THE FUTURE
“It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future” - Niels Bohr (and also apparently according to legendary baseball player Yogi Berra)
Firstly, welcome to all of our new subscribers in April (264 and counting!) I want to know each and every one of you, because I’m interested in YOUR story, and your challenges.. If you’re up for a virtual coffee please drop me a message.
Also, please continue to help spread the word far and wide.
So far we’ve seen how Three Strikes have brought disaster to a startup, a multibillion dollar corporate, and a trillion dollar company.
We’ve seen how Three Strokes (of great strategy and good fortune) have turned an idea into $400M of revenue, and how a lagging tech giant became the world’s most valuable company.
We’ve also seen warnings about a potential first Strike for nearly every business on the planet and also a dramatic warning about a single, potentially fatal strike.
Today, I’m going to focus on how each of us can deliberately put ourselves and our companies, in good luck’s way. To do that, I need to write about the future. Which is hard.
Yet, I believe we can all get conviction around the fact that technologies are converging, and during that convergence opportunities abound.
So.. I have found a futurist whose predictions have actually come true over the last few decades, and whose fact-based approach to understanding today, and therefore predicting the future, rings true to me.
I really subscribe to their evidence based view of the world and technology adoption curves, and especially their rationale of how these technology curves intersect and, critically, what this means will happen.. and when.
I am going to summarise this thinking and link to YouTube videos - which I highly recommend you watch - as we cover the foundational sectors of the economy which are and will undergo significant disruption in the 2020’s and 2030s.
This will be a multi-article series, with the main point being to share this view of the future and contextualise how we - as business leaders - can position ourselves to win.
Tony Seba’s ReThinkX reports are amazing.
They cover the transformative potential of technology and its capacity to reshape the foundational sectors of civilisation
They believe that the convergence of technological advancements across different sectors could initiate a new age of freedom and abundance for humanity.
Five Foundational Sectors
They have identified five foundational sectors - if you have time, watch each of the below 20 minute videos, they re excellent.
Information
Transportation
Energy
Food
Materials
I have been involved in businesses directly and adjacent to these foundational sectors and found it fascinatingly relevant to understand the “ReThinkX” hypothesis and apply it to my own forecasting.
But what if we are working in a business that is clearly not in one of these foundational sectors? Like Financial services, or Education, or Healthcare, or B2B software?
Well, I am involved in ventures across all of these non-foundational sectors, and I personally have derived significant insights for all of them. That, is why I am sharing ReThingX with you, because I believe fervently that if you understand these concepts and predictions, and the basis for them, that you too will be a better business leader.
For example, AI is impacting every single job, white collar to blue collar to no collar, all over the world.. in every industry sector that is not within one of these foundational sectors.. why?
Because the advances and convergence of technology trends within the foundational sectors of Materials and Information have enabled AI tools to be made available to the world.. and literally millions of companies all over the planet are busy building millions of very specific application layers on top of the handful of AI engines that the trillion dollar companies have made available to us. Will this impact every single business on the planet? Absolutely. Directly in some cases, indirectly in others, but it’s coming.
But AI is not the only wave of change about hitting us.. So lets get ready…
Let me know what you think!
If you've always dreamed of joining a think tank but never got the invitation, consider this your first seat at the virtual table. This experience has been more valuable to me than my master's degrees in terms of understanding business overall and gaining insight into the future. Thank you so much, Salvador, for introducing us to this and sharing your knowledge.
Thanks Sal. Very much enjoyed and concurred with the video on energy disruption. I'll check out the others.