Executive Blockchain Leadership Summit with Mark S A Smith
There can’t be anything more disruptive than what’s going on in blockchain. To keep us up with that in this fast-changing times, Mark S A Smith of Bija Company and host of The Selling Disruption Show talks about blockchain technology while giving us a peek on his Executive Strategy Summit. Mark shares his own origin story about first getting started in technology and how it evolved to helping other people explore blockchain. Mark shares his thoughts on pitching and creating the strategic story that gets the investors to agree on what you’re saying. Learn about the five Vs to establish whether a project is relevant to blockchain or not as Mark opens up about what is going on in the blockchain world.
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Executive Blockchain Leadership Summit with Mark S A Smith
I am excited to bring you somebody who I’ve gotten to know over time because we’ve interviewed him a few times. I absolutely adore him. Mark S A Smith from Bija Company and you have a podcast called The Selling Disruption Show. I love the idea of selling disruption because there can’t be anything more disruptive than what’s going on in blockchain. We’re going to talk a little bit about that as well, as things that he’s been working on over the years. You’ve been working in technology, Mark, since 1982.
I sold my first disruptive product in 1982.
I’m about a decade behind. I’ve been working around it since 1992. You’ve always had an executive focus on it and you run these Executive Strategy Summits which I want to talk about. Each time that you’ve been faced up against the technology, selling disruption and moving into these organizations, you’re coming up with the same conversations with customers again and again. It’s similar. It’s the same pattern of it. It doesn’t matter what the technology is. Let’s talk a lot about that. Mark, I want you to tell a little bit about how you did get started in technology and what technology you got started back when?
It’s simple. I started by accident. I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1982. I was expecting to design things and create electronic stuff. HP hired me out of college and that was back in the days when Hewlett-Packard hired engineers to be involved in the world of sales. It was a peer-to-peer sales strategy. I was thrown into this factory where we were selling the next generation of test and measurement equipment that nobody knew that they needed. They were doing it the old–fashioned way. We had this whole cool way of pushing a button and automating most of the measurements. When you’re up against that scenario, you have to teach people not about how you do it but what the outcome is.
What their benefit is, what they’re going to get from it.
How do you radically lower the cost of how you’re doing it is a great approach to taking when you’re selling disruptive technology. The benefit behind all disruptive technology is once you have this new approach in your business, you’re not going to go back to the old approach. That’s what creates the disruption. The status quo is no longer the same.
We’ve all changed our systems, processes and paradigms around. You and I have talked about this in 3D printing many times because that’s a lot of my disruption experience is in. We don’t prototype the same way we did several years ago. It’s never been the same since we got introduced to it.
Prototyping is frequently done as a simulation in software before we ever move into the meatspace.
We’re headed into this difficulty of corporate climates, where you’ve got to sell within your corporation when you want to move into new technology because they’re like on technology overload. As if we all aren’t everywhere else too but they’re on technology overload in a lot of companies whether it’s a startup, gross stage or you’re talking about Fortune 500s, they’re all in this overwhelm of technology.
The people who are going to decide whether or not to fund your project are looking at it through a completely different lens than you are as a technologist, enamored with the how you’re going to accomplish it. What that means is if you’re going to sell your tactical deployment, you have to be good at selling the strategy. That is the reason why I’m here to share with you the thoughts behind how do you create the strategic story that gets the people who will cut loose the checks, to agree to what you’re saying. You have to be able to speak their strategic language.
I was doing an interview with Cherie Aimée and she was talking the same thing. She was working with more of startups who need to pitch people. It’s not all that different from how you have to pitch investors. You have to change your language around what’s in it for them and whether that is what’s in it for them from an investment standpoint or from a corporate gross standpoint.
The whole idea here is you have to show them that your idea, when they add money, will generate money. It’s that process that you’re going to go through. They look at a lot of pitches and we can talk about this from an internal funding standpoint or an external funding standpoint. It doesn’t matter. Investors all have the same vision in mind, which is number one, “Can I get my investment back?” Number two, “Can I make money from the investment?” It’s in that order by the way.
Risk first then growth.
