Thursday, May 17, 2007

Futurist Service Available

Think how different your industry is from 5-10 years ago. Lots of changes? What's the likelihood that there will be as many or more changes in the next 5-10 years? One thing I can guarantee you is that just about every industry is going to face more competition in the future? How to survive and thrive in that environment? Perhaps you should take a look into the future and try to develop some alternative scenarios for industry changes and trends. Try to think out of the box and consider the impact of technological, cultural, social and other impacts on how your customers use the products and services of the collective industry. How can you be positioning yourself for success in the future? What products and services should you be considering today to have new competitive advantages in the future? Sound like a challenging exercise? This is what I do for clients - help them navigate in an uncertain future. Let me know if I can work with you and your team to develop a framework for getting ahead of the trend. Do you have the Sickness? Do you believe that you can get better?

Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Robots are Coming!

Unfortuately, R2D2 and C3PO are still years away. I've been busy lately and if I could offload more of my work to robots, I would have more time to blog and do other things that I enjoy. Robots are quickly creeping into our society and many consumers are turning over some of the day to day drudgery that no one really likes to do to some increasingly sophisticated single function robots. The Roomba from iRobot Company (http://www.irobot.com) is probably the most well known as it is a widely marketed vacuum cleaner. They also have a floor washing and pool cleaning robots. The compnay did $186MM in 2006 do it looks like a few folks are doing a bit less vacumum cleaning.

There are also a couple of lawn mowing robots - Robomower and Lawnbott for people who don't like to mow the lawn - check them out at http://www.bamabots.com. One of my clients makes the Litter-Robot, a self cleaning cat litter box (www.Liter-Robot.com). We get great feedback from cat owners who are estatic that they don't have to scoop out their litter box anymore. Talk about a distasteful job. Now if I could just get an email bot to write all my emails....