Today's focus is on the power of anticipation look if I could give you
one competitive advantage in business it would be to stop reacting and start
anticipating you know we have all heard the story I'm sure and I had the
privilege of working with one of the Great's in hockey Wayne Gretzky and
everyone said look he's not the tallest guy he's not the strongest guy he's not
the fastest guy and yet he's the best and when somebody asked him a long time
ago you know how is it that you managed to consistently with the best players in
the game perhaps in history and he was very very calm about it and very humble
he said well perhaps it's because I skate to where the puck is going not
where the puck is because anticipation where the puck is going was his
advantage in business the more you can anticipate what's happening with your
clients what's happening in the economy what's happening with competition the
greater advantage that you have and yet it's also an advantage in terms of
understanding just stages of life what's happening to you personally what's
happening to your family to your kids I always say that look leaders anticipate
and losers always are reaction of an example I often give us playing a video
game against the child I'm sure we've all been roped in at one point well you
knew better and maybe you gave the child a gift for Christmas or their birthday
and your mom a dad and aunt or an uncle and young boy or girl says to you'll
come play this game with me uncle ma dad whoever you are and you say no no I'm
not good and they go no it's really easy let me just show you and they go and
they pick up the guy that they kill like ten guys in ten seconds and he like I
could do this thing oh come on join me I'm gonna show this kid a thing or two
and what do you do you get in there Bam Bam Bam in three seconds you're dead and
the child looks at you and says that was very good and then they go and shoot BAM
- BAM - Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam but they go on for 45 minutes before they get
knocked out of one turn now you're pissed now you're frustrated now you're
gonna show this kid you're really determined and what happens you're dead
in five seconds and the kid goes on for another hour you know the drill right
we've all been there so why does the child always win why is it cuz they're
smarter cuz they're quicker cuz they're faster cuz they're younger
no it's because they know the road ahead they know the road ahead because they
played this game before so they're not reacting they're anticipating they know
the first bad guy is gonna be on the left and up and the next bad guy is
gonna be on the right and down and so they can go there instantly without
hesitancy instead of trying to react to a problem or a challenge that comes
forward to them and I really believe this is one of the greatest gifts you
can give you in your life so today I'm gonna talk with you here have a little
session with you here on the power of anticipation of one of my power talks
years ago and you know if you think about in business
those that anticipate those that find that advantage those are the people that
completely dominate right it's it's another version to some extent of this
idea of the blue ocean strategy but in a different way and if you will really
anticipate you're gonna get a gigantic competitive advantage so I want to talk
with you about that and by the way I also want to point out to you in advance
that some people anticipate for a period of time I mentioned in this audio a
little bit about the great advantage that Bill Gates created by his
anticipation of where you know the personal computer market would go but
he'd stopped anticipating when it came to the web that's why Google started
dominated a higher level Apple found its niche by anticipating so that's what
you're really looking for and then to help you think about life differently
you know many people try to think of anticipate tomorrow by looking at
yesterday and we're living in a time of geometric change we know technology
isn't just changing a little we've hit that curve and the geometric growth
where all of a sudden you have these giant transformations that occur over
the next few five 10 years 15 years things are gonna happen look like magic
so I thought we do is I asked a New York to interview Martin Ford Martin wrote
the book the rise of the robots the technology and the threat of a jobless
future and what's really cool about this he said everybody talks about they want
things to be better but nobody wants to change and we're going to go through
some major changes in our job market in our technology because not only are
robots coming this is not something 15 20 30 years from now there's some coming
right now but the price for it's gonna be so low it could give you a huge
advantage your business if you understand what's coming
so enjoy the podcast and enjoy martin ford but first let's talk about some
patient and its power in your own business and life
we live in a world where all business owners have to be able to run two
businesses the business you're in today and the business you are becoming the
world is changing constantly and now more than ever we need to be aware of
new technology breakthroughs new insights and changes in culture and
economics the business leader who is constantly anticipating and looking at
what's around the corner rather than just running the business there and now
is the one who will thrive and grow and as the developed world stands at a
