The Business Trendsetter Podcast

You can use trends to build highly accurate scenarios improving decision-making.  The last podcast discussed how demographic trends mean that Millennials and Zoomers will be running companies soon. This podcast dives into the impact on workplaces. Specifically the radical decline in needs for commercial office space. Nationally nearly half of all commercial real estate is empty.  Vacancy rates are...

Understanding Millenials and Gen Z To Predict Workplace Trends Millenials and Gen Z (Zoomers) already make up half the workforce.  By 2025 Zoomers will be 25% on their own.  Despite the outsized voices of Baby Boomers (who mostly are out of the workforce) this means the work world will change dramatically.  And it’s not even hard to predict how.  Just look at demographic surveys and you will not o...

Demographics drive more societal change than anything else.  Or should we say everything else.  And demographics are extremely predictable.  Yet we tend to ignore demographics because there’s little we can do to change them.  In this podcast we explain how to use demographcis to make better decisions.  For 40 years America, and most of the developed world, has moved jobs to China – helping build a...

Customers won’t buy from you if they don’t trust you.  The very minimum is you must promise to your customer what you will deliver, and then make good on that promise.  If your product and/or service doesn’t deliver on its promise, you won’t have trust and you won’t have sales.  Surprisingly, companies often fail at this very bottom level.  They fail to meet their promise, and they lose trust.  Fo...

The world’s richest people are all self-made billionaires. None started with great family wealth, nor corporations. But can we identify what made them billionaires while others only wish for wealth. This podcast explains how the path to $1B is available to everyone. But most of us don’t focus on the right things.  First and foremost, it takes a very strong commitment to growing revenues. And to do...

We are inundated with statistics.  But most of us have no idea how to apply the vast majority of them to our business.  This podcast explains how you can use reported statistics to make better business decisions – with specific examples about megatrends that are shifting today. Surveying Americans you will discover that the importance of patriotism has fallen 32 percentage points in 25 years.  Imp...

Last week Gordon Moore died.  In 1965 he wrote a paper saying the number of transistors on a chip would double every 2 years (at that time, to 65,000). That was not a new physics law, it was a trend. And it turned out to be a powerful trend – today powerful microprocessors have 114 billion transistors.  By seeing how manufacturing could improve, Moore helped others see that the future could be dom...

Tech companies are undertaking massive layoffs. Economists say inflation is out of control.  Interest rates are skyrocketing. Banks are failing. Investors and bondholders are being wiped out, and deposits are at risk.  Lenders are unwilling to lend.  The news is full of stories, quoting business leaders, saying now is the time to retrench. Don’t invest – instead hoard cash and prepare for potentia...

The biggest risk of myopia is unintended consequences.  We set out to do one thing, and we don’t see the after-effects that happen – on customers, suppliers and employees.  Also, by focusing intently on our existing business we don’t see how unintended consequences of things outside our business can have enormous impact.  And, if we don’t see it coming, we don’t prepare our Value Delivery System f...

Manny’s back from France, and in this podcast we discuss the difference in adoption rates of various trends in France versus the USA.  Work from Home, Gig economy, electrification of the auto fleet – we cover a lot of ground about the differences.  Doing so we discuss how local issues affect trends, as well as regulations.  The big trends apply, but when scenario planning we have to look at a lot...

With Manny in Grenoble, France this podcast focuses on global business.  First and foremost, it focuses on how every business – large or small – gains by having a better understanding of foreign markets.  Instead of thinking offshore is a way to export American business models, learning from foreign businesses new ways to compete.  Opening our minds, and our processes, to alternative ways of doing...

By 2010 the internet was everywhere.  Most everyone had a Blackberry or iPhone.  Young and old alike knew what Amazon.com was, and doing Google searches.  But, most businesses still saw fully integrating their business onto web-based technology as unnecessary.  Even a waste of money.  While they processed orders manually, and did sales tracking manually, and took payments manually, and chased down...

This podcast talks frequently about individual trends.  Global trends that affect all parts of life, like environmental awareness, electrification and the aging population.  And global trends that impact work like mobility, asynchronous work tools, Gig work and AI. While these are interesting, the greatest value from understanding these trends lies in thinking how they interact with one another cr...

