In turbulent times, the pull of the future needs to beat the tug of the past: 24 years ago (that’s 1985), I was studying for my ‘A’ levels in Scotland. One of my subjects was Political Studies, and our teacher was convinced that the electoral system should be the hot topic we should all study. His reasoning: It was time it was changed. I wasn’t convinced. My reasoning: The examiners were more likely to be reading the Economist than Plato’s ‘Republic’. The Economist at the time was full of the trade union strikes and there was very little mention of electoral systems (despite the fact that the strikes were taking place precisely because of the breakdown of the old system).
I abandoned all my teacher’s advice and instead just read the Economist. On the day of the exam I found the latest issue of the Economist in my pigeon hole so I crammed over breakfast. When we sat down to the exam I was happily proven right, peppering my essays with facts hot off the press. The rest of the class was shocked to find most of the subjects we had studied over the last two years to be entirely absent from the exam. A number of students far smarter than me managed a ‘C’ from the carnage. I got the lonesome ‘A’ – Not because I was smarter, but I just had a sense what the ‘experts’ would be focused on: The noise of the moment.
Experts are able to make sense of history, while Entrepreneurs are able to make sense of the future. One needs to know in order to do. The other needs to do in order to know.
When economies fall into Winter season, it becomes the Winter of Discontent. The Autumn Earth is left behind and there is more upset than ever as the ground falls away. The ‘Mechanic’ stage of any cycle is often mistaken as ‘fix what is broken’ rather than ‘re-order for the approaching Spring’. Mechanics don’t take things apart just to see how things work. They take things apart to see how they can work better.
By the way, this is the same for every season: In the summer, when our products are selling well, we are more likely to create more products to sell than focus at the service we will soon need to provide. In the autumn, when we are trading well, we are more likely to listen to the advice of others than to build a system to sustain our future success. And so on. We are always more likely to build on our past rather than reverse-engineer our future.
Right now, Experts are coming out in force to comment on history: What went wrong. Those being uprooted all follow the experts in looking backwards. This is the perfect time for Entrepreneurs to take apart the many components of our economies, markets and technologies that simply did not exist five years ago, look at them with fresh eyes and ask the question “If I landed on this planet today with no history of the past, and found all these raw ingredients to create a new future, how would I reorganize the pieces?”.
For starters, Mobile Internet, 3D Video, Wireless Power and Social Media Markets will transform the reality we live in and the dreams we live out this year.
Once the caterpillar has been reorganized into a butterfly, the butterfly has little time to question why the caterpillar couldn’t fly.
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