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It’s Only Common Sense: Meet the Future—Change!

In my last column, I discussed future technological advancements—most of which came from an excellent book by Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today’s Big Disruptions. What should interest us all is how new inventions and innovations are going to change the way we do things and how these changes will affect our lives and businesses.

For example, think of how we go on trips now. We drive to the airport and park our cars in an overpriced lot to accumulate expensive daily fees that we have to pay with whatever money we have left after our trip. Now, think about how this scenario will change with self-driving cars. A self-driving car could drive us to the airport and return to its home base until we return and need to be picked up. What will happen to the parking lot business and all that land at airports 20 years from now? This scenario casts an interesting perspective on how the things we are currently developing will change how things will be done in the future.

From the same book, I also learned what we should be doing to handle the challenges that these changes will bring:

1. Break out of your silo: Share ideas, especially with people who are working on products and services that will affect the future. There should be synergistic planning on the interface of these products—questions like, “How will they work together and affect what we have in place today?”

2. Create a new standard of ethics: New rules will have to be created, both legal and ethical, to manage the use of the power of the internet. How do we handle cyberbullying and false facts on social media platforms? What are we going to do with people who yell the equivalent of “Fire!” on the internet?

3. Reform news distribution: Biased media sources say anything they want at any time and let the people decide whether or not it is true. Whether you are alt-right or super liberal, you have to agree that whatever news outlet you use is more biased against the other side than ever before. This is going to have to change in the future because media continues to become more powerful.

4. Put limits on data collection: Cellphones are accumulating more data about us than we can imagine. Think about the information your smartphone is gathering while it sits in your pocket as you drive to work, or how devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo nearly function as spy device in our homes. Further, think of all the information we give away through supermarket loyalty cards just to save 10 cents on a container of laundry detergent. People already know too much about us and it’s only going to get worse, unless new rules and regulations are enacted.

5. Add more democracy to our democracy: Do we really need to go into the idiocy of the Electoral College? Or the flagrant gerrymandering that has been going on for decades? No matter what side of the political aisle you are on, you have to admit that we are going to have to change our voting structure.

6. Encourage marriage and having children: Millennials are now getting married in their late thirties—if they get married at all—and are less interested in having children. Is marriage a thing of the past? That remains to be seen, but countries with declining populations are hurting. China is already feeling the problems occurring from their long-standing one-child policy (which is now defunct) and the resulting male-female gender imbalance.

7. Bring the new economy to every region: Certain parts of the country are economically thriving, others are dying, and that’s not fair. However, with the rise of internet services and other cyber advantages that allow people to do business anywhere, this problem will dissipate and self-repair over time.

You might be wondering why I’m talking about this, why you should care, and how it relates to business. The answer is very simple—everything stated above affects every one of us. Remember how the rise of the mobile phone affected the amount and type of boards we built, how the cloud affected the production of huge memory cards, and how 9/11 affected security and surveillance electronics? If you are going to run a company today and into the future, you better have a good understanding of what that future will look like.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group. To read past columns or contact him, click here.