Electricity has been part of every American’s life for 60 years.  But we are now going through a punctuated equilibrium that will change everything.  The old way was big power plants with thousands of miles of distribution lines and massive capacitor stations tied to homes and offices.  The future is a distributed grid where we will have local solar and wind coupled with in-house batteries and EV...

Employers are wondering if they should force employees back into the office.  Some demanding 100% in office, to some offering 100% remote work.  What’s the right answer? This podcast answers that question by using the 4 Trends we discussed in “Thrive to the Future.”  Mobility, Gig work, Asynchronous work and Artificial Intelligence.  Those 4 major trends are just as powerful in 2023 as they were i...

Recent headlines were awash in news that China’s population is shrinking.  You might have asked “why should I care?” This podcast explains why trends, like demographic changes, have an impact on EVERYONE. It’s not just big business affected by demographic shifts, it’s all business.  Years of using Chinese laborers at low wages to make products for US and European citizens is going to change, as th...

ChatGPT has received a lot of news lately – and for good reason.  Ask this software robot a question and it can deliver eloquent answers often at the level of graduate school grammar.  Artificial Intelligence (or Augmented Intelligence if you prefer) is going mainstream.  College students are using it to do their homework, and people are faking expertise they do not have by leaning on ChatGPT (and...

How much time do you spend really thinking about customer needs?  I don’t mean how they want you to improve your product service. I mean really thinking about their needs?  What they want, what they wish, what would make their business a lot better?  Most of us don’t do this nearly enough.  We’re so busy trying to solve our own problems, trying to resolve complaints or meet an immediate request th...

Every business leader knows they need to sell more stuff.  And they need to make money.  So leaders invest in sales, marketing, operations and supply chain management.  But actually, after selling more stuff the most important thing every business leader must know how to do is raise money.  Look at Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.  All of them were masters at raising money.  If yo...

2022 was a tumultuous year! Interest rates went from zero to 4.5%, while finding employees continued to remain nearly impossible, and supply chain interruptions dominated the output landscape.  Climbing out of the pandemic was as fraught with difficulties as shutting down had been.  This podcast reviews many of the changes that happened in 2022 – including CEO changes at Disney, Elon Musk on a cra...

In 2022 Federal Funds rate went from 0% to 4.25% in just 7 months.  An unprecedented jump in rates – but it started from an equally unprecedented base of 0%.  Looking back 100 years there was only one time when interest rates were below 1% - and that was during 2010-2022.  Can you recognize that the 2010’s and pandemic were the aberration, not the norm?  In this podcast we look at long-term econom...

The world is abuzz about the World Cup.  But esports is actually much, much bigger than soccer – or the NFL, NBA or MLB!  Do you realize that gaming is a $200B business?  And while all major team sports are flat to declining, Gaming is growing at 25-50% PER YEAR!  This podcast overviews how to interpret the data so you can understand just how big a trend Gaming is, and why this should impact your...

Business leaders think very unidirectionally about their business.  Meaning they think about how to push more of what they have onto customers.  But customers tend to be unwilling to buy what they don’t want. Eventually leaders scratch their heads asking “why can’t I sell more stuff” without realizing the obvious problem is you aren’t selling the right stuff. This podcast uses a trio of scenario e...

We love how Netflix pivoted from delivering DVDs to streaming content, then pivoted from streaming other people’s content to making its own.  We love comparing how Netflix destroyed Blockbuster which refused to pivot from retail stores to other distribution channels.  But we forget that the Netflix’ CEO Reed Hastings was pilloried for making those pivots.  At the time every analyst wanted him fire...

FTX recently failed, wiping out $32B of value in one week.  Less than 3  years old, FTX’ 20-something CEO raised over $1.5B and charmed the media that crypto was the biggest thing since the internet. And the fad had been working. Listen in this podcast how all it took was one seller (most likely Binance) to cause a run on FTX’ reserves and expose the fantasy fad that crypto really is.  Listen to w...