What Will Our New Reality Look Like?
Prelude
I am often pitched on ideas for investment, a la Shark Tank. My assumption is that people simply watch too much television, forgetting that reality works different than that.
As a prelude, if blind pitching is your capital acquisition strategy: you don’t have a strategy.
If you want a strategy, feel free to reach out and we can chat.
That said, choosing to view everything as a learning experience, after one rapid-fire conversation of random ideas, it became apparent that everyone’s real question right now is – what will new normal be?
What products, services, ideas, will we need in the post-Covid economy? Will the drones take over, and if so, when and where?
Everyone Seems to Have an Opinion
Economists predict blanket optimism. Social psychology suggests that humans are habitual creatures, meaning we’ll up our quarantine ways for a few years.
Going back to Peter Drucker’s books in the 1990s and 2000s on managing the future, he often discussed managing people and organizations in a post-capitalism reality. Is this it?
FWIW, and as sad as it is to say, I need to prequalify my opinion here. Most people don’t seem to grasp the concept of venture capitalists; even fewer that women can have great ideas. So, having created a portfolio in non-market correlated assets in 2019, which seemed bananas in that moment, I assumed a serious correction. Good prediction, after all.
So here’s what I’m thinking…
What Will Our New Reality Look Like?
While this is by no means investment advice, I am happy to share my latest strategy.
Needs-based businesses will thrive over wants-based ones for the near future. The days of businesses that don’t add real value – beyond just reducing friction, to solving real problems – are over. Praise be.
The present value of a business during quarantine may more likely reflect its financial situation in the future than its past valuation. The evolution of a business to adapt to new environments is far easier said, and almost never actually done. Expect to see the dinosaurs fade out to the extent by which our culture changes and they are no longer needed in the next year or so.
Innovation and technology are now being forced onto SMBs and Fortune 100’s alike, opening every sector to new ideas and new companies.
As Drucker suggested, the value placed on knowledge will increase. Not because our values system has permanently shifted, however, but simply because it’s the natural result of every recession.
A post-capitalism utopia by no means. But a space where services are needed to solve real problems. Where products might actually start being 3D printed – seriously, why haven’t we adopted that yet? And one where the cultural acceptance of new ideas and businesses is more widely available.
Travel will resume, employment will resume. Litigation will explode. And of course, I am betting that the public equities market will go up.
Finally, while its cognitively impossible to not be swept away by the news cycle’s collective hysteria, what is most important to understand here is that this is a cultural phenomenon, not a structural one. Yes, it will have structural implications, and that’s the only real problem we have.
The world would have been better off to hide from fast food than a new strain of flu. Everything is fine. Everything will be fine. The machine isn’t broken, it’s just turned off for a bit.
If you are interested in any of the ideas presented here, it’s best to reach out directly at jessica@digital-unicorns.com. All of the ideas presented here are my own and have not been verified or endorsed by any of my companies or any other third party.
About.
Jessica Higgins is an agent of change for public, private and non-profit organizations around the world. Her focus is on facilitating the development of an enterprise’s authentic voice as a means of conveying their core values to stakeholders through their internal and external words and actions.
Beyond her advisory work, Ms. Higgins is a best-selling author as her first book: 10 Skills For Business Communication, reached #1 in Amazon.com New Releases for Communication and Social Skills books. Her work has also been published in over ten thousand media outlets including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, Huffington Post, CBS, and Newsweek.
In addition to serving as a Partner of R+I, Ms. Higgins is the President of Curated Financial, an investment fund manager she founded in order to streamline the cultivation of bespoke investment opportunities for private clients after finding a general lack of cohesion in the investment selection process of alternative investment options. Curated Financial advises a venture capital fund and a fund of funds focused on the selection of emerging managers.
Ms. Higgins holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Behavioral Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a Juris Doctorate / Master of Business Administration from the University of Miami. In addition, Ms. Higgins is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification holder with specialty in Systems Design and holds an executive education certificate in Behavior Design from the Design Lab at Stanford University.
Learn more about her work in finance at curatedfinancial.com, her venture accelerator is researchinnovation.co and her marketing agency is digital-unicorns.com.