unique moment in history where technology is replacing more jobs than
it creates your ability to anticipate could make or break your business the
people in our society that have been able to anticipate certain trends are
the people that are the best in the world at what they do and they are
incredibly successful and wealthy a simple example this would be Bill Gates
here's young man who's now the richest man in America how they do it was he an
absolute genius yes he was very very bright but there are a lot of other
people brighter than the other when he went to Harvard in fact that's one of
the things he was most frustrated with he'd used to be king of the hill he went
to Harvard he wasn't the best but he did one thing better than anybody else can
tissa pated the growth of an industry called personal computers and a specific
need that this industry would have basic software and you know why he even
anticipated the best way to market it that if he went out and tried to sell
this himself he would never succeed instead he made a
decision that is made in hundreds of millions of dollars a year and royalties
ever since he decided to give that technology to IBM and allow them to
promote it as the industry standard anticipation what if you could have
anticipated the idea of using satellites like Ted Turner what if you could have
anticipated the change in eating habits in our nation where people make good
food by choice not because they're forced you or because they have to they
actually look forward to it it's like their first step what if you could have
anticipated fat-free foods or yogurts just think about what you could've done
with that and you know what if you look at some of the failures in your life
where have they come from I would be willing to bet they came from your
failure to anticipate so how do you anticipate change on the horizon by
accepting new paradigms because in business the psychology of a leader who
resists a coming trend is capable of destroying
everything he or she has built what do we really need then to master this
principle of anticipation what do we need to do so we can utilize paradigm
shifts to our advantage the first thing we've got to do is adopt a new belief
system and that belief system is the nullius change inevitable but it is our
advantage the status quo is not to your advantage unless you're already on top
and have mastered it for decades now if you're one of those people let me tell
your advantage you're gonna have to grow which will make you happy because you're
not gonna be happy just sitting on top doing nothing but for most people like
they're still pursuing a way to become better more successful and if the rules
of the game are changing it means guess what you are on an equal playing field
with almost anybody else I'll give you a fun example I've been reading a lot of
books recently because I've really wanted to master this experience of
anticipation I wanted to make it more of a science so one things I started doing
is reading a lot of books forecasting the future so I went back and I reread
megatrends from years ago and then I read megatrends 2000 and then I read
some of toffler's books and then I read Joel Barker's book on future edge and
managing the future and as I started reading all these books I'm you know
faiths popcorns book obviously the popcorn report and what I decided to do
is I thought well this is really wonderful but what I'm doing here is I'm
getting everybody else's view of the future which is really valuable
information but I want to know how are they predicting it that was one of my
major goals and meeting with some of these individuals personally how are
they predicting the future in other words in life what I used to do is I say
who is really successful at something but something I want to master and then
I go find out what they're doing that makes him successful I do the same thing
I'd model their actions and I get very similar results and it allowed me to
save myself a tremendous amount of time I compressed time by learning by their
experience but as the years went by I drove my modeling a little deeper and I
started asking not only okay this person's getting a result what are the
actions getting that result but I started going a step deeper and said
what are the organizing principles that are allowing them to know that these are
the actions that take in the first place in order to get those results
consistently and I began to pursue organizing principles which is by the
way all power talk is about it's my chance to be with you and to share with
you organizing principles and by having this
I got to continue to pursue new ones that I can share with you certainly we
need to review the ones that make sense repetition is the mother skill but I'm
always searching for another distinction another organizing principle that can
increase the quality of our life so with these people that are futurist I started
saying okay what are they doing then I started saying how are they doing it
where are these trends really coming from in the first place and as I pursued
that I started looking not just at the trends which all these books told me
about but how do you track trends there's a great book called trend
tracking and this book describes the way of actually tracking it's kind of what
these futurists do to start making their predictions so now we need a little bit
about their actions so then I said a step deeper okay I can see how to track
it but where do they actually come from and I realized that all actions
