Phobia 1
Andy Grove taught us all to be professionally paranoid -- to understand that continuously changing technology and relentless innovation will dislocate, disrupt, and dethrone the patterns, pathways, and players we know and love. Nothing in the agency business is a sure thing. We dance on the high wire, usually without a net, every day.
For most of us, the thrill, the variety, the uncertainty, and the anxiety of agency life makes it worth coming to work every day. Every day is a test. Every day we have the chance to win or lose. Agency leadership is a high stakes poker game, not for the faint of heart. So if the iffy global economy isn't keeping you up at night, consider these 10 things to be paranoid about in 2011.
The "next big thing"
It's not a matter of if but when. It wasn't so long ago that Apple was struggling under the leadership of a guy from Pepsi, Google was a pair of nerds in a dorm room, Microsoft was battling for attention and market penetration, and Zuckerberg was finessing the Winkelvoss twins. We all remember when AOL, MySpace, and Netscape were monster players, and we wonder what new thing will skyrocket out of the blue and change the game again.
Nobody expects today's dominant players to maintain their streaks indefinitely, even though many of the so-called "killers" haven't amounted to much so far. Will the next big thing come from China, Romania, Switzerland, or Israel? Or will it come from a dorm room at L'Ecole Polytechnique, Stanford, or Moscow State -- or out of a garage in Sheboygan or Seoul? Will it stitch together or mash-up familiar concepts? Or will it come at a problem of content, networking, transmission, or translation in a way we never thought of before? You can read a million blogs and trade publications and never see it coming. But the next big thing is on the way, headed directly at changing the status quo and forcing all of us to scramble to recognize, understand, react, and adjust to it.
