Mike Figliuolo explains how to spot big opportunities by connecting unrelated trends. He suggests combining rising college costs, remote work, declining trust in corporate careers, and climate change to find unexpected threats and opportunities. Most weird combinations yield nothing, but the ones that work can reshape entire industries.
Chapters
So if you take some trends like that in other trends that we might talk about as well. We talked the other day about this idea of trend lines and convergences. And what I found fascinating about it, Mike, was, you know, we were thinking about it like a strategy consultant. So if you think, and you know, you're a former McKinsey person as well, if you think like a strategic thinker, what kind of things do you do with the information that you're picking up right now? How do you identify where these trend lines are going and what you should do so that you can start to find opportunities, make some of those big bets or those no regret decisions versus just kind of watching things unfold.
Yeah. What's fun about trends is, and it's not like I'm some analytical wonk that's like building these models and looking at macro trends. It's like I'm reading the news, I'm listening to people, I'm talking to people. And what I like to do is it's really easy to take a set of trends in a narrow field and sort of straight line them. So if you took like sales compensation trend, sales tenure trend, average, you know, pipeline length, and you took a bunch of sales metrics and you trended it out, it's like, okay, you can reasonably see what the future holds for that area, but there's no real innovation and major insights. There's there. When I talk about trends, it's like, take a bunch of different trends that have nothing to do with one another and see what happens when they intersect. Right. So things like the rising cost of undergraduate education, plus increased remote workforces, plus decreasing trust in long term careers at corporations, plus increasing, you know, global climate change and global warming risks and what sits at the intersection of any of those things? And it's like, wow, they're all like really disparate things now what'll happen? Nine times out of 10 you're going to draw one of those intersections and go, yep, nothing there, nothing interesting. Nothing interesting. But then all of a sudden say, hang on, hang on. So climate change and pandemic and work from home and working remote and all of a sudden increased pressure on airline industry and also people being shamed into traveling and carbon offsets and wait a minute, how is this going to impact the travel industry and what alternatives are there going to be to travel? And how is that going to impact how I think about the people that I hire because there's undergraduate degrees, do they really need a degree anymore? And all of a sudden you're Ending up with a very different conversation. And I'm still not convinced that there's something there. But you can see how some of these intersections can create threats and opportunities. You just got to pick weird ones. And by weird, I mean things that are unrelated and then be prepared for nothing there.
Yeah. So that's pretty cool in that you're taking some randomness, right? You're taking things that maybe aren't related. And you could say, well, it's kind of like Mad Libs or whatever. We're just trying to create combinations and see what we come out with here. How do you do that in a logical way, Mike, versus just kind of picking random things? Are you trying to find things that you assume would be related, or is it better to find things that are just obviously not related?
I like the things that are obviously not related because it's in those non obvious intersections where the ideas reside that nobody else has thought of because nobody said like, well, what if I take this ingredient and this ingredient? Okay, now we're back to cooking, right? So what if I took this ingredient and this. This ingredient, what would that taste like? If I combine them and all of a sudden it's like, nobody's ever done that before. It's like, all right, well, anybody willing to try? And sometimes it's horrible. Sometimes my kids will tell you I've had a couple of nightmare meals that I've cooked, But every once in a while, one of the best meals I ever made was called random crap in a taco shell. Okay? And I went to the fridge and it was like, we had some chicken cordon bleu and some baked beans and some other, like, there were like seven or eight ingredients that you look at and you go, these things have no earthly business whatsoever being on the same plate. And put them all in a burrito shell and baked it and threw some enchilada sauce on it, and everybody took a bite and we all just stopped and looked at each other and we were like, oh, my gosh, this is genius. Right? And it was just. And it was the. It was the intersections that you'd never deliberately think of where an insight pops out and something interesting happens.
