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Future Shock!
In a meeting few mornings ago, our Deputy Chairman Zin Dahari mentioned a book that blew his mind as a teenager. Published in 1970, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock gave an idea of what the future would look like. Written together with his wife Heidi, the Tofflers conjured ideas like “underwater cities and family-owned spaceships“. While some of their ideas are still far from reality, many of them were on point.
When asked in an interview in 2010 on why, he was a futurist, Toffler’s response, “Because it makes you think. It opens up the questions of what’s possible. Not necessarily what will be, but what’s possible.”
Here are four of Toffler’s visions for the future of business that turned out to be startlingly accurate.
1. The internet.
Toffler had written a lot about knowledge and how that was the key factor that keeps those in POWER – that knowledge would precede labour or materials and anyone that failed to stay on top of new information would fall behind.
He predicted the spread of free-flowing information via personal computers and the internet, and brought the term “information overload” into the popular lexicon, a reference to the difficulty people have understanding issues and making decisions because of the overwhelming amounts of data available.
2. The sharing economy.
The Tofflers believed we’d live in a society where there was no reason to own anything. Personally, I don’t think they were alone, but that thinking was ahead of its time. Heidi Toffler predicted some form of disposable paper clothing that could be thrown away after each use. Well, I was quite a fan of paper dolls as a child and this could well be something of the further future. Last check, pharmacists do stock throw-away underwear these days! Check when you visit one next time. Essentially, the Tofflers wrote about how people would be using things as and when they needed it, then return them when done. In Malaysia today, we have startup entries like OBike (Singapore), Mobike (Beijing), SoCar (Seoul) and ride-hailing app Grab (Malaysia/Singapore) also Airbnb for accommodation rentals. I heard from a friend that there’s even a wedding gown sharing service that’s available! Why buy when you can share and pay just a fraction of the price? What a beautiful world of sharing it’s become!
Aside: Allow me to share some news last week about Grab’s latest announcement that Toyota Corporation has just invested US$1 billion into the ride-hailing company. What an astounding feat for a 6-year old company. This news comes just three months after another news alert about Uber’s Southeast Asian operations being taken over by Grab, including Uber’s Food Delivery business which is now renamed to Grab Food (I was betting it’d be called GRUB). Trace news stories back another three months, and you’ll find reports stating that Grab was valued at about US$6 billion after its fundraising in January when it raised US$2.5 billion, the bulk of it from its largest shareholders, SoftBank Group Corp and Didi Chuxing. Now that Grab has cornered the market in Southeast Asia as a formidable giant corporation, perhaps it’s time that pie be shared, for the sake of healthy competition as this is after all a sharing economy? In Malaysia, there have been several new ride-hailing players in the market like MyCar, known as Malaysia’s third e-hailing service which offers customers cheaper fares and drivers higher profit share and another, EzyCab which runs a 24/7 call centre as well as its app. It would seem that the largest and most likely competitor to Grab would be Indonesia’s Go-Jek which had made an announcement in May about its imminent entry into Singapore and other Southeast Asian markets. This would be a very interesting space to watch!
3. Telecommuting.
A new generation of employees and workplaces are emerging. Technology makes it ever so easy to work remotely, and company policies are changing to allow its employees to have the freedom of working from home. Toffler wrote about how homes of the future would be like “electronic cottages” that enable people greater work-life balance.
Aside: It’s a fact and it’s a common request these days, when working with Xennials and Millenials, for the option to work from home or remote. I am a true believer of giving employees their freedom and trust that they would return that freedom of time, with higher productivity and enhanced creativity. The challenge lies in finding that common ground in which the employer and employee strike a perfect match because not all are able to work in an autonomous manner.
4. Businesses without formal structure.
Toffler popularized the phrase “adhocracy,” a reference to a company that operates without a formal hierarchy. An adhocracy as defined by Toffler is flexible and often horizontally structured. It allows for creativity and adaptability, since employees aren’t pigeonholed into certain roles. Many startups today are adhocracies–offering roles that change based on needs and titles that wouldn’t fit anywhere on a traditional corporate ladder.
I think about Dan Price, whom I connected with via LinkedIn. Dan runs Gravity Payments in the USA, and made headlines as the first CEO who paid all of his employees an egalitarian equal minimum wage of USD$70,000 each. Read about it here and here. This, to me is a clear example of one man’s vision to flatten the hierarchical structure.
As entrepreneurs come up with novel ways to make impact in their worlds, the purveyors of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, seem to be all abuzz about three things; the sharing economy, the gig economy and the gift economy. In 2005, I co-founded a company named Go International Group, ironically GIG and we practiced a mix of gig, gift and sharing economies as a part of our corporate GIG philosophy. I didn’t know it then, but this modus operandi has become a part of our DNA and we survive on projects, and not retainers as other agencies do. This keeps us nimble and able to evolve very quickly through time. We have survived this way of existence for the past 13 years, but there must be a better method to accepting gigs. Some seasons have been challenging whilst some seasons we were so busy we had to turn down projects. Inspired to turn our challenges into opportunities, I’ve been thinking about how the gig economy would be embraced by the general populous. We’re all heading that way, it seems. Ask around my peers and more than half of them are self-employed or freelancing. Why is this happening? Aren’t people happy in the bosom of a fully-secured retirement under the employ of
If I were to wear the hat Toffler wore and envision the working landscape in 50 years, what would my predictions be? It’s funny that The Jetsons was recreated in 2016 and the author of this piece in The Verge described it as “a bone-chilling dystopia”! If I must, this is how I envision 2068:
- The human demographic would be non-homogeneous
- Countries divisions would cease to exist and the world is borderless
- There will be a unanimous ONE WORLD rule, an extension of the UNITED NATIONS
- The concept of ownership will be a thing long of the past as humans realise they do not need to own anything in their lifetime
- There will be no currency, as there will be a smart barter debit credit exchange system put in place
- Those leading the planet will be CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS, hence the world in 50 years will be a culmination of ideas made possible.
- Value system of the future: liberte, egalite, fraternite…. oops! Is this too much Francophilia?