How to thrive in the future: predictions made by Kevin Kelly

In this fast-paced world, one of the most disadvantaged conditions for a business professional is:

• Working very hard, but you are not in the fast growing industry.
• You are smart, but you don’t know how to or don’t take advantage of new business trends.

The writer of Out of Control Kevin Kelly published his new book, “The Inevitable” in Chinese, which is in early December this year was prior to it being published in any other language. It sold 75,000+ copies on the first day. The English version will be available on June 7, 2016. Kevin elaborates on his view of the future in his new book and discloses the 12 technological forces that will shape our future.

In my opinion, the following key points are critical:

Invisible Value

More and more products have been commoditized, how can you differentiate your product/service offerings from the competition? This book describes the 8 subtle and likely invisible values that will make a difference:

1. Real-time: real-time creates a scarcity value. For example, people will pay premium price to watch the first showing of a film.
2. Personalization: personalized service is hard to copy and thus increases customer loyalty.
3. Explanation: companies like Red Hat can offer a free downloadable software to their customers, but may charge $10,000 for a guide book.
4. Reliability: people would rather pay for a trustworthy software than download a free software, which may contain a virus.
5. Availability: Free Wi-Fi is available at many places, but the download speed is not satisfactory. Many don’t mind using a costly data plan for a higher speed.
6. Visibility: A great story can be filmed or performed live for example.
7. Sponsorship: more and more fans want to support a creator/designer of a product and make connections with their idols. However, you must have a simple payment method, a reasonable price and mutual benefits to facilitate the process.
8. Searchable: to grab a customer’s attention, you have to make a product searchable by its target market. However, we are still at an early stage in determining what kind of information should be filtered and how to filter it.

Use right vs. Ownership

Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Ownership has become less and less important compared with proper and effective use. This change has largely relied on the technology trends. I have listed some of these trends for your reference:

Decentralization

The effect of decentralization is that everything, whether it’s visible or not must flow faster to ensure the whole system will move in synchronization.

The richest and most destructive organizational structure is a decentralized net such as Apple and Google. All these giants utilize third party suppliers to add value to their own systems. They often build an ecosystem by opening their API and welcome other people/companies to leverage and expand the existing system.

Sharing Economy

Sharing Economy has been used to describe a new style of economy. Its purpose is to maximize individual autonomy and teamwork at the same time.

Tracking

Internet of Things is designed to track data. Tracking is the essence of the cloud where all data is stored. In the next 5 years, Kevin estimates that 34 billion IoT devices will be used to distribute data. Anything that has access to the cloud will be tracked and can be tracked.

A new human right and responsibility will appear in that is every human being has his/her own right to obtain data about himself/herself and benefit from the data. Meanwhile, everybody needs to respect the completeness of the data and takes responsibility to share the data and accept data monitoring by a third party.

To sum up, our previous experience and success will not guarantee the future success. To thrive in the future, it will largely depends on whether we can follow the technology trends, how fast we can learn the new skills required to leverage the emerging technologies, and how quickly we can experiment with new ideas, fail and move on.