From that standpoint, you have to show them that your idea is one that’s going to generate money and also is manageable. Keep in mind that no executive will ever agree to a project that they don’t know how to manage.
That’s an interesting thought about it. That’s a much more internal thinking. From an external, from an investor, you’re thinking, “Is this the team that can manage it?” You have a team perspective, not a process perspective.
Frequently, they go after the team because the team has a process or a system that has proven that they can create the outcome that they promise. In every case, you’re still going to have timelines, milestones and places where you’re going to drop tranches of money in the case of an investor to fund that next phase. Investors are always going to look for a phased approach as a way of minimizing their losses and maximizing their gains. You start off with a research phase and then you go to an Alpha phase. That’s why people go through these various rounds of funding as an attempt to limit that. What I want people in the world of blockchain to think about is, “What is the strategy behind what we’re bringing to market and how is this going to make our investors and our customers’ money?
Monika and I have been talking a little bit about it. Sometimes we get in that as we referred to it earlier, a little shining object syndrome going on in that. We think blockchain is the answer for everything or at least many companies are presenting it as the answer for everything. There is no reason to put it on the blockchain. It might be easier to manage but it’s also going to be more costly in the short-term. Can you prove out your concept in a more traditional way and then say, “When we’ve got the blockchain research and we figured out how we’re going to structure and how we’re going to do it, we can drop it right into there. Make it more simple management and a more transparent solution like we always wanted it to be.”
Risk first then growth. Click To TweetLet me share with you my five V’s to establish whether a project is relevant to blockchain. We’ve done the P thing, now we’re going to do the V thing. First of all, let’s take a look at the business model. If it’s a business model that relies on transactions or information. It requires that it be validated and verified the veracity, the volume and the velocity. Those are the five areas where blockchain brings real value. Let me say those again. Validation, is it what we say it’s going to be? Veracity, in this particular case it might be a history. It might be a genealogy where we need to illustrate the serial numbers that were put inside of a unit before it was shipped out. I can go back and say, “Yes, we shipped it.” The verification is, “These are the things that were put in it.” That prevents for example, warranty fraud. Warranty fraud can run as high as 10% or 20% in a lot of organizations. You can kill that immediately with a blockchain type of verification. Next is veracity and what I mean by veracity is that is everything recognized the way that we want it to be? In that particular case, what I look is in the world of wine and the terroir, where does it come from and how deep do we need to go?
Here we call it, “Is there trust in that data? Can you believe it’s not been corrupted, modified or is there some amount of truth in that?” That’s where veracity comes in.
It could even be a chain of blockchains where we’re going to connect to the blockchain system at our vendors so that we can illustrate that genealogy. It’s probably another good way saying and of course, volume. The higher the volume, the more valuable blockchain comes and then velocity. If you’re looking for something that has a high speed, blockchain can do that. All of those areas are going to benefit substantially from a blockchain type of deployment.
This is the thing though that all of this is checking off with the business plan model that we’ve been working towards, which is why we got into this blockchain world on the first place, over our podcast business side. I’ve talked about that with the audience before. They’re familiar with the basics of what we’re looking at. The reality is that we can also start to do that as a test model. We think veracity matters. We think truth in the data matters. We can test that out with where we are by exploring it and making principles that we’re applying to how we’re delivering our data and how we’re providing that to advertisers or how we’re providing that back to our podcasters. If they don’t believe the data, then we have a problem. We need blockchain as a solution. Now, we’re right about the solution. Verifying those things along the way is also important because blockchain is time-consuming and putting it in place is time-consuming, to have to build it, then expect to get that feedback later and find out you didn’t even need it. That you were right about this but your market didn’t believe that, now you’re in trouble.
