Peter Sealey's Ten Trends

My topic is ten trends that are going to change our professional and personal lives. And, my general theme is on the nature of change, which -- as we all know -- is accelerating.

The issue here is this: how do we contend with disruptive technologies and other new factors coming into the marketplace? This is not really about predicting the future: the ten trends are already here. So my project is really to articulate some trends and developments and then tease them out to their logical conclusion.

Central point: Joseph Schumpeter, a brilliant, Austrian-born economist, once said, "We live in a perennial gale of creative self destruction."

What Schumpeter meant: if there is a better business model out there, a better way of doing business, a better way of marketing a product or service, then we have to destroy our present model and embrace the new one. This is, without question, the hardest thing for companies to do. They sail into oblivion doing what they always did.

Here is an airline case in point. Delta, Northwest Airways, U.S. Airways and United Airlines are all either bankrupt, coming out of bankruptcy, have discarded their pensions or have thrown the pensions over to the Feds. It's a mess.

In contrast, Southwest and JetBlue are making money -- i.e. carrying passengers at $67 per barrel of oil. Why? They have a superior business model.

Northwest Airways: labor cost per seat mile is almost five cents.

Southwest Airlines: labor cost per seat mile is two point five cents.

Game over. We all know it doesn't work. The issue is how we get these people at the top to say, "Look it was a great run. Hub and spoke. Flying ten different kinds of aircrafts. Charging enormous differential between the walk-up passenger and the leisure traveler. That was a great model until about 2000. It no longer works."

The old-style airline guys have to destroy that model. If they don't, watch American Airlines follow the others into bankruptcy.

The big issue we face here is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get a company to destroy its present business model. But, it simply has to happen, and the reason that it has to happen breaks down into my --

Ten Trends that are going to change our professional and personal lives

1. Three Mega-Trends -- bandwidth, the cost of storage and processing power
2. Three Media Sub-Trends -- media is becoming digital, personal, and controllable
3. A revolution in the motion picture, television, and recorded music industries
4. IPTV: Internet Protocol Television
5. Performance based marketing
6. The demise of ad-supported TV
7. The rise of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
8. New and accurate ratings system
9. Ad-ID and RFID
10. A Marketing Renaissance

Each of these ten trends is already here in one form or another. They are not fully developed, but they are here and they are going to change the world.