Run to where the ball is going
Anticipation. This is what defines the difference between a good and a great player. I used to get frustrated playing rugby because other players always seemed to get more ball than me. I assumed they were lucky — in the right place at the right time. Eventually, I realised they were making their own luck. They could read the game and were positioned in the right place to pick up that pass in broken play or make that spot tackle.
The people who are the best at this also make it look so easy. Because they were not trying to catch up with the play, they are already there, waiting for it to come to them. I considered them greedy, but deep down I knew my belief was really just a jealous justification.
This ability to anticipate is not restricted to the sports field. Many businesses have been founded on clever anticipation. And the best ones are those who have correctly identified the second-order impacts of a change.
Amazon is possibly our greatest example of running to where the ball is. They began life as an online bookseller, exploiting the internet's infinite shelf space.
They have since morphed into a vast e-commerce business, a state-of-the-art logistics provider, a cloud computing behemoth, and have become the world’s third-largest advertising platform (after Google and Meta).
Phew! Amazon has grown into a monster from nothing (a rather shrewd one).
What they have done is identify structural shifts (e.g., the internet enabling e-commerce) and built internal capabilities to take advantage of them, e.g., cloud computing for all their data. Then they turned that capability into a platform (Amazon Web Services) and used it to enter adjacent markets, to the point where they now dominate cloud computing.
They focused on where the ball was headed and ran there.
Google is another example where the founders correctly anticipated a need and ran to meet it. The need was to find information on the internet easily. Their solution was algorithmic, rather than via the directories or portals that were commonplace at the time. This approach was a big win, and they dominated online search. But it was a second-order outcome that has driven their success. They found themselves sitting on a pile of search intent data, which meant they were beautifully positioned to build an advertising business. Cha-ching!
We cannot ignore timing in all of this. An average idea at the right time will outperform a great idea at the wrong time. Most successes cannot claim to be the first with their idea. YouTube was by no means the first video streaming platform launched. Interestingly, when Google bought YouTube for $1.6b in 2006, people thought it was an absurdly high price to pay. It has now become a massive money-printing machine, making it one of the best tech acquisitions in history. This shows how rubbish most of us are at predicting futures.
It should be noted that the success of online video wasn't driven by a single breakthrough. It emerged from several simultaneous shifts: smartphone cameras + mobile bandwidth + cheap storage. YouTube was a first-order consequence. The second-order consequences were the creation of influencers, creator economies, social commerce, podcast studios in spare bedrooms, news media outlets losing relevance, and entirely new career paths that barely existed twenty years ago.
The future is notoriously difficult to predict. Most forecasts are wrong. But a useful exercise is to look at major shifts already underway and ask what happens when they collide. And then what are the potential second-order effects?
Aging population + robotic assistance = robot relationship services (for those not getting on with their robot)
Predictive health + food as medicine + customised food delivery services = BYO food restaurants
Driverless cars + car-to-car connectivity = traffic lights become redundant and are repurposed as baby billboards displaying city information, events, and public art
Drone delivery + car connectivity = death of fast food drive-throughs and the birth of drone hubs
Driverless cars + cheap energy = cheaper travel → more travel → more tyre wear → tyre manufacturers prosper.
There are all sorts of futures one can imagine when you start to combine shifts. The trick is not predicting which future will emerge with certainty. It is positioning yourself close enough to the action that when it does emerge, you're already there to catch the pass.