everything that we're doing all the behaviors of the masses those trends are
coming from a conditioned way of thinking so I started studying paradigms
the thought processes that are consistent amongst mass number of people
where large number of people share the same assumptions about what the rules of
the game are about what's gonna happen they may be absolutely wrong but if
enough people believe it people start to buy into it then I start saying well
where do those assumptions come from and where those assumptions come from
through history so I've been reading all these books on history and looking at
how different ways of thinking through history have created certain
consequences in our society and then I dug even deeper and said okay where do
these ways of thinking come from what shapes the way we think in the way you
feel in the first place and I got back down to pain and pleasure now why am I
telling you all this because out of everything I've read I've clearly come
across one critical organizing principle that you must adopt to be successful at
any time in human history it's a belief system that if you'll adopt it I
guarantee you it will change the quality of your life forever and the belief is
simply this the same level of thinking that has gotten you to the level success
you have today will not get you to the level success you want for tomorrow and
beyond in other words all that's work for you up until now that you value so
much may go out the window in a day and you've got to not only know that but I
anticipate that they said well that doesn't feel very good I don't like
thinking about everything I've done that works you know may just go out the door
tomorrow I'm not saying well I'm saying it man you got to be prepared for that
you can't be thinking because you're the best at what you do you're always going
to be the best at what you do just by making incremental improvements listen
if you worked in the carburetor industry what happened here you were making the
best carburetors in town you're always making your carburetors better and
better and better in one day guess what happened overnight there were no more
carburetors because the other thing called fuel injection which cut fuel
usage from 1/3 to 2/3 everybody needed one everybody wanted one and all those
skills that you home for a lifetime we're worthless or how about the vinyl
record industry we're literally overnight it disappeared think about it
that's called a paradigm shift where the rules of the game changed overnight the
rules of the game change the barriers changed the approach change and you know
what there are brand-new winners and the people that used to be winners are now
losers this is very good news for you because it means if you stay on the
cutting edge if you anticipate there's always a way for you to make your
fortune there's always a way for you to be at the cutting edge there's always a
way to turn your company or your career in a whole new direction but you've got
to operate from this principle it says just because it's worked up until now
and because it's made me successful doesn't mean it will tomorrow one of the
most powerful triggers of change is new technology think about it how fast did
the movie rental industry change blockbuster is a thing of the past and
now Netflix is a household name and consider a few other technology
disruptors how about Instagram which Facebook purchased in April 2012 for a
billion dollars think about it if you came up with the
idea of a mobile app to share your photos through filters with friends
you'd have a billion dollars today need more proof consider the mobile messaging
service whatsapp that Facebook purchased for more than 16 billion what's up was
founded in 2009 and three years later it was processing ten billion messages
daily that's by participating in tech shifts not just protecting yourself from
them can make way for your impact in the world and your fortune in business I'm
your host and New York and today we're going to be speaking with a veritable
expert on some of the biggest upcoming changes in technology martin ford
software entrepreneur and author of rise of the robots technology and the threat
of a jobless future which just won the Financial Times and the McKenzie
business book of the Year award Martin thanks for Joe
and congratulations on the success of your book well thank you and thanks for
having me right so I'd love to start off with just understanding what drove you
to write this book why robots why did you think it was important to share this
information now well you know I I've been running a small software company
for quite a few years I started it back in the mid 1990s and I saw in my own
little business the impact of this was having you know software used to be
fairly labor-intensive in the sense that there was physical things to ship there
were CD ROMs and manuals and all of that and all of that created work for typical
people but within just a few years I saw all of that disappear you know and now
of course software is delivered electronically or it's hosted in the
cloud I mean there really isn't anything tangible for people to deliver or
produce and as a result there's a lot less work there especially for typical
people and my sort of insight I think was that that was a preview of what
we're likely to see everywhere as artificial intelligence and robotics
begins to kind of invade the whole economy you know just not just the
technology sector and that's really what motivated me to start thinking about
