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FEATURESTORY

What's Next?

by Paul Nolan

It takes only a few minutes into a conversation with Watts Wacker to realize that you don’t so much interview this noted futurist as give him cause to package up and present a portion of his knowledge.

...The single most important thing is if you don’t believe in it, don’t even try to sell it...

To be sure, Wacker is knowledgeable. Before a recent telephone interview, we provided him with a profile of the SalesForceXP reader and asked him to focus on three business topics that are included on the laundry list of subjects he’s prepared to speak on (starting at $20,000 an appearance): leadership, strategy and people management.

While rattling off concepts and theories, Wacker referenced everything from Greek mythology and Shakespeare to rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and even quoted Miles Davis. You hang up from that sort of discussion confident that you have a boatload of useful insights if you can just figure out what the hell the guy said.

Fast Company magazine once called Wacker “one of the most offbeat – and influential – minds in corporate America.” He served stints at the global consulting firms Yankelovich Partners and SRI International before founding his own consultancy, FirstMatter (www.firstmatter.com).

Just as Wacker himself is in perpetual motion, traveling three-fourths of the year for speaking engagements and other projects, so too are his thoughts. He pauses reluctantly to allow you to catch up and doesn’t so much ease into a different topic as sling it at you full force.

We hope that his perceptions below on preparing for success by peering into the future will give you cause to create a think tank of your own that can lay the groundwork for better business practices in 2008 and far, far beyond.

Change is happening faster than people say, but it’s been so overused for the last nine years – since 1999 – that I don’t talk about it like I used to and maybe I should more. Change has reached the point of being autocatalytic – it’s feeding itself.

The great metaphor is the weather on Mt. Everest. You can’t predict the weather on Mt. Everest because it changes in real time every second. It makes its own weather. Change is making its own way and you have no choice but to embrace it. If you don’t want to embrace it, you might as well pack it in.

There is this new thing called naïve source knowledge that describes a social environment of an abolition of context. There are no social norms and no known believed expert. Forty years ago, if you would have asked, “Who is the No. 1 rocket scientist in the world,” everyone would have said Wernher von Braun. We don’t have experts like we used to.

I believe in intelligent disobedience, which is how we teach seeing-eye dogs. If a blind person wants to cross the street but the dog sees a bus coming, the dog doesn’t move. Basically, it means do what I tell you unless you have a better idea.

To be an effective manager of people, you have to give them more latitude to make decisions. You have to come to a better resolution yourself as a leader on a loose/tight model of what has to be run tight and what can be run loosely.

There are five levels of salesmanship:

• Unconscious incompetent – You don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t even know that yet

• Conscious incompetent – You don’t know what you’re doing, but at least you’ve figured that out

• Unconscious competent – You know what you’re doing, but you don’t know how to repeat your success

• Conscious competent – You know what you’re doing and you can repeat that success

• Unconscious conscious competent – You know what you’re doing, you can repeat it and you don’t even have to think about it

The ambition is to move your salespeople to the top of that ladder. Some don’t ever make it. You have to manage expectations based on where each individual is on that ladder.

When you look at relationship theory, the three issues are growth, sustained involvement and reciprocity. The latter is the process we go through of revealing ourselves to others, in this case, a company revealing more about itself. As a (business) relationship deepens, it has to reveal more of what is critical and important to the other side.

Because of the transparency of things, you’re better served to give more away than you ever dreamt you should – about who you are and what you’re doing. Most salespeople are good at recognizing that they have a dynamic audience – they’re not the same person twice – and at sustained involvement, but they’re sometimes very reticent about reciprocity. Coach them to be more comfortable to revealing things.

The first thing a company needs to do to inculcate a culture of innovation is look outside its own industry. We encourage businesspeople to read trade publications outside the boundaries of their own industries and to read a lot of them. See what’s going on in other industries and discuss with your people how you can apply it in your own company.

“Futuring” is about looking at the things that can shape the future. “Visioning” is about creating the future you want to pursue. They are not the same thing and you should be doing both.

Good futuring is like good science fiction writing. When you read great science fiction, you say, “Hey, that could happen.” And if you thought it could happen, what would you do differently than what you’re doing today? That’s what the exercise of futuring is all about.?

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Photos by Kit Noble

See also in: What's Next?

Success Is More Than Showing Up – But That’s An Important First Step

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