statement but true and it is happening. Thus, those who want to survive in the competitive future will race to equip themselves with skills and tools that could elevate themselves from being replaced by the ever-advancing technology. However, where can we start?Here are some tips and advice that I gained from the Global Entrepreneurship Community 2016 organized in Kuala Lumpur:

Source: http://www.ericsson.com/hyperscale/cloud-infrastructure/data-infrastructure/secure-storage

1. Data – waste in the past; gold in the future

The cloud-enabled, AI moderated, a data-driven experience that the young generation experiencing now will be the next big business shifts. Data driven is the vital piece of the whole story where people start to minimize the risk of business and increase success rate through data and not pure individual experience. In addition, the line of the physical and virtual realm will be blurred even further when technology, especially transaction starting to become invisible. The trend can be seen through the new experience of Amazon Go, Uber, and other platform services. In an urban city, we are producing data every single second! Thus, a future business model should no longer make a decision based on guts or sixth sense, but it can be done through Big Data analysis. Which can be concluded as DON'T GUESS!

2. Find out who are your future customers

As a service provider, it is crucial for us to understand our future customer. By identifying the customers have similar traits like mobile centric and data driven, whereby they are agile and resourceful. If the service provided are not easily accessible, redundant, opaque and most of all arrogant (from their past success experience and not based on data-driven model), it is the time that the business should consider to reinvent, re-imagine, and re-design.

Source: https://strategyzer.com/canvas/value-proposition-canvas

3. Design business that can survive the future

Personally, I am very keen to know how to design a business that can survive the future. By imagining the business as an organism; the company is the body while the office culture is the vital organs running the body. Capability to identify the unknowns and change adaptively are skills that are most sought by the employers nowadays. Whether or not, energized by the unknown is the key to measure the capability of a person’s survival in the future. Naturally, the chain reaction of change will not stop at the task but rippled into other elements like the tools.The future company should do these to increase the probability of survival:

1.  Hire for agility
2. Rethink what is the definition of work
3. Use data to hack the culture

Source: Stevens, G.A. and Burley, J., “3,000 Raw Ideas = 1 Commercial Success!”

4. Innovation = idea + execution

The spectrum of innovation can be measured by the way we address the task through a certain product (physical or service). The first level can be defined as doing the same thing better; the next level is doing new things to solve the problem and lastly doing new things that make the old things obsolete. It is also wise to keep in mind that idea has the minimal value in innovation. The execution will decide whether your idea can be realized and solve the targeted problem. Thus, it is important that we engage with the market and get validation. 

5. Disrupt or die – fight for space and time from the customer (physical and mind)

How to identify the opportunity to disrupt or improve?

• Complex experiences
• Broken trusts
• Redundant intermediaries
• Limited access

One can disrupt the market through micro or macro scale. Personal branding is one of the keys to achieve that, which can be done through:

1. Give people a reason to want to engage with you
2. Give them something fun and easy to do
3. Give them the tools to be ambassadors for change

A great brand champions certain group of people (give a reason for people to engage you), bestow meaning onto its brand (a meaningful product that embedded with the brand's message)
For you who are keen to establish your very own prospect, you could start to identify the opportunity that is lurking out there and start to provide the solution (reason) for the people to engage you.

While waiting for others to do it, why not do it yourself?

Mike Walsh, the futurist speaker, threw three mind grenades to the audience during the talk. The questions can be critically answered from the perspective of employer and employee.The Mind grenades – Future office

1.     When you hire someone fresh out of college, what do they find the most strange about the way your teams work, make decisions and communicate?

2.     How to your most productive, networked and innovative co-workers actually get stuff done? Do they follow rules and procedures, or do they routinely break them?

3.     In the future, what kinds of roles will automation; AI and algorithms take over in your team, and what will be the human capabilities most in demand?

One final thought, it had been a great mind blogging session and it still left me with awe. Time has changed and it is happening right before us. I would like to quote the futurist speaker Jon Duschinsky who said:

The world never move this fast, it will never move this slow again.

Embrace the change, fear not and move forward!  

*This was originally posted on my LinkedIn after the GEC 2016 event which I attended.