Be Less Zombie

7Detecting Weak Signals from the Future

Finding the saboteurs and saviours of tomorrow's growth.

© Richard Johnston.

Your business model is under continual attack from the future.

What made you red-hot relevant yesterday has already cooled imperceptibly overnight. Someone somewhere figured out a better way to do some part of what you do, or how you do it.

‘If you don't burn down your own business every year, a competitor will supply the match,’ says Andy Billings, Vice President of Profitable Creativity at Electronic Arts, the world's largest video games company.

Failing to spot this gradual fade to grey turns out to be the single-largest cause of stalled growth, according to Matthew Olson and Derek van Bever, authors of the book Stall Points. Every company has deeply held assumptions about the ingredients and recipes of its success. Over time, market dynamics subtly shift and the failure to recalibrate leads to eventual demise.

The better we can sense and respond to the future, the greater our chances of showing up there.

Unfortunately, many companies are in a continual state of shock. For them, the future always seems to appear suddenly, like a Star Wars space cruiser arriving from hyperspace.

I guess this shouldn't be a surprise. We saw earlier that companies don't naturally allocate sufficient resources to the future. Neither do they pay close enough attention to the oncoming ...