Pretty much everyone’s at least a little bit scared economically right now. It’s like walking through a bad neighborhood at night — everything you see or hear starts to look and sound like an ominous threat to your personal safety.
What we need at moments like this are some economic self-defense techniques. Consider, for instance, jiu-jitsu, the martial art centered on taking your opponent’s force and turning it in your favor.
The Economic Revolution we’re living through has been brought to us by the Internet and related technologies, and more specifically by the flash floods of information that have been unleashed on every sector and part of our society.
These forces are blasting apart the economic world we’ve known by creating vastly more efficient and effective ways of getting and using the goods and services we need, but they are also eliminating entire categories of companies and jobs in the process. Including, possibly, yours.
The good news is you can take these same forces and instead channel their energy to help build your personal economic security rather than standing by while they destroy it.
Using economic jiu-jitsu on the forces of change requires three things:
• Understanding your opponent and anticipating his moves.
Your “opponent” going forward is neither Chinese workers nor software that can do what you do better and faster than you can. Your opponent is instead the set of large forces of change that are blowing apart the value chains and ways of doing business that have existed in our industrial economy since the 19th century.
The forces at work are profound but not that hard to understand:
“Big Data” and the digitization and ongoing capture of all human knowledge and activity, and our ability to gain enormous efficiencies by finding predictive patterns in the data.
Digital search, allowing for the easy and immediate accessing of exactly what people need and want when and where they want and need it.
Frictionless collaboration, thanks to the ability to immediately find, connect and work with, generally speaking, any and every other human being on the planet for whatever purpose you need or want them.
The rise of powerful information platforms and tools, allowing less skilled laymen to develop ever more powerful and focused applications, thereby cranking up the speed and reach of innovation.
Anticipating your opponent’s moves means, in this context, deciding how these forces will shape your part of the economic world. Will your industry restructure and thrive, or will it be materially damaged? Will the big players in the field prosper from these forces, or will opportunities for the creation of more nimble competitors arise?
You cannot know the future with certainty. But you can — and must — make educated guesses about what’s likely to unfold in your world. You can always revise your plans based on additional information, but unless you know the forces and lay out the scenario you believe most likely to unfold, you’ll be frozen in place.
• Knowing your own capabilities and faults.
Knowing what you can and can’t do is critical in any fight — especially one for economic survival.
A search-driven world means it’s crucial for each of us to be the very best at some very narrow focus or function that clients or customers are looking for. When buyers and employers can find exactly what they want and can access it anywhere in the world, being the fifth- or seventh-best provider won’t do. So the economic future will require everyone to be very, very good at — and very, very focused on — whatever it is we propose to do for others for money.
Being the best in the world at something means you’d better be passionate about it, because indifference is anathema to excellence. You’d also better be leveraging your strengths and working with others to do what you’re not world-class at, because if you can’t give your buyers what they want, they’ll simply search for someone who can.
So seek out the intersection of what you’re incredibly good at, what you’re incredibly excited about and what people will pay you for. The more focused the better. And that seemingly tiny place will become a mighty fortress in the future marketplace.
• Directing and employing your opponent’s energy to propel you toward your objectives.
Now for the fun part: You have to grab your opponent’s strengths — those four forces above — and use them for your own ends. Don’t stand King Canute-like and inveigh against the tides. You can’t stop them — but you can surf them. Mourn what you’ve lost, but grab your surfboard. Your job is to ride the same wave of forces that were trying to crash down upon your head.
Lost your manufacturing job? Use the collaborative power of the Internet to work with someone to design something better than what you made before. Your traditional travel agency closed? Find a narrower slice of the industry pie and become the expert’s expert on something very focused — polar-bear-watching trips or a single resort destination or trips for people with pets — and use the power of search and content marketing to help you find a very targeted client base around the world.
The most profound opportunities always arise at the moments of greatest crisis, but with study, bold action and a little economic jiu-jitsu, you can get yourself where you want to go.
Dave Maney, an entrepreneur and former journalist, runs . Reach him at Davemaney @economaney.com.
Economic Revolution By Dave Maney
