Over 20 years ago, a pair of authors wrote an incredibly prophetic book.
The One to One Future, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, actually saw part of the future and told us what would happen. It was a marketing-focused work, but it examined the way people bought things, and how businesses dealt with those relationships.
It talked about market disruption and discontinuous change, which when properly handled, is the way we grow up. But too many business are terrified of any change (which to them means an uncertain future) and want to remain the same, well, forever. And we know this does not work.
Let's take the publishing industry, for one. Their way of doing business has blown completely apart, and some of them still haven't got it yet. They're doing what they did for a long time before. They think they can just add on a few ebook versions of their paper books and things will go on as usual.
They should read this book, and maybe some light would dawn- and note, it's 20+ years old!
The book says it's better to take products to customers, not customers to products (selling model for physical bookstores). If this sounds familiar, it's because it is the Amazon method, which caused enormous market disruption. Jeff Bezos must had read this and used it as a strategy planning guide. It's talking about putting the "store" on the home computer- years before this was a comfortable reality.
So cool to see someone write with accuracy on how the world is changing and to see it has come true.
Read this book- it will help you understand how the world has changed.
What things do you see for the future?
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