Customer Obsessed

Final Thoughts

When a book like this ends, it usually concludes with a few sweeping statements about the future of business and technology. The problem is, most predictions about the future never come true, leaving those books feeling dated and out of touch.

The more pressing question is, what can you do for your business right now to move it forward? How do you keep your finger on the pulse of innovation? In the existing era we're in right now, as world-shaking organizations such as Amazon and Google have expanded over the past 15 years, it's tempting to try to predict the future. And we all have friends who are building cool apps (“Hey check this out, I can order my food from underwater!”), but if we give in to the temptation to live our lives through the crystal ball, we'll end up eating a lot of glass.

Innovation doesn't require predicting the future. Let me take you back a few years. In 2007, my cofounder Michael Kirven and I were featured on the cover of VAR Business magazine. Little did we know, the world as we knew it was going to collapse 12 months later. This was a year before the financial crisis, before the market corrected, and before unemployment went to 10 percent—we all know that story. When I think back to what made Bluewolf successful as a consulting firm, it was precisely because we weren't trying to predict the future. We were using tools that were available to us at that point in time.

We were the first company to embrace the cloud back before it was called ...