What happened while we weren’t looking was the industrial age ended… 100 years of rising productivity based around bosses who owned factories telling employees to act like human cogs… that system made us all rich… all built around making average stuff for average people… there’s a new revolution here… if what you want to do for a living is do what you’re told, you must understand that the boss can find someone cheaper than you. So, now there’s a race to the bottom… compliant folks are going to get hurt because I can always find someone cheaper. Then there’s a race to the top…
- Posted on
- By rhaggart
- In The Future
9 Comments
Thanks for sharing, Rob. I would also highly recommend Godin’s book, ‘Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable’. While the book cites many fortune 100 companies, I found it very helpful in re-assessing my photography business’s marketing plan. I strive to define and brand our company in a way that transforms us into a ‘Purple Cow’ amongst the overwhelming sea of black & white cows out there. Cheers!
Ask yourself: What are you providing your client that not everyone can give them?
In our business, you have to provide something that is unique. And with the proliferation of the cheap affordable DSLR, what can you do that any person who puts the thing on “P” can’t do?
Photographers that are successful now have to not only be great at marketing and customer service, they have to be great at providing a whole variety of solutions that clients want. Photo Studios are becoming virtual multi media, multi platform solution providers.
Say, “Yes,” but be prepared to get in that helicopter and take the doors off.
SO TRUE…Ive been saying this for years
Seth is the man!! I like the way he looks at the system. I have learned a lot from his books and blog. Thanks Rob for sharing.
A wonderful and insightful video. Seth is a thought leader and a great guide for those who want to succeed.
Wait who pulled the trigger on the starting gun for this new era?
Seriously, I think a lot of people get stuck in the paradigm they have operated by for so long, thus their demise. There are some who are struggling because they are trying to blend the past with the future and it is not working.
How a photographer does business to stay in the game is a new outlook on the future. These days if you can’t be quick, you lose.
@Ed, I agree 100% Ed. Can quick even begin to describe it? Is it possible the change has happened too fast and people are too scared to lose that past? As Doug Menuez pointed out in his post last week on the SM blog The model is broken and a new one as yet to be found. I like how Seth basically connects those who think for themselves to success. I see that as a model waiting to be built. The future ain’t so bad I say.
It just sounds like a different photoshop mask on the old paradigm that rewards mavericks and those who create new paradigms. i’m not sure it has changed in 10 thousand years. those who shaped sharp knives out of flint-stone then tied them to the tip of a long piece of wood were the ones who finally left the safety of the caves and went out into the open savanah and killed the bulls and the mamoths and build the first fire.
the future always belongs to those who take risks with new ideas, those who think out of the box, those who open a sliver in the fabric of the status quo and trace new roads toward horizons others have not thought of.
above all, substance trumps aesthetics, and gimmicks, and formulas.
so this lynchpin theory is just repackaged old knowledge to me. in times of crisis there are a thousand very smart people just repackaging the basics of the human condition.
“things” are still being build in collosal factories. what screwed us up was the barons in wall/street, one, and what has caused tectonic shifts in the way we interact is substantially redesigning our experience of being both physical (as in our system of production, capitalism) and intellectually, as in our operational paradigms, is the goddammed stunning internet.
we need to place checks and balances on wall-street on a scale no one has imagined yet, and continue to step into the hologram of the web because we have no idea or we have not imagined yet where it is taking us.
Please, enough with the Wall St. jibberjabber – it’s tired. The bottom line is as important, if not more so, than the ability to innovate. Even if your business is the next Apple or (insert favorite company name here), your innovativeness will probably be marked by how well you can sell to the generation coming up – a generation that will be used to getting content (even good content) for next to nothing.
Jeremy Rifkin’s ‘The End of Work’ – maybe we should be talking (and thinking) about long term, structural unemployment and the ripple effect it’s going to have across every industry out there.
Here’s a business model for photographers looking to the future: elder care portrait studios.
Comments are closed for this article!