Full Description

Today’s business world is confusing and uncertain. Things move so fast, it seems that every day there is a new technology, a new marketing strategy and a new way to attract customers. How do you make sense of it all? Is the hot new trend you’re hearing about the wave of the future or just another passing fad?

Louis Patler has the answers. As a leading trend-analysis and market-research guru for companies such as American Express, General Dynamics, Lloyds Bank and Dell Computers, Patler has spent the last twenty years studying emerging business trends and tracking their impact in the marketplace. Through this intense research and remarkable insights into the most successful and innovative companies, Patler has discovered the key to doing business in the 21st century--the trends and strategies that are here to stay.

--Don't expect loyalty. Today’s employees will not stay at a job for more than three years. Plan for this and take advantage of it.
--Forget what you do "best." Your company’s most valued traditions or processes are often the ones holding it back.
--The customer is not always right. Offer savings and specials to your most valuable and loyal customers and let the rest shop somewhere else.
--The future is here. Things will never "go back to normal"; this is normal!
--and countless more…

TrendSmart not only reveals the most important business developments, but shows you how to use them to make your business strong and leap ahead of the competition. TrendSmart managers lead with strength and vision, create a group of happy and loyal customers and give employees the tools they need to help the company grow. TrendSmart is the tool every leader, manager and business owner needs to succeed today and in the future.

"Louis Patler is to change as Mark McGwire is to baseball--a man with the power to shatter myths, raise standards and inspire greatness."--Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing

"Reading Louis Patler awakens your mind and renews your energy for this marathon race we call business."--Jim Kouzes, Chairman, Tom Peters Group Learning Systems

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

A Parable: The CEO and the Winter Weather -

Part One: The TrendSmart Leader

Overview: Trends Are Not Trendy
Chapter 1: Lasting Trends: Where the Future Bypasses the Present
- Is That a Real Trend... or Are You Just Making it Up?
- TrendSmart Leaders
- Knowing the Trends
- In the Trenches, Out of the Box

Chapter 2: Visionary Myopia: Where Vision and Results Meet
- Not Seeing the Forest for the...Mushroom?
- Fields of Dreams
- Flunking the Visionary
- Visionary Laws

Chapter 3: Generalized Priorities: Where the "Big Picture" Guides Little Decisions.
- Linking Strategy and Profitability
- The “Strategic Givens”
- Good Strategy
- Dismount or Ride On?
- Strategy Comes Out of the (California) Closet

Chapter 4: Delayed Urgencies: Where the "Urgent" is Chronically Delayed and the "Important" Is Consistently Sought
- Putting Out Fires...Literally
- The Bellagio Blitz
- Timely Tips
- Tapping Into Napping
- Overwhelming Cluelessness
- If I Had a Hammer...

Chapter 5: Acrobatic Structures: Where Agility and Stability Meet
- Managing the Boss
- When the Former Cannibalizes the Latter
- Managing the Multiple Generations
- Cows and Cowpokes
- Be Acrobatic When Hiring Human Capital
- Find a Corporate Yenta to Solve Your Staffing Needs
- A Bright IDEO
- Temptations of the CEO
- Who Hurled the Rock at the Glass Ceiling?
- Nothing in Nature Retires

Chapter 6: Grounded Risks: Where Bold Action Aligns with Bold Values
- What Risk Takers Know
- Two Views from the Top
- Plan for Success... Backward!
- Learning from History’s BIG Risks
- Strategy and Risk Taking Guided by Intuition
- Mirror, Mirror: Who’s the Smartest of Them All?
- You Are What You Value
- Aligning Personal and Workplace Values
- Law’s Laws
- Who You Lead, What You Manage

Chapter 7: Standard Deviations: Where the Creative Exception Becomes the Norm
- The Ruts of Logic
- Disruptive Innovations
- Five Little Lightbulbs
- Traveler’s Aids
- The Place of Most Potential

Chapter 8: Proactive Luck: Where Finding Good Luck Is Not an Entitlement Program
- “GOOD LUCKY”
- Good Lucky on the High Seas
- Leverage Your Reputation
- The “Lame Service Awards”
- Rob Peter and Paul
- The idealab! Fakeout
- Two Heads are Better Than One
- Drucker’s Seven Sources of Opportunity

