Every leader I meet is drowning in "the next big thing."
The metaverse was the next big thing. NFTs were. Clubhouse was. Some of you spent real money on those.
Meanwhile, quietly, remote work, cheap solar, and generative AI compounded in the background. Here's how to tell the difference before you spend.
What's the pattern?
A fad rides on taste. It spreads because it's new and everyone wants to be seen with it. Then it's not new anymore, and the reason to have it disappears. Pet rocks. Pogs. The particular flavor of app everyone downloaded that one summer.
A trend rides on capability. It spreads because it lets someone do something they couldn't do before, and once they can, they don't go back. The car. The credit card. The search bar. Nobody went back.
The test is simple. Ask: what can a person now do that they couldn't before? The bicycle let a woman travel alone. The smartphone put a computer in every pocket. If the answer is "have something cool," it's a fad. If the answer is a verb, it's a trend.
The tricky ones look like both. Crypto was a fad on the surface, all speculation and celebrities, and a trend underneath, programmable money. I wrote a whole book about the underneath part. The fad died. The trend is still compounding.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Ask for the verb. Every pitch, every new thing: what does this let someone do? If the pitch can't name it, walk.
Watch the second year, not the first. Fads peak in year one. Trends look boring in year one and undeniable in year three.
And separate the surface from the underneath. The loudest version of a technology is almost always the fad. The quiet version is the trend.
What's the thing everyone's excited about right now, and what does it actually let anyone do?
Related: When your customer is a bot, what is a brand?
- Samantha Radocchia, Bitcoin Pizza: The No-Bullshit Guide to Blockchain (2019).
More like this on LinkedIn. Follow @samradofficial
