“Re-imagining” our lives
The world is experiencing a new era of re-imagination, in which virtually all our old ways of doing things are being uprooted by new, more efficient and more widely available methods of accomplishing old tasks.
We collaborate using Zoom, Teams, Salesforce, Yammer, Skype, GoToMeeting, Fuze and 
hundreds of other tools not available to the last generation of whiteboard, personal meeting or teleconference users. We read increasingly using our digital devices. We compute using our smartphones and tablets. We use gestures or our voice to control our engagement with our technology. We take courses on-line. We bypass the middle person for services and information.
We are learning to use new tools.
ChatGBT and Bing AI are just two of the new tools that are already changing our lives. It won’t be long before another round of layoffs comes, and these new tools will create new jobs to fill the gap.
We watch our news and entertainment anywhere we want to on any kind of device we choose. We move boarding passes, coupons and more off paper and into the digital world. Many of us now never physically touch our music. We recruit and hire using LinkedIn or other resources, replacing job fairs, campus events and paper resumes. We use QR codes to simplify the process.
Examples of re-imagining the business.
There are hundreds of other examples of re-imagination everywhere we look, making our lives easier and our reach greater than ever before.
The principal drivers of this re-imagination are the hyper-growth of the mobile Internet, consumer-controlled commerce, the rise of big data, and “globality.” Let’s explore examples of these and more.
The mobile Internet – The latest major computing cycle
[Email readers, continue here…] Over the last fifty years, the world transitioned from mainframe computing to mini-computers to PCs to the desktop Internet. And now we have made the largest cycle of all – the move to mobile Internet computing. With 7 billion people on the planet today, there are more than 6 billion mobile subscriptions, up from 
just 720 million in 2000. Mobile workers are quickly overtaking the fixed desk worker and long-distance traveler. Mobile commerce is up 552% in one year (measuring cyber-Mondays). The mobile web will become what desktop Internet became in the 1990’s – the standard platform for anyone doing business.
In three years, as web browsing and TV watching minutes per day remained constant, mobile consumption rose by double to over two hours per day. Fifty-seven percent of teenagers say that their mobile device is the “center of their universe.” We are entering the smartphone era, where 65% of time on our mobile devices is spent in non-communicating activities. We are treating these more as computers and less as phones. And almost half of all homes have at least one tablet device, replacing traditional computers for most tasks. And we carry access to our entertainment with us, bypassing the need to be entertained by others while away from home.
Big Data – threading the needle while still in the haystack
By 2024, there will be an estimated 8,200 gigabytes of stored data for every person on earth. That adds up to 80 with 21 trailing zeros. In my country, USA, there are three million data centers in all, accounting for 2.2% of our nation’s use of electricity. Examples of this massive accumulation of data abound. We could store all the world’s music on just three four-terabyte disc drives. There are thirty billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each month. If we analyze the potential value of that data to various industries, we can imagine a 60% increase in retailers’ operating margins, or $600 billion in value to various enterprises from mining personal location data. An estimated $180 billion will be invested in data analytics by 2024. This is big business.
How do we use big data?
We will enable segmentation of the population to produce customized messages and actions. We will replace or support human decision-making with automated algorithms. We will enable a generation of experimentation with innovative business models, in our industry making today’s form of revenue management look like a primitive art.
The true value to us will be in analyzing unstructured data, estimated to be 80% of all data stored, from blogs, social media, pictures and video. None of this could be mined successfully in the past generation of technology. Think of 6 million automobile comments, or 30 million political comments, 200 million travel comments, or 150 million consumer electronic comments posted each month.
Retailers such as Staples and Home Depot are already charging shoppers different prices based upon where they live, income levels and proximity to a competitor’s store, among other mined attributes. Will hotels be next?
We are in the “age of recommendation”
Already, 69% of consumers research their product, service and guest stay decisions online. 62% look at online peer reviews. And 39% compare prices across alternatives. This cat is out of the bag, driving prices down, democratizing search and supply between branded chains and independent properties.