Part Two: The TrendSmart Consumer
Overview: Know Thy Customer
Chapter 9: Mass Customization: Where One Size No Longer fits All…One Size Fits One
- How the “Surf Doctor” Treats His Patients
- Personalizing for All
- Get Involved in Your Customers’ Lives
- Ask Your Clients What They Want
- Customer Service the French Way
- Mass Food for Thought
- Is Online Off Base for Customers?
- A Customer’s “Mess” May Be Your Opportunity
- A Bonus: Customizing Customers and Employees

Chapter 10: Local Universals: Where You Act Locally and Think Globally—and Vice Versa!
- Search Globally, Buy Locally
- Developing Products for Consumers’ Local Tastes
- Gaining a Competitive “Advanex”
- KPC Crafts a Powerful Intention
- Work Globally, Live Locally
- Techy-Feely
- Polishing Stones
- A World of Change Close to Home

Chapter 11: Instant Branding: Where "The Big Idea" Meets the Big Brand
- Big Ideas
- Built to Last...and Last...and Last
- Bottom Line Branding
- The Power of Trend Analysis

Chapter 12: Selective Service: Where the Best Customers Get the Best Service
- Chief Customer Officer
- Turkeys, Thieves, and Diamonds: Reward Your Best Customer
- No Duping
- Efficiency is Not Service
- Give Your Customers What They Want
- Putting the Right Price on Service
- Keep Up With Your Customers’ Preferences
- Know What Motivates Your Customer
- Going Out of Your Way to Help Customers
- Do Your Own Thing... On A Small Scale

Chapter 13: Episodic Loyalty: Where Customers and Employees Have Multiple, Fleeting Loyalties
- Customer Loyalty at Risk... and Recovered
- Employee Loyalty
- Serial Monogamy
- Early Warning Signs

Part Three: The TrendSmart Employee
Overview: Pieces of a Puzzle
Chapter 14: Paid Volunteers: Where Workers Work Because They Want To
- What Makes GenX Tick?
- Talent Scouting
- Location, Location, Location
- Interview Applicants Not on Their Past But On Their Future
- Talent Keeping
- Reading Between the Lines... of Evaluations
- The High Cost of Going Freelance
- Global Retirement Issues

Chapter 15: Fringe Deficits: Where People Weigh the Benefits and Liabilities of Work, Products, and Services
- Ferreting Out Fringe Deficits
- From Deficit to Benefit
- Benefits are in the Eye of the Beholder
- New-Age Currency
- Garnering the Benefits of Teams
- Workplace Fun
- Satire and Sarcasm: Workplace Barometers
- Why People Stay

Chapter 16: Perpetual Innovation: Where Innovation Is Everybody’s Everyday Job
- You Aint’ Nuttin’ But a Hound Dog
- Staving Off Myopia
- Continuous Hiring
- Managing a Younger Workforce

Chapter 17: Positive Negatives: Where Building on Strengths Is Not a Weakness
- Disabling Your Disability
- Be Yourself
- Encourage and Motivate
 - How to Manage Like Joe
- Aligning Employees’ Skills With Job Descriptions
- Training: The Strategic Imperative
- Cisco Finds the “Win-Win-Win” Solution

Chapter 18: Temporary Careers: Where the Career Ladder Has Very Few Rungs
- Age Stereotyping
- Twenty-First Century Guilds
- Permanent Temps
- Rent-a-Boss
- Suggestions Anyone?
- Career-Hopping

Chapter 19: Complementary Competence: Where Opposite Competencies Attract
- The Peter Principle Meets the Palter Principle
- A Conversation: The Dichotomies of Leadership

Chapter 20: Business Casual: Where the Conventional and the Unconventional Meet
- The Lines Have Blurred
- Incrementally Challenged
- Baseball Caps and Capital
- Adults Wanted, Experience Preferred
- You Are What (and Whom) You Value
- The Tortoise Wins
- From Start to Finnish
- Forces at Work
- The End of Economic Adolescence
- The Pendulum Principle
- The Drucker Principle

