Without a full grasp of the age of abundance one simply cannot think, design or produce anything, period.
It’s all about Mastery; entrepreneurial mastery is a free gift embedded in us, we just need to open it. Only repetitive and continuous refinements will get us the spotlight; one time wonders only make back pages of local community papers. So how do we take our goods and services to become the talk of the town, how do we create extreme iconization in the age of abundance?
Thrive or Survive in the Age of Abundance: What is the age of abundance, how it drowns ideas in its own floods of abundance. Definition: Age of Abundance came out of the age of curiosity and scarcity; we are now in the age of abundance, where for every great idea, we have thousands of better ones. Caution: Build any new idea but with extreme value and uniqueness with ultra-high design values. Weak ideas sink. Symptoms: Promotional campaigns are up but sales are down; competition has better, faster, cheaper options; the race is lost; vision challenged, and the fog of confusion is cutting profits. So, what to do now?
How to build a superb new idea: We should never become overly content and proud of whatever we design or quality we produce… it’s just not good enough, only continuous refinements make things worthy. Without a full grasp of the age of abundance one simply cannot think, design or produce anything, period.
Study design from all aspects, for example, like from a car designer’s point of views, sitting in a driver seat point of views, pedestrians point of views and why not from other cars point of views; go line by line, item by item, study every corner, every feature, and every grain and ask how and why it was done in that manner or why it was not done some other way. Now do this for 100 other products and after you MAY start to develop a third eye for design appreciation?
This is just a start, self-discovery and self-optimization is where future hidden: If you think your degree taught you everything, possibly not, or like how to hold a pencil. Relax… Mastery achieved by deeper studies and ultimately discovering the unknowns like the bats diving deep in the caves and finally catching a glimpse of that Bat-mobile. Something, deep and mysteriously beautiful, something when the eye sees it asks the heart to skip a beat.
You need not be a master car designer or artificial heart maker, that’s for other experts to step in, you are a builder and your deep appreciation is far more important in order to engage with all other experts along the way. Steve Job simply had the greatest ideas; will to fight the oppositions; he surrounded himself the worlds finest to deliver you an iPhone… imagine the battlefields he had to cross fighting century-old models of telephony.
While your skills are much wider, even generic but driven by unique forces of entrepreneurialism, execution and out of box thinking something to assure you on a path of discovery. You are a builder; you deal with everything, as you have the right skills. Design thinking must go parallel with your progress. Study all the successful entrepreneurs; now restudy them from the design development point of views, the origin of the concepts, the progressive moldings and constant fighting towards achieving perfection.
What’s age of abundance: Visit the largest shopping mall, multiply it by a million more malls and now roam in it but it’s still not big enough… the new global age is over-flooded with everything, good and bad, mediocre and excellent, junk and collector’s items. Without understanding the Age of Abundance, any idea, no matter what must create extreme value and extreme image otherwise it’s simply doomed from the start. If you wish to make a spicy sauce, you must study the 10,000 sauces that are already available. You must check the labels, sizes, shapes, prices and sample flavors. The same applies to socks, scarves, cars, motorbikes, music, food, clothing, books, drones, movies, seminars, high-speed-trains and just about anything, like writing articles.
This does not mean there is nothing left to do…rather on the contrary; this is about a limitless market.
If there is good knowledge of innovative design with extreme value and extreme image, there will be a success. There is already for too much junk and proliferation of nonsensical designs and stupid imagery that it automatically opens millions of new doors for high-quality contributions.
Follow the heart, the mind, the art, and science and go forward, but not blindly
Design: this discipline requires special training to deeply understand the various and multiple dimensions of design, the diversity of philosophy, the complex schools and the various styles. Without such knowledge, most ideas of goods and services miserably suffer a slow death.
Production: produce if you can, collaborate if you can, outsourcing with command and control of design is the fastest way to global age markets, provided you fully understand Intellectual Property assets, global nomenclature and conversant with the global image positioning. This is not easy.
Promise: how to create and how to deliver the promise is a fine art, requires mastery otherwise you stand stripped-naked in the market and angry customers as a mob. Study mega failures by mega-corporations.
Timing: today it’s all about timing, being at the right place with the right combination at the right time. This will also mean being extremely fast and extremely efficient, something that also requires many other additional and special skills.
Competition: despite the flooded markets, if you have mastery of all of these fine components, there is hardly any competition; only those with all the combinations can open all the doors.
Consumption: how things move from factory floors to consumers; those with full understanding and solid marketing, on local and global accessibility thrive while the hit and run ideas simply die.
Image supremacy: the age of abundance only permits the best of the best to climb to the top. However, it will only allow experts with mastery to even enter the race.
The real game is ‘extreme-value creation’ and not ‘extreme-value-manipulations’
Three critical progressive stages originally defined.
Age of Curiosity: here, for anything newly created or produced there were either none or a few other options. Access to originality and production was extremely rare.
Age of Scarcity: here, for anything produced there were hundreds of other options. Access to production and easy replication was very common.
Age of Abundance: here, for anything produced or created there are thousands or of other options. Access to production, replication and global distribution is in abundance.
Choice Attacks: When there are millions of choices and options, there is an automatic sense of rejection. Elvin Toffler defined Future Shock in the eighties. Now we can walk into any Mega-Malls of Mega-Marts which create ‘choice attack’ as the mind refuses to process the subtle desires and the emotional awakening of imaginary consumption. Selecting a cooking sauce from 10000 plus varieties shuts down all the excitement and creates a massive abundance of agoraphobia forcing a person to hyperventilate and run out of the store in a panic. In times past, guards controlled the onslaught of incoming customers; now in the age of abundance, there are guards inside the store so that customers simply don’t run out screaming due to ‘choice attacks’.
It’s all about Mastery; entrepreneurial mastery is a free gift embedded in us, we just need to open it.
You build great ideas by self-discovery and deeper understanding of the landscape… start one today
The Origin: The concept of the ‘age of abundance’ originally published in syndicated column by Naseem Javed in 2005; “The Age of Abundance Demands Innovation” Globe and Mail.
(Naseem Javed is a corporate philosopher, Chairman of Expothon Worldwide; a Think tank on Image Supremacy of Innovative Excellence & Entrepreneurial Leadership. He is leading charge on entrepreneurial leadership transformation and a recognized authority on global digital trends, image complexities how they impact business performances and create global age skill shifts. His recent work on Expothon Strategy is getting global attention. His latest new book; Alpha Dreamers; the five billions connected who will change the world. www.expothon.com. He can be connected via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naseemjaved.)