In his paper, ‘Identifying the future, The Daily Drucker’ (2004), Peter F. Drucker considers that the most important work for the management is to identify the changes that already happened. The true challenge in the society, economy and politics is to exploit the changes that already happened and to turn them into opportunities. It is important to identify the ‘future that already happened’ and to develop a methodology to identify and analyse these changes.
He believes the top management can harness the emergent trends and can use them to build a new future for their organisations and businesses thus achieving and competitive advantage.”[1] This is considered to be a proactive attitude not a reactive one. [2] (Joseph A. Maciariello, 2016)
Dave Rubin is a well-known youtube vlogger and famous in USA for his liberal discourse show ‘The Rubin Report’ where he often invites guests to discuss freedom of speech, economic ideas and political and social ideology.
One of these shows was with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, former attorney Ben Shapiro and liberal economist Eric Weinstein in a discussion about the paradigm change in the economic ideology ‘that already happened in our society’.
“There was a phase change in the economy around 1970 that I can not get people to focus on. Looking at the GDP and the Medium Income, they both going up together until like 1970 and one of them flat lines and the other one keeps going. And the idea that this is not a structural change in the economy that isn’t in every school textbook and that we don’t understand that we build up two plus generations of experts lying about what happened (is wrong),” said economist Eric Weinstein.
“There was this economist active in late 50’, Derek John de Solla Price, that started talking about there is going to be a singularity in science. He predicted that numbers of Phd, the number of journals and everything was going up exponentially and he said nothing that goes on exponentially can continue. So the part of the problem is the concept of jobs that is tied to a period of time that will probably not going to go on for too long as means of feeding us. This is a hidden Ponzi scheme.”
What Eric Weinstein is afraid of, is that the economic ideology of capitalism is not good enough anymore as jobs are obsolete in a world of AI and robotic process automation because jobs are still founded on expertise based on repetitive work knowledge. He sees the future of capitalism in technology, the single way to eliminate the market bias. For example when countries are confronted with recession, national banks that regulate the monetary policy sometimes are influenced by the political power or sometimes by corporate interests. In this particular example, the AI could resolve automatically the problem of economic recession eliminating the special interests. (3)
The ‘future that already happened’
His views are based on the emerging technological trends of our age. This changes are here to stay and Drucker said it better: it is the ‘future that already happened’.
First digital business trends are related to the growing investments in fintech and the emerging blockchain based monetary system. All continents are announcing investments and the great investment appetite is founded on the increasing market growth. Companies like Bitcoin are here to stay despite the opposition and are already structurally changing the financial sector.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting huge and loads of attention based of investment news stories. There is a great market already and massive potential for growth and there is also a high probability of convergence with other technologies/markets like and also blockchain, home appliances (smart home) and car devices market (smart cars).
So how can top management harness the emergent tech trends and can use them to build a new future for their organisations and businesses thus achieving and competitive advantage despite the cumulative advantage of incumbents? As most of the time, the best ways to achieve competitive advantage is by developing proprietary technology or early adoption of the technology in your market. For the latest, it requires market benchmarking.
[1] Bujorean Daniel A. Why Romanian SMEs don’t scale-up? Insights on the Growth and Development of the Romanian SMEs, MBA Thesis for UNESCO Chair in Inter-cultural and Inter-religious Exchanges, Bucharest, Romania, 2019
[2] Joseph A. Maciariello (2016) Peter Drucker Training Course for Managers, Litera, pages196-197
[3] Daniel A. Bujorean, excerpts from The Gambleneur, 2020.