Chapter 21: Working Contradictions: Where Contrarian Trends Join Hands
- The L/R Game
- Lessons Learned
- Trends Mingle
- Leaders, Customers, Employees
- Trends Linked to Strategy, Strategy to Sustainable Success

Notes

Excerpt

Follow the Business Trend

Excerpted from TrendSmart by Louis Patler © 2003

“I wanted to know how much information you could give with how few words just like the lines in a Matisse drawing.”
—Diane di Prima

“The biggest lesson in [business] is that it is going to be a roller coaster.”
—Marc Andreessen, chairman of Loudcloud/cofounder of Netscape

The “normal” ebb and flow of a zip-zap, turbocharged world of business has changed dramatically. Added to this, the quest for security and predictability have to compete with a growing sense of uncertainty. The truth is, neither exponential change nor increasing uncertainty are likely to diminish in the foreseeable future. Today’s workplace is decidedly different, and the new “normalcy” is that exponential change and large mixtures of uncertainty are here to stay.

We now live in a world taken over by ironies, working contradictions, and oxymorons, a world where the line between conventional and unconventional wisdom is drawn with a disposable pen filled with invisible ink. The rules that once seemed so useful, even profound, now wax and wane like a hyperactive harvest moon.

Open the business section of any newspaper or magazine and you see it before your eyes:

• New companies quickly move full circle from not-com to dot-com to hot-com to not-com.
• A five-year-old software company sells for more money than Ford paid to acquire Volvo.
• Top leadership at American Express announces the creation of a new senior-level position: “Vice President of Customer Listening.”

How do we become and remain successful in the face of such a dynamic marketplace? How do we know what it takes to thrive in such a chaotic environment? Where do we turn for good information early on?

New times call for new thinking, and new thinking requires new perspectives. This book has been written to offer the reader insights, strategies, and useful tactics to be successful in an uncertain and changing marketplace.

Is That a Real Trend…Or Did You Just Make It Up?
This said, exponential change and economic uncertainty are now old news. The new news is that there are, in the pages that follow, twenty-one significant and lasting trends that are affecting and shaping the nature of business today and for years and years to come. The trends cited, fully understood, provide a strong foundation for competing in a volatile world.

Still, in the face of such challenges, the need for good information—or more specifically, the value of predictive information—has never been greater. At my company, Near Bridge, Inc., our focus is on finding useful information that makes the journey from point A to point B easier than you might think. We pride ourselves on knowing a trend from a fad, as well as how to put trend information to strategic, and profitable, use.

With more than twenty years in the trend-spotting business, using proprietary methodologies and curious minds to help with the research, I have learned many lessons that are shared in this book. In the pages that follow, you will hear about more than two hundred companies and two hundred individuals who were tracked, interviewed, and/or monitored as part of a four-year research project for this book.

Using both secondary (Web searches, data analysis, reviews of the literature in the field, etc.) and primary research (focus groups of nearly nine hundred respondents, eighty-two in-depth interviews with executives, and a proprietary database), I developed a list of nearly forty key trends and selected the twenty-one that were most suited for this book.
Most of the other trends not found in these pages were more global and would best be the basis of another book at another time. Among these trends were mass urbanization (soon more than 50 percent of the world’s population will live in fifty mega-urban areas of the world); rising global micro-political activism; the Euro Decade (rising prominence
of the European Union); rising nesting; WordLab (the rise of global experimentation from cloning to clowning); and Mind connect (Web space connectivity based on Minds, not just documents). For an excellent insight into some of these more global trends, see architect Rem Koolhaus’s editing of Wired magazine, June 2003.

One of my favorite poets, Robert Creeley, wrote an essay that shaped my outlook on trend research. The title of the essay was the inspiration for this chapter. In looking at poems he had written, someone once asked him: “Was that a real poem, or did you just
make it up?” His answer made clear what a “real” poem is.