A couple of ideas here that popped into play. One is as Scott Adams pointed out, “If cheating has value and the probability or risk of getting caught is low, there’s a 100% probability that somebody is cheating.” That’s the perfect application for blockchain. The other aspect that you pointed out, is this something that we can predict whether this is going to be valuable or not. The profit equation consists of three components. Number one, is it scarce? Number two, is it desirable? Number three, is it necessary? If you have all three of those, then you’ll have consistent profits as you can see the Venn diagram that I’ve put up. If it’s scarce and desirable but not necessary, then it becomes a luxury. There are a lot of things in the world of blockchain that are that. Scarce but desirable, not necessarily necessary. If it’s scarce and necessary, then it becomes essential like a banking function. There’s not going to be a lot of profit there because a lot of people are going to be playing. If it’s desirable and necessary but not scarce, that becomes a commodity. There’s not a lot of money to be made there either. If you can identify that you have an application that’s both desirable, necessary and scarce, then you’ve got a winning combination to make a profit.
We talk about this, it’s your unique value. When you talk about something being scarce, it’s having that unique value but having that unique value be desirable, those two things are magic in the product world that I work in. Whether you’re talking about services or products, that’s the magic we look for. On the other side of that, we want it to be necessary. Everybody needs it but that’s not always the case. You’re right about that.
Necessity changes over time because what was once desirable becomes necessary. A good example of that are these mobile devices that we have. They’ve been around for about eleven years or so. At one time it was desirable, you have five-year-olds with their own iPhone X.
Let’s talk a little bit about these Executive Strategy Summits that you produce. How many have you done now?
Six, the seventh one is upcoming.
I have some friends who’ve gone to them with you. Betsy Westhafer, one of my good friends went and that’s how I got introduced to you right after one actually. Tell us a little bit about how they work. I’m curious about what you try to accomplish in these Summits?
It’s quite straight forward. This has grown out of the work that I’ve done with executives over the past several years. Through my experience of coaching and working with them and helping to figure out how to grow their businesses, I’ve learned that executives have a very different mindset, toolset and skill set than an entrepreneur or a manager. Their world outlook, their worldview is very different. What I’ve done is pulled together what I consider to be the critical aspects of being a business leader. Being an executive leader, leadership is not leadership is not leadership. The way you lead a spiritual organization is very different than the way you lead a military organization. It is very different than you lead an entrepreneurial organization, is very different than you lead an organization that is built for scaling.
I have pulled out what those differences are and identify that there is a skill stack that’s required for you to successfully run a sustainable, scalable, profitable and ultimately saleable business. Everything I teach contributes to those four elements and that is roughly in the correct order. You can have a profitable business that’s not sustainable, that’s not a business, you can’t sell. You can have a scalable business that’s not sustainable or profitable, in which case it’s not a saleable business. We work on the skill set and more importantly, the mindset and what we talk about, which freaks a lot of people out are things that are never discussed outside of the C-Suite. They’re actually politically incorrect. If the average worker on the front line knew it was discussed in the C-Suite, they would be disgusted.
That’s why we have a lot of problems when emails get subpoenaed.
They do and a lot of that can be eliminated once people understand what’s standing behind those discussions. It has to do with the fact that the people on the front line and one or two levels up don’t have the capacity to see as far into the future as is required by an executive, who is guiding the company to where the customer money will be in the future. If they knew those plans, it would freak them out because they’d say, “No, there’s no way we could ever do that.” Keep in mind that an executive is creating a future that does not yet exist using methods that have not yet been invented, where best practices have not yet been established. Blockchain is fitting into that for a lot of companies.
The part of the problem is we talked about the idea of us partnering together here, Monika and I with you and other partners to do a blockchain-specific, a niche Strategy Executive Summit. The idea is that there are a lot of unknowns because here I am, I’ve been looking and saying, “I see this blockchain application and we cover all your Vs.” It’s viable. We’re actually building the Beta version of it off the blockchain and it’s already proving itself for at least two-thirds of it. The other third, we’re going to build in the coming year.
I have to start thinking and that’s my job because I’m the CEO now. We just swapped roles. I am the CEO and Tom is the CTO because of this. Someone has to sit back, look at this vision and make the decisions about how are we going to go into this? Who’s going to partner with us? What does this look like? What team do we need? What money do we need? What do we need to make this happen? It looks like it is very viable and it’s actually very necessary for us to do this. That is a lonely job. It’s scary. I’m in a family business. It’s a little scarier when your frontline people are in the same office as you and you can always talk to them. I agree with you. This has to happen somewhere, where you have people you can talk to who are going through the same thing.
