Insight 2020: Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration #8 – Think BIG!

Leadership is all about setting the direction, inspiring the team to achieve, and establishing the goals of the journey. What’s the purpose of it if you are only going to try to accomplish small things? People didn’t get to the moon by being small and timid, by pursuing the same old ideas, or setting extremely small expectations!

But thinking big is not just about figuring out your future – in today’s increasingly disruptive world, it also involves developing an understanding that the company you work for, the industry you work within, and the assumptions that you hold about the future are being subjected to dramatic, gut-wrenching change. If you don’t adapt, you’re gone.

That’s the theme of todays’ post in my series, Insight 2020: Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration : Think BIG!

Check the phrase I’m referring to in the video – it’s become one of the key go-to phrases I use with my clients, as found in this particular image which I posted way back in February 2017:

Since I wrote the post around that photo, the photo has also become a significant slide in all of my presentations – and it resonates. It’s one where I can see people all throughout the audience taking out their smartphones in order to capture the thought.

Here’s a keynote clip – appropriately themed Dare to Disrupt – in which I’m talking to the concept on the stage.

Take the idea apart – and the phrase found in the photo above – and you’ll get a sense of why you need to “think BIG” with everything you do:

• “companies that don’t yet exist” : you’ll find yourself in competition with companies in the future that aren’t even yet around, because they will have realized there are entirely different business models that can change your industry
• “will build products that are not yet conceived” : what you sell today isn’t what you will sell tomorrow, particularly when we add intelligence and connectivity to everything product. Read my post, “It’s not a widget anymore!”
• “based on ideas that have yet been generated” : did you check point #7 in this series from yesterday? “Accelerate your ideas!” Your competition is thinking fast. Are you?
• “using materials not yet invented” : we live in the era of fast material science – learn why in my post from my 19 Trends for 2019 series – The Acceleration of Science and New Materials. This has profound implications for your future.
• “with manufacturing methods that have not yet been conceived” : Every single industry is seeing a massive change to process, methodology, how we get things done. If you don’t, your cost structure can’t compete.
• “Are you ready for the new world of disruption?”

What do these trends lead to? A future that is unlike anything you have known.

In my post 20 Trends into 2030: Are You Ready for the Massive Transformation of Just About Everything?, I give you a pretty succinct playlist of what you are faced with:

First, here’s a playlist of short videos – 2 minutes long each – that link into the theme of this post. Zager and Evans is a bonus track (OK Boomer!)

Then, think about how each and every industry around you is going to change. All of these predictions are based on real, actionable trends which are happening right now. That’s the reality of what you need to prepare for.

Here’s the thing: you might be ruled by compliancy to the scope of this potential change. Don’t be.

“Once you start to think you are invincible – you probably aren’t!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Think BIG, because nothing great was ever achieved by thinking small!

So what do you do? Here’s two playlists to help you THINK BIG!