MANILA, PHILIPPINES — “Do I have permission to scare you?,” asked Mark Joyner, Founder & CEO of Simpleology, in his keynote address, “Your Roadmap to Money,” at DIGIMAX: IMMAP Digicon 2023 on October 19, 2023 at the Marriott Grand Ballroom, Pasay City.
Mark asked the question, he explained, because plotting the roadmap to money begins with preparing for the future, and “To prepare you, I’ve got to scare you a little bit.”
Tapping on lessons he learned during military training, he shared that the key to success in any age lies on our ability to “see the battlefield,” or to understand both the world around us and what lies ahead. However, exponential growth curves in technological development throw a curve ball when it comes to that philosophy.
The sudden boom of AI language models like ChatGPT, for example, has proven that technology progresses at a rate faster than we can currently handle.
“We are entering into a different era right now,” Mark said. “There’s no human alive right now who can properly see the battlefield.”
“We are experiencing a paradigm shift in one field or another every single day,” he added, stressing that daily advancements in AI, nanomaterials, and 5G all have the potential to upend how modern civilization functions.
In order to keep up with a world that can change overnight, every night, Mark suggested three hedges that every business needs to make:
1. The only assets that really matter are skills, knowledge, and health.
History has shown, he explained, that financial and material assets are more fleeting than most people realize.
“We might wake up one day and boom! Your currency is rendered obsolete. It could happen because of war; it could happen because of a number of reasons,” he said. “When the Iraq War happened, people who were US dollar millionaires woke up the next day and it’s like, ‘Oops, your currency is valueless.”
A person’s skills and knowledge, however, cannot lose value as long as they keep developing, and good health is necessary to maintain that sense of development.
2. Build a “lifeboat business”
In a world of constantly shifting paradigms, businesses need to be designed with “lifeboats” in mind: they need to be able to stay afloat when their current models inevitably become outdated.
“Now, we’re in a world where your business model or your marketing model could be rendered obsolete overnight,” Mark said. “Make it pivotable. Lean into systems and culture.”
Building work systems and company cultures that can survive a pivot towards new business models will allow brands to adapt quickly and move forward. To underscore this point, Mark used the example of YouTube – what had originally been conceptualized as a dating site pivoted away from that model and grew to become the world’s largest video-sharing platform.
3. Big-tech marketing independence
For his final piece of advice, Mark cautioned against an over-reliance on big technology companies for a brand’s marketing needs. In many cases, a single algorithm shift or policy change can even undo a company’s entire SEO strategy, without any sort of recompense from the major tech platforms.
“Have you ever had an ad account shut down by Facebook?,” he asked the audience at Digicon 2023. “Everybody here has been wronged by big tech in one way or another.”
“Sometimes, they might say, ‘Hey, we don’t like your business model anymore. We’re going to take away your ability to process transactions’,” he continued.
Mark suggested that companies avoid putting all their eggs into the baskets managed by tech giants, and to start looking into more decentralized platforms.
By working on these three hedges – treating skills, knowledge, and health as key assets; creating pivotable lifeboat businesses; and developing a marketing system that can run independently of big tech – Mark hypothesized that companies can be adequately prepared for an unforeseeable future.
adobo Magazine is an official media partner of DIGIMAX: IMMAP Digicon 2023.
