Taking On Today or Tomorrow? We Can Do Both
By Greg Kahn
Emerging Tech Exchange
Founder & CEO
Published on May 30, 2023
Business leaders generally face the same choice: bring in dollars today or focus on tomorrow?
Everyone knows that it’s a balance, of course. But when you get right down to it, actions of business leaders rarely focus much beyond the next quarter. (Safe to say that doesn’t count as “forward thinking.”)
I was thinking about how leaders actually do achieve the balance of achieving today’s goals and paving the way for tomorrow’s growth while talking with executives at the PTTOW! Summit in California. If you’re not familiar with it, PTTOW! stands for "Plan To Take On The World!” and attracts a veritable “who’s who” among CEOs, CMOs, and other decision-makers at major companies.
I moderated on a panel on the future of transportation with an advisor to a company fittingly called Jetson. They currently make “personal aerial vehicles” But they are also pioneering flying taxis that promise to change the way people commute in the future. Now, there’s very few people taking a flying taxi to a meeting today. But tomorrow?
I also met one of the leaders from a company called Space Perspective. They make what the company calls “the first carbon-neutral spaceship.” As soon as late 2024, Space Perspective plans to take travelers to space inside a pressurized capsule propelled by a “SpaceBalloon” without using rocket fuel or high G forces. “Space Explorers see the world anew through its vast windows, 450 miles in any direction. The ultra-comfortable, accessible, and gentle six-hour journey redefines space travel,” as the Florida-based company describes it.
Sounds fantastic, right? If you’re not at least a little intrigued by Space Perspective’s ambitions, I would ask you to look back 30 years ago and consider all the things that computer in your pocket is capable of doing today. The future depends on leaps of imagination.
Time will tell as to how the courses taken by Smart Cities, space and deep sea exploration will pan out , of course. But the expectation for such technological wonders has existed for years. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia are actively investing in the Smart Cities of the future while others may shake their heads at the concept. The rest of the world is going to be playing an expensive catch-up.
Pursuing the Smart City model is certainly a risky bet at the moment. Still, the worst time to explore a new business is when a model is already proven. You can compensate for being “too early” with an idea. But if you’re too late? Well, the rewards and costs for playing catch up tend not to balance out all that well.
There was a time in the 1950s and ‘60s when we could race for the moon while building the interconnected systems of highways. Both fueled and expanded America’s growth.
When the topic of space exploration is brought up, the inevitable rejoinder is, “Let’s take care of problems here on Earth first.”
Or if it’s mentioned that, given that most of the globe is covered by waters whose depths we haven’t fully plunged, the usual comment is, “Shouldn’t we be managing the land better instead?”
We can — and we must — do both. The discoveries of the Space Race era led to the powerful inventions that have changed our society and the way we do business. The future is inevitable and it’s important we continue to find ways of steering toward it in much the same way Nvidia has.
Greg Kahn
Emerging Tech Exchange
Founder & CEO