With this little space and time, it is not possible to expand upon other macro-trends, such as socializing commerce, increased trust in the cloud for storage and transactions, exponential growth in computing power, green technologies, and the continued amazing growth of the Internet in Asia, Latin America and now in Africa.
But it is certain that being informed and planning well for that future will give you a competitive advantage over those who do not. An African proverb states “Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”
both the plan and execution of their vision (since from experience almost everything about a business plan changes over time), and whether that person, no matter what age or experience, is coachable.
One of the best indicators of future success for an entrepreneur and an early-stage idea is the quality and depth of great relationships with industry veterans or technology gurus, or experienced successful business leaders. Those relationships would be impressive but worthless if the entrepreneur was not coachable, open to suggestion and criticism from those who have experience enough to surface the issues unspoken but obvious to the coach.
Considering the alternatives early in the timeline helps you to monitor growth in terms of valuation, weigh the value of continued investment, bring family members into the discussion, and picture the end game in your mind.
didn’t even think existed – from CEOs who couldn’t control the euphoria. A successful test. Completion of a software project by the remote workers in (Philippines, Brazil, Armenia, fill in the blank… Just name a country whose daytime is our nighttime.) You get the idea.
when you are at or near that right point to sell for maximum value? Those of us in the business of calculating (guessing) this mythical peak in value often make the same mistake as our entrepreneurs. We hang on just a little bit longer, expecting continued or accelerating growth and value as in previous periods of the same.
For young companies, often the question is whether to suffer a new round of dilution to stimulate growth, or to sell earlier and not share the (presumably) increased proceeds with additional investors. Not so long ago, Basil Peters wrote his book, “Early Exits,” after analyzing 150 young companies and their exits. He concluded that the sweet spot for valuation was in the $20–30 million sales price range, and that many, many times more deals were completed in that range than above $100 million in valuation at exit. Adjusting these numbers to fit your circumstance, the conclusion is that waiting for higher value after sustained growth becomes more and more of a risk in the majority of early stage cases.
assets (including cash) in its corporate income tax audits. This insight addresses more the impact of such behavior upon the actions of employees and others who observe that behavior from a senior manager or owner of a business – and know that they cannot say anything about it without jeopardizing their jobs.
companies by a New York private equity investor using only five million of its cash. The rest of the purchase price was concocted from a brew of zero-coupon bonds (where the face value is many times the invested amount until the reduced cost bonds mature thirty years later), and borrowing using the target company’s accounts receivable and other assets as collateral for a loan to purchase the company.
And how about a product purchase where you cannot come to a successfully negotiated price with your supplier? Ask for extended terms well beyond sixty or ninety days. Not only do you save the value of imputed interest, but you most likely will use, resell, collect from your customer, and even earn on the excess sales revenues deposited in your bank before you ever have to pay the supplier. Almost always, such an arrangement is more favorable than factoring or private asset lending, does not take away from your ability to borrow from other sources, and allows you to make customer promises and profits you could not have made otherwise.
offering or extend our reach. And we rightly celebrate each such pairing, often with a mutual press release.
In spite of the best efforts of senior management in creating such a partnership, the success always lies in the hands of those closest to the end customer. The only way to assure continued success in such a relationship is to permit those in sales to be in direct contact with their counterparts in the other company, something often discouraged by sales management from the selling organization as a distraction from achievement of quota for both the salesperson and manager.
customer asking for a meeting with the product development team of a critical supplier, one of “my” companies. The goal, the VP stated, was to “see if these guys are battle hardened veterans that have dealt with the real-world product and delivery problems” of a nationally important customer.
What could be construed as a threat to management of the supplier turned out to be a cementing of relationships between the two organizations. The worrisome risk that opening the meeting to those subordinate employees not prepared for such an encounter was never realized. Problems that might have later created stress between the companies became mutual challenges worked on by the whole team – not just because they were directed to overcome a problem but because team members felt a personal obligation to the customer’s VP.
let’s bend the meaning to help us focus on resources while preserving those words.
Treasure is obviously a proxy for capital, whether earned or invested. There is no doubt that money is a most valuable corporate resource that can be leveraged by good management, great talent, and effective allocation of corporate time.