this and writing about it so you mentioned that you saw something happen
over the past few years and and that's what drove you how fast is is this
transition happening right so going into 2016 and Beyond do you see the pace
accelerating or do you think that it's just going to continue happening at the
same pace that you've seen in general all of this technology is subject to an
acceleration it keeps moving faster and faster and I think you see some evidence
about you know you'd think for example of self-driving car so it's just a few
years ago no one could imagine and now every single automotive manufacturing
and a whole bunch of tech companies like Google and uber and all the rest are
doing research into this and it looks like it's it's really gonna happen
probably within 10 or 20 years so I think things do move faster and I think
that as a result of that a lot of the progress that we see is gonna surprise
us you know you can't look at the last 10 or 20 years and say well that's how
things worked in and so the next 10 or 20 years you're gonna look the same in
fact everything is gonna unfold a lot more rapidly and I think we really need
to start think about the implications all of this
maybe a little bit in advance so that we can adapt to it right so what about the
sort of domestic versus international question cuz you know you're mentioning
how robots you know they ultimately lower costs and increase efficiency so
the idea is okay maybe some of this manufacturing will you know move back to
the US how do you see that unfolding over the next few years in general this
is a global trend you know it's going to impact every country in the world
leading developing countries we are seeing some manufacturing come back to
the United States as a result of this I mean that that sort of makes sense if
labor is going to become less important in the future then obviously companies
to build factories are gonna be less concerned with building them in places
where labor is cheap because it's not gonna matter too much
and so they'll they'll begin to look at other factors for example it will make
sense to build factories close to markets or in a way that minimizes
transportation costs and so forth and so we you are seeing some factories come
back to the United States especially in areas like the textile industry but the
thing is that the factories come back but the jobs don't so so you might have
a factory that back in the 1980s would have employed 2,000 people then then
that factory 1.2 thousand people it's only employing 150 people so there are a
lot fewer jobs there so what about countries like China with heavy reliance
on manufacturing how will this impact their economy well it potentially could
have a tremendous impact actually a couple of months ago I went to China for
a week to do a book tour Neri they're very concerned about this
they're concerned about the reshoring issue they know that by utilising
robotics and and automation we can perhaps move the factories here and
they're worried about that they're also worried about their factories moving to
even lower wage sectors for example Vietnam and and Indonesia so in order to
prevent that and keep the manufacturing in China they're bringing their own
robots and they're doing it very aggressively China is now the biggest
market in the world for industrial robots and it's it's accelerating very
rapidly so there's definitely gonna be an impact there and there is the concern
that going forward there may not enough of those factory jobs even in
China to employ the huge number of people that that really rely on that
they're so out of outside of manufacturing you also mentioned that
low-wage jobs like fast food and people who work in agriculture that those will
be impacted as well and I think that's pretty easy for a lot of us to wrap our
heads around you know flipping burgers or other types of manual labor but
what's very interesting is you also noted that the medical field and the
legal fields and other and creative fields like writing music and art could
also be impacted can you give us maybe an example of that sure I mean in
general that's I think gonna be the the biggest disruption in the United States
because of course we know I mean manufacturing is no longer very
important in the United States in terms of employment I mean not many people
work in manufacturing everybody works in the service sector but we are seeing
these technologies come really across the board as you say it's gonna impact
the low-wage jobs but it's also coming for the high wage white-collar jobs
things that are done by college graduates and examples include smart
algorithms that are taking on some of the work that used to be done by lawyers
and paralegals in terms of reviewing documents to figure out which ones are
relevant to court cases there are systems that can do basic journalism
that can tap into a stream of data and then automatically by analyzing that
data they can put together a pretty compelling news story that really is
it's not easy to see it all that it's written by a machine it looks just like
a person wrote it and you know a lot of those technologies are just at the
beginning now but again there is this process of acceleration so it's gonna
get better and better and I think that one of the things we can expect is that
eventually any kind of knowledge-based job the kind of job where you are
sitting in front of a computer doing something relatively routine and
predictable for example cranking out the same kind of report or the same kind of
