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Call most people a fool, and they'd be upset. Call Watts Wacker a fool, and he'll heartily agree. Might even hug you. In fact, the first to label Mr. Wacker a fool was none other than… Watts Wacker.
Strange? Not really. For two reasons. First, Watts is no ordinary fool. Second, he's a Fool with a capital "F" -- in the archetypal sense.
As futurist and founder of FirstMatter LLC, Watts lectures and, he says, plays the Fool relative to the social, technological, economic and political trends that he believes will define the future. His clients include…you name 'em. The blue-chips. But Watts is probably best-known as the best-selling co-author of 1997's The 500-Year Delta and, 2000's, The Visionary's Handbook (both Harper Business).
Before founding FirstMatter, Watts was the resident futurist for SRI International's Melo Park think tank. Prior to SRI, Watts spent ten years as resident futurist at Yankelovich partners .
He was the original pollster to the Fox News Division and directed the Time Magazine poll. He was a vice president of marketing for the Kenner division of Hasbro, Inc., held a research fellowship at the Institute for Constructive Capitalism and owned and operated two radio stations in Corpus Christi, Texas.
So, what, then, is this squib about the Fool? The Fool, says Watts, shows up in every pantheon of gods that’s ever existed – East and West – usually referred to as the "trickster" in the East. Shakespeare, of course, gave us Puck, Hibbity-Gib and Falstaff. Watts allows that his personal favorite fool of that genre was actually Womby in Ivanhoe.
But, according to Watts, before Shakespeare gave us the modern Fool, the Fool was the deaf and dumb or the village idiot. And the Fool would be placed, by the Church, in the wealthiest people's homes so those wealthy people could never forget how lucky they were.
What I didn’t have as a child was the ability to make meaning out of life. So my life became a search for meaning.
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"The Fool’s job also was to ensure that the King was not making decisions in denial," says Watts. "And because he's the Fool, and can be dismissed as the Fool, he is the only one who can get away with telling the truth without being killed."
Watts traces his intellectual interest in the futuring business to his father's career in the advertising, which introduced Watts, at the impressionable age of eleven, to a fellow named Joe Plummer. As Watts explains, Joe was the head of research at Leo Burnett and he effectively invented lifestyle advertising with his pioneering work for Schlitz beer.
What matters is, Joe showed Watts where psychology, sociology, and economics collided. At that moment, Watts Wacker saw his future in futuring.
Good futuring is really not about predicting. The media hold you accountable to your predictions -- and thank God there have been certain things I've predicted that have happened! I predicted that Halloween would become the second biggest holiday in the country and it has, for example. But good futuring is about helping companies create a vision for their futures that they would like to have happen.It's become obvious to me that the act of futuring is a very paradoxical one, because when you put forth your vision of the future and you start marching toward it, you automatically make it your present.
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So, futuring has to be a serial experience. As soon as you finish your process of visioning, it already starts operationalizing itself as your present -- so it's not your future anymore. And so you have to approach futuring as an episodic experience.
Another interesting thing is that the more time you spend visioning, the more you destabilize your present. And the more time you spend in your present, the more difficulty you have in creating a vision. And then the people responsible for running the existing business become threatened because everything the futurist is doing involves obsoleting what they do.
Kodak is a perfect example. Kodak undoubtedly knows that their future is not in silver halide film. I mean come on! (laughs) But to announce that future -- to the universe or to your corporation -- is to invite all the people who work on your present business to leave or become discouraged.
So, Kodak has to go through the process of envisioning what imaging is becoming at the same time they stay involved in the current imaging technologies. The one destabilizes the other. So you actually have to have a group that can quickly figure out how to change what you're doing, while you’re still motivating those other people to continue to do what you're doing.
A futurist, if you read what the dictionary says, studies the dynamics of change, or the way change changes. Futurism is the delta of change itself. Alvin Toffler in his seminal work, Future Shock, put forth the whole concept that the future was about the acceleration of change.