In the Executive Strategy Summit, not only do we work on mindset, skill set and tool set but we also build out a business plan. Everybody walks away with a refreshed single sheet business plan. Side one is strategy, which is the what and why. That’s mapped completely to your personal motivation. If you cannot run a business or not running a business out of your personal motivation, it will fail. The other side of the business plan are the tactics. How are we going to get this done? The reason why one sheet is important is because if it’s more than that, nobody looks at it. This is something you pull out every Monday morning and you take a look, make sure that you’re on track. We also give people the tools to decide exactly where to focus their attention. We do that with a set of key performance indicators for the most important aspects of the business. There are eleven of them and one of them is personal satisfaction. The reason why is because if you’re not personally satisfied, this thing is going to blow up. It’s unsustainable.
The higher the volume, the more valuable blockchain comes. Click To TweetIt’s the key to sustainability, that’s for sure. That’s interesting that you’ve tied it because there are so few executive style summits or leadership summits to where they are either all personal or they’re all corporate professional and they separate the two. Now, many of us are building our own businesses and they’ve gotten up to a level. At the end of the day, if I can’t have time with my kids, then why am I doing this? It’s the question you sit back on and think.
For that reason, we have companies that come through that. We have executives that are in companies, the Fortune 500 companies. They come through to get themselves primed for a promotion. They know how to speak C-Suite language when they’re done. We have others that have come and gone through the class and go, “No, I’m not going to go through that. I’m going to start my own company instead.” I know how to run a company that I think will work. Part of that is you have to create that balance of what your life looks like because after all work is here to generate the lifestyle of our desire.
If we’re not doing that, we have to sit back and think. I always loved being in a big corporation. I loved the C-Suite. I love being a part of the management structure. It energized me and being able to have that infrastructure and support under you was great. Tom, is the opposite. He was like, “I was meant to be an entrepreneur. This is the life for me.” Which is actually why we’ve been able to partner up over the years well, it takes all kinds within a company to be able to make it run, make it scalable and salable. These are keys that you’re also helping them identify, “Am I up for this?”
Yes and, “Do I have the right team for this?” as you pointed out. The reality is your team has to have a broad mix of skills, abilities and worldviews for you to put together a scalable organization. Here’s an important concept, you have to hire people you don’t like to do jobs you don’t like.
The people that are very opposite and different from you.
It’s absolutely critical otherwise, it’s going to be a dysfunctional organization.
Tom and I were lucky enough, we have our daughter who is our Operations Manager. She thinks in, to-do lists and process flow. I can think that way but it’s not where I’m not in my element there, I can do it. It would be the thing I would procrastinate about but I would get to it if I had to and the company needed me too. I didn’t love it but she does.
If people like you and I have to have folks follow behind us and clean up, we’re good initiators and bad completers. That’s okay because the initiators are the ones that go out there. The completers are the folks that make sure that what we created is actually turned into wealth. We’ve got to have both.
Tell me a little bit about what you’ve been thinking about the blockchain world? What’s been going on there? There have been some crazy dollars going back and forth and lots of scams happening also. What are your thoughts about it? Are there some good necessary applications out there?
There are oodles and oodles of great applications out there. As I’m sure you said many times to your audience, you have to divorce cryptocurrency from blockchain. Crypto is not blockchain, although crypto is part of the blockchain methodology, it is just one application. We’ve talked about the five Vs, there’s another aspect that you might think of too and that is if you have the word broker in any part of your business, blockchain is going to disrupt that part of your business. Keep in mind what a broker does is they trust and verify. Whether it’s brokering stocks, brokering the sale of anything or real estate brokers are going to be gone, once we blockchain a lot of titles, we won’t need that title companies. It will be a thing of the past.
We’re looking at ad brokers, we’re disrupting ad brokers in a way. If you think about the ad sales rep model and the interesting part is, they don’t even see it coming. We talk about this model because we can do it without the blockchain, which is basically we can put ads on any of your shows. We can put it on the entire catalog and they go, “That’s nice but we only sell the foreword.” I was like, “You don’t want to make a hundred times more than you make because I have more than a hundred episodes?”
