A fascinating development in the past decade has been the resurgence of vinyl records sales. With the introduction of the compact disc in the 80’s, followed by digital download and music streaming, it was widely expected that sales of vinyl records would be zero by now. And yet, vinyl sales have made a stunning comeback and are increasing rapidly.
An iron law in business is that for every trend, there is a counter trend. This is an application of Newton’s third law of motion: action equals reaction.
There are three counter trends which I expect to materialize in the next few years:
- The effective executive will be the off-line executive. The ability to tune out on-line noise and focus on deep thinking, will set high-performance leaders apart from everyone else.
- Valuable information will be off-line information. In the near future, any information which is truly valuable, will most likely be found in an unconnected place. Think of information stored in a physical vault, or retrieved from someone’s memory.
- Trusted judgment will be human judgement. Clients will turn to organizations where humans make decisions, not machines. The organic label will no longer be limited to food, but will extend to the realm of decision making as well.
If you follow the herd and do what everyone else is doing, you’re not distinguishing yourself from the competition and you’re probably stuck. Which counter trend niche will you occupy to stand out?
PhotoCredit: iStockPhoto/Kuzmik_A
1 Comment
The part about human judgment as being organic is certainly a great way to call our decisions as opposed to automated decisions.
Thank you Paul