Today it isn’t just about the pace of change. It’s perhaps about, what I call, auto-catalytic change -- or change that’s become its own engine and its own fuel. And it’s more about the amount of change, not just the rate of it. It’s really a combination of both.
The dictionary would also tell you that a futurist studies the human condition -- what the Germans call the zeitgeist, which is the trend part of this. And part of futuring, a subset to me, is the trend watching or the ability to chronicle contemporary culture.
A futurist also has to give you a sense of vision. Marshall McLuhan put forth, “the medium is the message.” John Naisbitt put forth the idea of the fusion of technology and emotion – or “high-tech, high-touch.” I already referenced Toffler’s notion of vision. That is part of what the job is all about. You have to put forth a vision that doesn’t have to be "right," but that has to suggest what you would do if you found yourself in that particular scenario. It’s like good science fiction writing. You read it and you think, "God, that could happen!"
And, finally, a futurist has to provoke you to think. The job is to provoke you to think and, hopefully, to think a little differently.
Three of the principal tools you can use to study the zeitgeist are music, the information highway, and movies. These aren't necessarily the creators of trends, but they're the three disseminating vehicles. So by watching them, you have your significant magnifying glass for looking at society and culture.
Starting with the information highway, we're at an interesting point because this is the first year in the short history of the Internet that we'll have more people whose native tongue is a language other than English. It's a phenomenon that took root with the English language. Now there is enough critical mass around the world that the market share of English-speaking people is less than 50 percent. So you can open up your perspectives to see how people unlike you think and feel. I take that as a major possibility for growth of the human condition.
One of the things that’s so interesting about music today, is that it is more of a global phenomenon. We are discovering everything from instruments to rhythm usages, to harmonies that come from all over the globe. In the past we never really found them, but now they show a significant influence. Whether it's Eric Clapton getting into an African beat or someone you never heard of who suddenly bursts on the scene -- it works in both ways.
Movies, finally, pose many different things to reflect upon. One, of course, is their extremism -- be it sex or violence. Number two is that movies don’t necessarily reflect a place to go to for fun, which is one of the truly global motives. People all over the world seek to have fun. Movies used to be driven toward that quest for fun. I enjoyed Pulp Fiction, and I enjoyed The Seven Deadly Sins, but you couldn't call them fun – engaging, for sure. But not fun.
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When you’re trying to deal with "the truth," oftentimes it's really about people’s perspectives. What's fun about "the truth" -- and the reason I’m a such a believer in the application of mythology to business -- is that mythology is about a truth that is not necessarily the truth.
For example, I did a lot of work with Krispy Kreme. One of the things that was so interesting in that expedition into their truths, was that everybody will tell you that their little Krispy Kreme store in Baton Rouge, Louisianna, or Mobile, Alabama, or Gainesville, Florida, or Marietta, Georgia, was the first Krispy Kreme made, first one built.
Well, obviously only one can be the first -- which happened to have been in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But what that is is a truth about the commitment of Krispy Kreme to the local communities. So it is a truth, it’s just not the truth.
You know people have said to me, and it’s been said about me, that I studied under Marshall McLuhan. Well I think I was seven when he died, so I don’t mind admitting to you that I didn’t study under him. But that has to do with the truth story of the role of futuring -- for certain people who want whatever McLuhan represented to be continued. It’s really nothing to do with me.
As the Fool, I try to get companies beyond the day-to-day issues of their life and look at themselves in the bigger context. This is what writing a 500-year plan is all about. We’ve written several of these for Fortune-200 companies.
The most interesting question I’ve ever heard asked about business, is “What’s the best criteria for success?” When you distill that, the answer we came up with is simply sustaining. It’s making it, and being in business a long time.
What is it about General Electric that they are here today and one of the most highly valued companies in the world and their biggest competitor for 78 years went under two years ago? Or at least forfeited their name. It was called Westinghouse. Why did one survive and not the other?
