12 Views (techno-inspired) of the Future

1. 12 Foolish Futures Ideas
2. Father’s Day and Leadership
3. Circling the Profit Drain
4. Who’s using Who?
5. Could Your Sales Team Get to Carnegie Hall?
6. Econ Recon

Before I launch into the articles, here is an invitation:?

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12 Foolish Futures Ideas

A thought about the future: “The future is like the past until it isn’t.” ?

Based on his recent TED Talk, I think that venture capitalist and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla would agree. He warns that “Experts extrapolate the past. They prevent radical progress because they don't think nonlinearly. They don't think of the improbable. I personally believe only the improbables are important. We just don't know which improbable is important (emphasis mine). I can't think of a single large social impact change that was driven by an expert in the field.”

Khosla was a founder of Sun Microsystems, Juniper Network, and Khosla Ventures which backed Door Dash and Instacart. In a short TED Talk this past April, he brought 40 years of successful technology experience to bear on the future of AI. I think you’ll find his 12 predictions for the future of technology to be worth the 9 minutes it will take to watch it.

Roy Amara, ?a past president of the Institute for the Future, created Amara’s Law when he said:? “We tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run.”

Given the nearly upward vertical path of AI in the past 18 months, those long runs may be getting shorter and shorter. Khosla’s view of 12 technology futures may be quite close by.

Father’s Day and Leadership

In honor of Father’s Day yesterday, this short article from INC Magazine does a great job of exploring the relationship between parenting and leadership. Take a few minutes for “A Father’s Day Reflection on Leadership: Six Parallels between effective fatherhood and impactful leadership.” ?

Circling the Profit Drain

One of the best books on enhancing profitability is Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink: Why 40% of your Business is Unprofitable and How to Fix It . It’s not just about finance and accounting; every member of your executive team can absorb its lessons and profit from it.

A recent article in Chief Executive Magazine offers a taste of what this book contains. The author, the late Jonathan Byrnes was a professor at MIT’s Sloan Business School specializing in cost control and profit improvement. Among the many “profit drains” of which he warned executives, here are three of most common. Which drain is your company circling??

• Marginal contribution. Why shouldn’t we take business that contributes to overhead, even if it doesn’t cover full cost?
• Full product line. Why shouldn’t we carry products that lose money if they are part of a product line that makes money overall?
• Traffic drivers. Why shouldn’t we carry money-losing “loss-leader” products if they attract customers who then buy very lucrative products?

For a quick prescription for each, check out this short article: ?How To Avoid 3 Common Profit Drains . Then buy and study the book.

Who’s using Who?

One of the things that make humans different from other animals is that we make and use tools. The utility and variety of tools accelerated during the Industrial Revolution. In the past generation the rate of change in the ubiquity and power of tools due to information technology is truly breathtaking.

But the power and utility of modern IT has had a subtle and insidious side effect that most of us have experienced (even if we’re not aware of it):? the theft of our attention. An excellent article from the Farnum Street Blog warns that “our attention is for sale, and we’re ceding it a little at a time as the tools get better and better at fulfilling their function.”

In short, our tools are using us.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to become more aware of this phenomenon. The theft of our attention is really the theft of our time…and therefore our lives. Don’t Let Your Technology Tools Use You .

If you find the article compelling, check out Vistage Speaker Maura Thomas’ 15 minute TED talk on managing attention versus time which recaps the half-day session on the topic that she has led over 300 times for Vistage CEOs and Key Executives across the county.

Could Your Sales Team get to Carnegie Hall?

There’s an old joke about a tourist in New York who asks a musician carrying a violin getting out of a cab “How do I get to Carnegie Hall”; to which the musician replies “Practice, Practice, Practice.”

Musicians, airline pilots, world class actors, and champion athletes have one thing in common: thousands of hours of practice. Yet, according to Vistage Speaker and Sales Trainer, Colleen Stanley , many of the salespeople our companies rely upon to provide revenue often resist what other great performers do as a matter of course: Practice.

How would you answer Stanley’s challenge ?Do you have a practice averse sales culture?” She explores the reasons for this in a recent 2-minute video and urges executives to move their salespeople from “flabby to fabulous” by demanding a regimen of practice?before inflicting themselves on your customers.?

Note: If you want to greatly multiply the effectiveness of your salespeople’s practice time, conduct role plays where you play the customer, the salespeople play themselves and (this is really important) you make a video recording of the session. When the roleplay is over, ask the salesperson to self-assess, give you own feedback, then watch it together. The camera doesn’t lie, and it helps eliminate arguments about what the salesperson, did or didn’t do, in the roleplay. Few things will improve a salesperson more than seeing themselves perform in a role that they think they’ve already mastered but according to the camera have not.? Check to see how practiced or unpracticed your team is.

Econ Recon

?An Auto Primer:? Few industries changed American, and the world more than the introduction of the automobile, contributing 3% of GDP (a really big number). In his latest “Three on Thursday”? economist Brian Wesbury offers a concise one page summary of current events in the auto industry.?? ?

A Positive 2025, but at a price: Check out ITR Economics’ Brian Beaulieu’s latest look at the metrics?in his latest Fedwatch.

Thanks for reading and sharing across your network this week's issue. Wishing you a productive week.

Sue Tinnish, PhD,?Vistage Chair, Facilitator, & Executive Coach

Find me easily at: 847.404.7325, [email protected] , Twitter:?@STinnish, LinkedIn: www.dhirubhai.net/in/suetinnish , Website: https://vistage.com/chairs/sue.tinnish