One could say the same thing about trends: Is that a real trend…or did you just make it up? My objective is to make clear what trends really are, which trends are going to last over the long haul, and to explain to you how to use them individually and in combination to become successful. Those who do so are those I call TrendSmart.

TrendSmart Leaders
I trust that by the time you finish reading, you will have a better understanding of the nature of trends—particularly how contrarian and counterintuitive trends can be and how subtly they interact with one another.

Certainly, the ability to understand trends is a useful tool in any leader’s toolbox. But the ability to know how to use emerging trend data makes you a TrendSmart leader. Many trends have emerged in recent years that will, when properly understood, become the foundation for future success. The trends identified in this book do not exist in isolation. Rather, the real power of trend spotting accrues to those who see the emerging opportunities that come when trends intersect.

Truth be known, the twenty-one trends in this book are like small dots that are forming into pictures and changing how we work, where we work, and even the way we feel about the nature of work itself. These pictures, when viewed from strategic distances, create a wholly new perspective on commerce and the workplace.

TrendSmart leaders of successful companies not only understand trends per se, but in my experience they share other attributes as well. As professionals, at the core of their personalities are several common values and traits. TrendSmart leaders are:

• Self-initiating. Their entrepreneurial tendencies are such that they adhere to the old adage that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. They are action-oriented
initiators whose energy and resilience— like water—makes them basic to the life and sustenance of any organization.

• Project oriented. Gone are the days of careers, of linear paths up some archaic balsa-wood ladder. Gone are single-minded, one-skilled workers performing repetitive functions over years and years. We are fully committed now to a production methodology where workers are expected—even encouraged and rewarded—for the depth and breadth of what they know and do. And though projects may come and go, skills remain viable, interchangeable, even portable. Therefore, harnessing seemingly disparate “multitasking”
skill-sets has become a new asset-management challenge…and opportunity. Managers understand that reining in the new skill-set is not easy, but like a kid saving up for that bike, it is well worth the time and energy.

• Results and process focused. As portable skills become assets, and project-based productivity the modus operandi, the logical outcome is a focused work environment.

• Team players. They know that they do not have to go it alone, that they are in the company of others—personally and/or “virtually”—whose complementary skills are needed and valued. TrendSmart leaders know that they need others to be productive and to achieve sustainable levels of success sufficient to stave off the pressures of complacency.

TrendSmart Tip: TrendSmart leaders are self-initiating, project oriented, results and process focused team players.

Knowing the Trends
In the world of business, the doctrine of growth has to face head-on the realities of uncertainty. This is a book for managers and leaders, young and old. It focuses on emerging trends that are shaping the nature of work and the products and services we offer.


I am also convinced that the real power accrues from the leveraging and combining of the emerging trends. Business today is not conducted in tidy, disparate pieces. Leaders today understand that interdependence, relationships, and ad hoc configurations of people and processes will win the day—and add to the bottom line. Therefore, the emerging, ironic trends you will read about are best understood as fully modular, and they gain added value when they are viewed in light of all the other trends.

Seeking good information, listening, creating good strategy, building a relationship with customers, and finding and keeping good employees all are part of the picture—and will comprise large portions of this book—but, ultimately, the measure of a successful process in today’s work environment boils down to four little words: show me the results.

In my twenty years of consulting and trend analysis, it has become quite clear to me that good results come from good information gathered early on in the development of a “big idea” that guides the creation of products and services, as well as the creation of a “brand roadmap.”

TrendSmart Tip: Gather good trend information in order to create good strategy.

In times of prosperity and plenty, good information is important. In times of uncertainty, good information will, literally, make or break your future. I believe that this book offers good information—“good” because it is accurate, practical, and implementable. In uncertain times, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

TrendSmart Leaders, Consumers, Employees, and Tips
This book is organized into three parts that offer fresh insight into the TrendSmart leader, the TrendSmart consumer, and the TrendSmart employee. Even so, each chapter is written so that it is self-contained and modular such that the interaction and combination of trends may be discovered. TrendSmart leaders will appreciate the irony of each trend, subsumed in the title of each chapter. They will also understand the power of such contrarian and predictive information.

Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Customer Reviews: