Blog: Crystal Ball
Don’t you wish you had a crystal ball you could look into and see the future? It could be that you already have it and just don’t know about it.
Peter Drucker (1909-2005), referred to very often as the father of modern management, wrote in his famous book “The Effective Executive” first published in 1967 (and in 1985 & 1996 & 2002 & 2006): “The most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened … to exploit them and use them as opportunities in the future”. The way I interpreted this statement was that a manager’s task is to look at the changes that have taken place in the past to anticipate what is coming in future and plan for it. This notion has been in my head for many years and every time I try to strategize and come up with a mid or long-term business or marketing plan, I try to do this exercise. On occasion it has produced some results, but I must admit it comes with high risks, namely being wrong about the assumptions made and having dedicated resources, time, and money to them. Honestly speaking, most of the time I was simply afraid to act on my instincts based on looking into my “crystal ball”. So, my thoughts and ideas made an interesting dinner topic discussion, but they usually went no further than that.
The other day I was on Tik-Tok and somehow their powerful AI algorithms running in the background suggested that I look at a 30-second Jeff Bezos interview clip. This 30-seconds changed my perspective entirely about my trying for years to look at the past to plan the future approach. Bezos said: “People always ask me so Jeff what do you think will happen in the future? What changes can we expect? What new products will become mainstream? etc.” He said, “… and I always tell those people the same thing: I don’t know!” But what he said after that is what startled me. He said: “I don’t understand why people are so obsessed with what changes are going to come in the future which is much harder to figure out rather than thinking about what changes will NOT come in the future and build a business strategy around that?”.
WOW!
He went on: “I built Amazon around 2 basic customer behaviors that I could say with 100% certainty will NOT change: 1. No customer would ask me to raise prices, 2. No customer would say they want slower delivery.”
WOW #2!
How simple! Simple but profound. Simple but insightful. Simple but powerful. Powerful to a point where this concept could become the crystal ball I was looking for. The crystal ball that everyone of us has but none one of us uses. So I started a different exercise and started to think about things that I could say with certainty will not change in the next 9-12 months. And that was so easy to a point where I felt like an idiot why couldn’t I figure this out on my own until now?
Now let’s take this one step further and see how this can be applied to where we are today. As I am writing this in January 2022, the world is still struggling with the Corona pandemic. Still as of a year ago, a lot of people -including myself- were hoping that this virus will go away, and we can all go back to “our normal lives”, whatever that meant. Now we know that this virus is here to stay, and it will affect our daily private and business lives and even the future generations to come. Corona will not go away in the next 9-12 months, and we have to further learn how to live with it. So, what does that mean for you and your business? Well for starters, plan your marketing activities with this limitation in mind. Plan your sales activities with this reality in mind. If you are planning on exhibiting on an exhibition, make that your plan B. If you are planning on doing a sales seminar because you have done it for the past 10 years, re-think it. If you were planning on inviting all your VIP clients to a resort for a long weekend because you did it 5 years ago and people are still taking about it, forget it.
Here is another general thing that will most likely not change. If you are working in a B2B manufacturing industry like I do, most manufacturing companies are obsessed by committing themselves to developing new products for their clients. Even if you are a service provider, you do not have a physical product, but you can think of your provided services as products. Nothing gives a salesman more satisfaction than knocking on their client’s door and say “ta-da look at our latest and greatest invention”. So, if you are thinking that I am going to say that this is another thing that will not change therefore keep committing your scarce engineering resources to developing new products, you are jumping to the conclusion too fast. In fact, I am going to argue the opposite. Every time you say yes to one thing, in reality you are saying no to 100 other things. If you are (still) reading my words right now, you are not doing a whole bunch of other things that may even have higher priority for you. But you chose not to do those things at this moment. Same thing is true when companies dedicate their expensive engineering resources to new developments. They are actually saying no to those clients who have been complaining about quality, about service, about late deliveries, about missing functionality in existing products and so on. So, what will not change (for most) in the next 9-12 months is that about 80-90% of your client base will be the same (unless you are a start-up). Your existing clients may choose not to buy from you anymore, but they are still your clients. Figure out whether the majority of your clients want you to knock on their door and say “ta-da, here is the feature you have been asking for since 3 years ago” OR “ta-da, here is our latest and greatest product”? You might be surprised. Do not fall in the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. Do not corner yourself by trying to keep everyone including your own employees satisfied. You will fail. It is like trying to lift two round watermelons with one hand. Chances of dropping and ruining both is quite high. So, another thing that will most likely not change in the next 9-12 months is most of your client base and what they expect from you. List them up. Prioritize them. Act on them.
A third thing that will probably not change in the next 9-12 months, will be your attitude and fixed ideas based on your beliefs and personal experiences. My advice: question them, question yourself, question your intentions, do a reality check whether they would still be relevant to what you are about to do now in 2022. And now it is your turn to look into your crystal ball.
by: Ali Hoorsun, January 2020