When you study companies that have been in business a long time, you find that the companies that stand the test of time don't make their principal source of revenue anymore from the goods and services with which they started. Forty-two percent of GE’s revenue is financial services. I really don’t think that’s what Thomas Alva Edison had in mind. But I’m pretty sure I could persuade you that Jack Welch is Thomas Edison reincarnated. They have the same beliefs.
So the Fool helps companies find that the constant in their future is their beliefs, and that the evolutionary process is tied to what they do. I can pretty much guarantee you that Nokia did not make cell phones 187 years ago when they went into business.
Motorola has not made a car radio in 35 years. Motorola stood for “motoring Victorolas.” Owens-Corning, from pots and pans, to glassware, to fiber optics. The Marriott brothers sold root beer. Coca-Cola was a patent medicine. You see case after case.
It all ties back into the core brand promise. A product is an artifact of a truth of a promise. A brand is a promise. The promise of Saturn motor cars is respect. That’s why today they can say it’s a new kind of car company and people believe it’s a new kind of car, even though it’s fifth-generation technology. The promise of Xerox is sharing – share the knowledge. The promise of Gateway is to be the wagon-master across the silicon prairie.
It was more interesting to me that Gateway opened stores than Barnes & Noble went dot-com. It doesn't matter whether Gateway sells anything in its stores because retailing is the retelling of the tale. So you open stores to tell the story of being the wagon-master. You’re on a perilous journey and Gateway can help you get there.
When you apply the wagon-master metaphor, you realize that inventors invent, and pioneers discover, and wagon-masters commercialize inventions or discoveries. So we decided, why would you have an R&D department if all you do is commercialize other people’s discoveries? So guess what Gateway did? They chucked their R&D department, and put $95 million to the bottom line. And I knew it was a success when -- five months later -- Dell did the same thing.
And you know what the answer was to the question: "Why do you need to have an R&D department?" They said: "Because companies have to." And I said: "Show me the book that says that."
And so when you have one success, it starts opening you up for more success of the same genre. Not only does Gateway not have an R&D department -- and make more money from Internet-service provisioning than they make from manufacturing computers, and make more money from leasing than from Internet-service provisioning -- they have the advantage of not having a sacred cow.
\Gateway has the advantage of knowing that in 10 years they won't even be making computers -- or, at least they know it will be fine if they are not making computers.
This goes back to the friction between the present and future. Gateway is living in the "pressure tense" by letting everyone who’s doing what they do today not worry about whether or not that’s what they’ll be doing tomorrow. By focusing it on the bigger issue -- which is the belief system -- that is the constant.
In the environment of the world today, the pressures are greater than ever. The "pressure tense" is a phrase we created to capture the fusion of the present and the future. Companies that learn how to live in that "pressure tense" are the ones that have the greatest opportunity for succeeding in the environment as it exists today.
The place where the present and the future meet the most, of course, is with the person who runs the company -- because the person who runs the company is ultimately charged with responsibility for both the present and the future. That helps explain why there has never been a President of the United States who looked younger when he retired than when he started. The pressures associated with balancing the present and the future are really pronounced.
Societally, we've recognized the approaches that have succeeded in the past don't work any more. For example, one big change is that consumers will now be in the remunerative chain. One way that this will influence advertising and communications is that people will be paid to hear advertising. It's fundamentally different than the model that exists today. And, of course, it scares advertisers. But if they don't embrace this change, then they're gonna be out of business.
I think another change we will see is the fusion of our vocations and avocations. While being interviewed for the 35th-anniversary issue of "Rolling Stone," B.B. King was asked what he was going to do when he retired. He said, "You don't understand. This is a life's work." I think that most people don’t want a job; they want a life's work.
Five thousand years ago, in the face of the second oracle at Delphi, Aristotle said you could never have too much health, friendship, love, wisdom or self-esteem. People who know how to develop their lives around self-esteem pretty soon come to recognize that they don’t judge their successes by other’s successes. They judge their successes by them, by themselves. That's the ultimate heroic thing to me, and I think we’re going to see communications and marketing built around self-esteem in the future.  |