They don’t understand the concept of binge listening. People tell me they binge listen to my show and I’m sure they do the same thing for your show. Let me rattle off a list of things that can be blockchain. This is probably for some of your people: finance records, loans, stocks, bonds, insurance, academic degrees, employment history, résumés, information sources, reputation, licenses, deeds, wills, copyrights, patents, software, movies, music, games, computer security, emails, voicemails, currency contracts, construction, collateral, real estate, cars, jewelry, relationships, credit scores, historical records, genealogy, warranties, guarantees, government functions, trustee, notary functions, tax levies and tax payments.
I did an interview on luxury jewelry, Borsetta, one of my favorite companies. It’s up and coming. There’s a lot of fraud there. That fraud hurts the owner of whatever the piece might be.
Keep in mind that the Chinese have nailed lab-grown diamonds.
I love what she’s doing there, Pamela Norton. It’s going to be a killer for luxury goods. That’s one application I’m already seeing in play that’s doing really well.
We can license plate every luxury good, we can go validate it with an app. You’ll know immediately if that beautiful Gucci bag that you bought is the real deal or a third shift knock off.
This also an area because you and I come out of a world of lots of innovation, inventors, technology and things that end up patentable. You mentioned that in the process. When we look at creatives, artists, whether it’s music artists or any of those areas where somebody has invented something, there is a lot of problems with value filtering down. Part of the reason I don’t have a design business anymore is collecting royalties was a nightmare. You do a royalty deal and you can’t verify that the sales happen, you can’t collect your checks and you end up cheated so often out of it. It makes it not worth it then what do you do? You go to fee-based and no one can afford you. It became no longer a viable business for me. We started to move into 3D printing and other things that we could control. I would love to see blockchain applications where they return the ability to have residual value, whether it’s the payment structure or smart contracts. Going through to make sure that those that have ideas that the creatives get valued for what they’ve put it.
If it's scarce and necessary, then it becomes essential. If it's desirable and necessary but not scarce, that becomes a commodity. Click To TweetThat’s actually a fairly simple thing to do given the smart contracts. The fact that every time you play a song, the player goes out, pings the blockchain and finds out if you have the right to play it. It also provides the author with a nick. They get their cut and it will take us a little while to pivot to that. I also see that is inevitable. In the world where we used to buy physical media CDs and DVDs, it was easy for us to get royalties and count royalties. In this world of everything’s digitized, it’s a little more challenging. We can embed in every song released, every movie released its unique license plate. We can tell very quickly whether a particular piece of media is owned by a person or rented by a person or leased by a person and we can fix that royalty thing. It will be a little while. We’d have some legislation that will have to happen. I see that as inevitable over time.
I found out because my son-in-law did a music video. He’s been doing many of them for hip-hop artists, but this is the first more mainstream. It is a Meghan Trainor’s song and it is dancers from So You Think You Can Dance or something like that. They’re dancing to our song but because it’s music, you can’t put it up on YouTube without going through a specific company agency that has to authorize this. You’re going through a broker in order to get YouTube to put it up and not take it down because their bots would automatically take it down. It was eye-opening to me to see how that process work and I thought, “There’s somebody who’s going to be disrupted.” It’s going to happen because that is difficult. It means that you can’t self-published without then enrolling in and belonging to this organization and going through this agent to make it happen for you.
It’s called a mechanical license and you have to have it if you use somebody else’s music. The same thing, if you’re going to play somebody else’s music, you have to get a license from ASCAP, BMI or SESAC to have the rights to perform that music. Those are perfect places for blockchain and actually automation through apps to manage that. We have not only the geographic location of the play but also the other time duration that can then be steered back to a smart contract. All those are opportunities to create extraordinary outcomes. What would this event be like? Let me give you a couple of ideas about what the event would be like. First of all, you have to explore the business of blockchain. What does the business look like?
