Beyond The Looking Glass
A Few Ways Of Looking At The Business Of The World We Live In
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I don’t care about the sort of things that will bring in chump change over the next two or three years. I think I’m better than others at sniffing out things that will bear fruit in 10 or 20 years while they’re still at the seed stage, and I’m more willing to take the risks that entails — Masayoshi Son
What deserves our full attention is not the success of a few companies that have harnessed the powers of hybrid analog/digital computing, but what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world-George Dyson
When Alice peered through the looking glass, she was able to see a completely strange world. Today, we need to go beyond the looking glass and see what the strange new world of business represents. The world of business is changing so rapidly that the strangeness of today is a harbinger of an even stranger world tomorrow. This article emphasizes an important shift in our mindset - instead of just looking just at the ideas (such as Bitcoin, AI etc) on their own, we need to go deeper and ask : are these ideas a harbinger of things to come or a symptom of a deep rooted change in society? The answers we find will have significant impact on our business models and will radically change our lives in the future.
Approach #1: The Idea Behind The Idea
This happened to me exactly two months ago. I was on a video conference with a few of my close colleagues and friends. The topic we were discussing was ‘What Is Innovation? — a topic that gets discussed everyday in the world of business now. A lady on the conference asked all of us to give an example of an idea that changed the world. There were the usual litany of examples ie the iPhone, voice based assistants, Augmented Reality etc. I held my answer for a while because I was afraid of being laughed off. Ultimately, my…
