Old dog

My last dog made it to fifteen. Coincidentally, this is about the lifecycle of a successful company today. Sure, there are exceptions, but fifteen years is the average brand lifecycle now according to people like PWC.

During the life of that dog, who was called Ice, I had two children, moved house four times and changed jobs five times. When Ice was a puppy, I had no plans for any of that to happen.

New dog

I’ve got a new dog. Well, actually she’s five now, and she’s called Soda. In the last five years we haven’t moved house, I have started five businesses for other people, and am five years into running my consultancy.

When Soda was a puppy, I had an idea I wanted to start companies and knew I’d be my own boss. Soda is a reminder to me that, as she gets older, so does everything else – including my brand. By the time she’s fifteen and I’m another ten years down the road, everything I know about the world will be different.

We regularly say that the ideas you expect to be in the market in five years will have taken market share in eighteen months. Things change much faster than they used to.

New tricks

At the current rate of creation, all data (every byte of data ever created) is doubled every two years. By 2020, data creation will be doubled every year.

Without a regular look into emerging trends, you simply can’t plan for a future market.

I’m a great believer in ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’.

If you aren’t looking into the future and planning your place in markets as they develop, you may as well wrap it up and sell out now to give someone else a chance of doing better.

This is the reality of business today.

If this kind of thinking can be helpful to you, let’s talk. Here’s my diary.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.