We talked about business models, financial models, applications, product services. We talked about development models. How do you go about developing it? We’ll go to market models, deployment models and some other enhancements. We would spend a lot of time talking about business models. I love talking about business models because business models determine how we make money. Business models are made up of business rules. The great thing about blockchain is it allows us to create and enforce business rules automatically. The smart contracts and other aspects of it. If you want to increase your revenues, you change your business model. If you increase your profits, you change your business model or your business rules. We would talk about business rules.
This is important because there aren’t a lot of places in which we can get information on models, on how to build the blockchain. What my process needs to be? What my tools are? What the team members are? When you look at that, there aren’t a lot of places because it hasn’t happened quite enough yet because it’s new. We need to know what models is it similar to that had been done elsewhere. That’s something you can bring great perspective too because you’ve done this so much.
Part of it is going to be what I mentioned, a broker model is one business model that will allow us to create things. There are a lot of other models that were yet to be invented. We were talking about Thomas Edison. His light bulb created a new business model and that is called generators and electrical distribution. In some of these ways, we’re going to generate new business models along the way. We’ll talk about what investors and executives have to consider as they conduct due diligence on project investments and what they’re going to say yes to and what you got to show them. Keep in mind that CEOs are looking three to five years out. You can actually do some long-term projects if they see that this is going to disrupt their competition or is required for them to stay in the business for the long haul. We’re going to look at the horizons of innovation, which you and I have talked about in the past and how to fit blockchain into those horizons. That’s a critical component.
The next is business model pivots. If you’re going to introduce blockchain into your business, you’re going to necessarily pivot your business model. What’s going to change? What’s going to stay the same for example, finance operations culture can change because of blockchain. Ethics can also change with blockchain. That’s an interesting conversation about that. If you’re part of this, we’re going to be discussing how this applies specifically to you and your company. We want to explore the blockchain and adjacent technology. Let’s find out what blockchain is going to plug into such as artificial intelligence or Internet of Things, mobility with 5G turning on blockchain is going to be a big part of the deployment of lots and lots of content with 5G streaming to one gig to twenty gig device. Then smart cities, smart houses, smart buses and smart schools are going to be a part of that. Wait until we start doing implants and become cyborgs. It’s not too far away. We’re seeing a lot of things at CES. We’re not that far away from implantables.
When people were talking 3D printed organs, I was down in San Diego and they were doing the ear with the implant for it. They were rebuilding an ear with the implant already in it. I was like, “We are not far at all.”
Of course the Millennials, they’ll be glad to tattoo and pierce anything. They’re already okay with body modification, which means that implants are a yes to a lot of people and even Boomers, “They get all things implanted such as pacemakers.” We want to take a look at what can be exploited commercially and business models. What business models are going to get disrupted, replaced and augmented by blockchain would be part of that conversation.
This is where I think a lot of companies can afford not to have somebody be thinking about this. Even if blockchain is not in your future vision, you should be aware of what’s going on because it could be disrupting your vision that you think you have.
If you’re a business that has any digital component to it, then you’ve got to pay attention to blockchain. You’ve got to pay attention to 5G technologies. 5G technology is going to be so disruptive and there are some interesting opportunities that are coming forth with 5G that’s going to drive blockchain adoption.
When I was conducting a lot of top-level interviews, the one thing that I get is the naysayers are strong, “Blockchain has no place in it. Google is going to live forever.” I’m sitting back thinking, “You are not open about what might be happening right under your nose.”
I always take a look at the naysayers as I do about futurists and say, “How good is your record?” I have some interesting elements that I plug into my crystal ball that allow me to be very accurate with my predictions. Sometimes I’m off on the timeline but as far as the predictions themselves, they’ve worked out well. One of those of course is Moore’s Law, the fact that technology doubles every twelve to eighteen months, which makes blockchain more and more attractive every year that goes by. The other is that we’re seeing substantial increases in compute power, which makes blockchain so much less expensive. I want to share with you around 5G. A recap, 5G is the next generation of cellular connection technology. The big deal there is sub-millisecond ping, which means that you have essentially instant load times for pages. You have one to twenty gigabit to your device, which is faster than most people have to their house. Actually, more bandwidth than that most corporate data centers have to the internet and it’s massive.
