Memory of the Future - Self Commoditization

With this blog I plan to begin a series of articles brought to realization through actual application and further refined through evolution in my life. The blog is intended to be abstract. The hope is to disrupt the basic brain patterns for evaluating information and causing the deeper cognitive layers to emerge that have been hidden away due to the mediocrity that must pervade our lives.

Ladies and gentlemen, any merit based, tremendously successful individual or company, can be considered to have understood the concept of good to great as Jim Collins discusses in "Good to Great".

Now, what comes after the "greatness" for an individual or a company that is mostly focused on revenue generation? It can be a goal of larger delta between existing and future gross profits, create or capture the next breakthrough, sometimes short term outcomes i.e. quarter to quarter, etc.

To begin to look beyond greatness that all of us feel entitled to yet few conceive and achieve, let each one of us turn around through our individual history, step back and look through our successes - pick up one that we feel great about (and let us say if ego allows) that we can brag about. Now if a certain level of humility combined with confidence pervades, we ought to instantly come up with one or two things we wish we could have done to turn our great success into excellence.

“This” future memory… the specific realization that every great triumph has a delta to a new level is what I have come to call “Memory of the Future” (MOT-F) or the comprehension that in our conquests we leave so much more to be realized, or made conscious – yet, always after the fact. For individuals and organizations who give in and close the curtain to the window of excellence, it is called concensus building or 80 for 20. While for the ones who dare to peek it is called a fantastic learning (whether failure or success) that causes cognitive dissonance, the disruption that leads to cladogenesis in innovation, etc.

Today, our focus should be to grasp these fissures that keep us from our MOT-F… fill them and achieve the next level that exists far beyond greatness. Why should we strive? Simply because if we do not then there will be someone faster than us and more knowledgeable than us some where in the world will capture the breakthroughs… World Flatteners cannot afford such risks… We must preempt commoditization.

I declare “self commoditization” a practice we must adopt and development of ourselves into the next generation product that is the need of the World as our “Memory of The Future”. I call upon the merit based knowledge workers to adopt the same.

I must credit the ignition of the above thought to Mr. Steven Levin and Dr. Adam Malofsky who are my business partners in our venture – Acara Global. I plan to discuss Acara in detail in the near future.

In the next few blogs I will share some ideas on how Memory of The Future can be applied to business innovation.