analysis again and again all of those jobs are ultimately going to be
susceptible to white-collar automation not the robots obviously but to smart
algorithms and to machine learning and and so forth um so that that
potentially could have a huge impact and again the important thing is that these
are skilled jobs I mean these are the jobs that people who go to college take
and so one of the implications of this is that it kind of up ends our
conventional thinking about how all this works and what the solution should be
because the solution traditionally has always been that if a robot takes your
job then we ought to send you back to school and give you some more training
so that you can do something more you know at a higher level but that that
conventional way of thinking is really beginning to be upturned by this
interesting so going into small business because a lot of those things you just
mentioned like for instance writing if it's a large media company I could see
an algorithm replacing a writer like you said like the example that you had used
for writing a baseball story or sports story what about for small businesses
what are something some of the implications for for small business
owners well in general this technology is going to become very widely
distributed I mean traditionally robots of course have been things in factories
and they've been things they're only really big corporations with huge
amounts of money can afford to buy but that that's changing rapidly there are
companies specifically focused on building much more affordable robots an
example is we think robotics in Boston that builds the Baxter robot I mean
that's I you know I think it's about 20-25 thousand dollars in other words it
costs less than it would cost a higher-up person and it specifically
intended to be accessible to smaller businesses and you're gonna see more and
more of that as this as this develops the same thing is true in terms of the
impact on white-collar jobs you know um we're seeing really just kind of a
proliferation so instead of being these incredibly expensive enterprise software
type things that only big corporations can afford it's gonna be apps and it's
gonna be things that in some cases might be free you know for small business to
access that they can begin to leverage in their businesses and of course that's
a very positive story for many small businesses and means they're going to be
tools out there that you can utilize there
will allow you to compete but of course it also means that the smaller
businesses which you know everyone says are the primary engine of creating jobs
in our economy are likely to perhaps be less labor intensive going forward and
in fact you already see evidence of that you know it turns out that I saw a
recent analysis that says that most small businesses that have been started
are really just one person no you know they don't really hire anyone anyone
else it's really just self-employment where it's one guy working and utilizing
all of this technology that's out there to create a job for himself and that's
what it's gonna look like more and more in the future so what kind of skill set
then would a small business owner need to equip him or herself with in order to
leverage the technology right in other words who's gonna manage the robots you
definitely need to be technology savvy I mean you need to be aware of all these
opportunities out there as they develop you don't i think necessarily have to be
a computer programmer but you definitely need to be savvy and you need to be
aware of it and you need to be constantly tapped into what the
opportunities are because if you're not your competitors will I mean I think I
really think that artificial intelligence and robotics are gonna be
one of the primary drivers that are going to just upend the competitive
dynamic for businesses of all sizes it's gonna become just a hugely important
parameter on which businesses of all kinds compete and you already see that
with with big tech companies like Google and Facebook they're like in a talent
right now to get the best people in artificial intelligence because it's
become something that is just central to to the way they compete but that
eventually is gonna scale out everywhere and it's gonna be like that for even the
smallest businesses so I mean I'm suggesting you've got to be aware of
this and you've got to be you know at the leading edge of this if you want to
remain competitive in the future yeah great so is there anything else any
anything outside of some of the concepts in the book I need recent observations
that you've had that you want to share well my general impression is that this
is continuing to move I mean I see news stories every day that surprised me I
mean one of the things that's really amazing is
is the progress in artificial intelligence and it's particularly in an
area like that's called deep learning where you now have machines that can for
example recognize images better than people and that's just amazing and
incredible I mean because this you know looking at a visual image and figuring
out what it is is something that human beings are particularly good at and if
the machines are getting better even at that then it really I think portends a
disruptive change so it's really important to be aware of the extent of
the progress we're seeing and it's really gonna have big implications
across the board I think it's really interesting
well thanks Martin so much for your time thank you great to be here
No comments:
Post a Comment