I am sitting in a plane on the way home from London, and it’s midnight. The air conditioning is not working but at least the engines are. The baby in the row next to me is also feeling the heat and is crying quite a lot so I put on my Dr Dre’s and turn up Randy Crawford and decide to pass the time writing this post on my Ipad.
I have just attended the WSI Excellence & Innovation conference in Birmingham. Of the two days we were lucky to hear Scott Klososky present to us 3 times.
The Future of Social Tech
The first presentation was on the future of social technology and he made some real interesting predictions. He opened by saying that if we don’t start accurately predicting where technology is going in the future our revenue streams in 3 years will start to dwindle.
So it is important to understand how to take advantage of social technologies and start testing it now. Otherwise we will always be behind our competitors and they will be teaching us instead of us leading the way.
It’s best to be teaching your competitors as it enables you to grab market share, rather than being behind and learning from them.
High Beam Leadership
Later that afternoon a select few of the top performing franchisees were invited to attend Scott’s High Beam Leadership presentation. It was real interesting and he highlighted that managers were low beam which meant they focused on the next 12 months and the execution of tasks, where high beam leaders looked in the future at least 5 years ahead. He explained the process he goes through when conducting one of his High-Beam leadership workshops.
Step 1 is to identify trends. We were given 10 minutes each to come up with trends that could affect our businesses. Creating the list made you think carefully about what actions one should take to ensure the continuous viability of your business.
Step 2 we had to review each trend and decide whether to leverage it or defend it.
Step 3 we had to paint a picture of the future
Step 4 was to create an investment portfolio. We had to identify what is needed to be done and to allocate resources like people and money to achieve our objectives.
Step 5 is to communicate our plan to the rest of the company
Then a review would be held every 12 months to see which trends needed to be removed and which had to stay and add new one as as well.
The Last presentation was on mobile marketing.
Scott discussed the new “M” Generation, kids that are between 5 and 8 years old today. They are brought up with technology from as young as 2 years old. I smiled when he mentioned this as our grand daughter started using my IPhone & IPad from the age of 9 months. In fact she said “IPad” before she said “daddy” 
The “M” generation are good at 3 things.
Mobile, Multitasking & Master Learners.
Scott is definitely a futurist and seems to be accurate with his predictions,
Having access to smart people like Scott is one of the major benefits of being part of WSI.
I bought a copy of Scott’s latest book Social Technologies and had it autographed. Scott included a special message for me which is really motivating.