Another interesting aspect is that our mobile devices that’ll be running on 5G not the first generation, but probably second or third will have month-long battery life. With 5G, what’s going to happen is we’re going to have an adoption of technology called containers. Containers are essentially ultimate and virtualization for a compute power. Most computer centers run virtualized servers, which are the compute power of heavy lifting. What happens is we take a piece of hardware and we can put twenty different virtual servers in there. They’re soft machines, we have soft storage and we have soft networking. The container puts all that into a single software unit. If I have an application running in a container, I can run it in a data center, I can run it on a cell tower, I can run it on my mobile phone, I can run it anywhere that there’s compute power. What that allows me to do was very rapidly move where an application runs for either massive numbers of people or doing it personally.
How do we get paid for that container? That’s where blockchain comes into play. We’ll use blockchain to pay for the compute power, for the storage and the network. It will also use blockchain to pay for the license to run whatever application is inside that container. An example would be many people use Salesforce.com but they’re using it on Salesforce’s servers. In the future, you’ll be running your Salesforce instant within your own container. What that allows you to do is move it around so that you’re independent of Salesforce. If something goes down or if you lose networking, you still keep your business operational. That’s a business continuity strategy but it requires blockchain so everybody gets paid.
I can see that as being also highly valuable in security systems and other things that it’s going to keep working through. There’s an infrastructure reason that blockchain is going to force itself into almost all areas of the way that we work on, utilize the internet and utilize our devices.
The reality and a lot of it is going to be the key to the software apps that are going to be running, especially high-value app. For example, Oracle’s offered containerization of their databases for a couple of years now. It’s been around, this is not new technology. IBM bought Red Hat and they bought Red Hat for the container technology. We’re getting a little geeky but it’s important for our audience to understand that there are many things in play that are going to set us up for a blockchain explosion. The naysayers can say, “Whatever they like. Go ahead and retire. I don’t care.” Blockchain is an important part of our future.
Work is here to generate the lifestyle of our desire. Click To TweetMonika, Mark and I would like to invite you to converse with us about the necessity for the summit, your ideas for what you’d like to see, what you’re interested in. Make sure you communicate with us. If you’re in, if you’re interested in having this type of executive summit specifically focused on businesses that are exploring or are even already putting, stepping their toes into the blockchain and want to get that outward vision three to five years, we want you to communicate back with us and let us know. We’re pretty serious about wanting to sponsor this and get this going. The timing could be upgraded if you are interested. We want to make sure we’re communicating with all of you on that.
Besides that, I have the perfect venue that will allow us to live stream, they have the bandwidth to live stream. I’m sure that we’ll have a lot of people that would like to join us in person but also livestream.
With many businesses, it’s hard to take a full amount of time out of your business to travel somewhere and do it. Being able to virtually do it would be awesome.
Although you’re coming and taking two days as an executive to stop and put together your blockchain strategy would have a lot of opportunities or a lot of value to you.
That’s an accelerated motto. Mark, I always enjoy our conversations together. I love that we can get together and talk on all our shows because we’ve made that happen everywhere. Is there anything else you want our audience to know?
If you’d like to explore the Executive Strategy Summit, I hold it about every six weeks or so, ExecutiveStrategySummit.com. I want you and Tom to come or probably you and Alexandra come because CEOs, COOs together actually work well in this organization because you’ve got the strategic person, the tactical person both speaking the same language after the end of the summit.
Thank you so much. I appreciate that invite. Mark S A Smith, he’s been awesome. I knew you would love him. You can reach out to him. It’s one of my favorite shows, The Selling Disruption Show. It made my top list on Tribalist if you didn’t see it. We’re creating some new lists of things and Tribalist has my best business growth podcast list. That’s the first one I put up and you’re on it because selling disruption is so critically important. You’ve got some great guests on your show and I want to make sure our audience tie into that, especially if you’re in that executive leadership and executive level.
If you want to be, it’s both listen to learn and if you’re there, I’ve got lots of ideas. I’ve got fantastic guests, including you.
Thank you, Mark. We appreciate it. This has been the New Trust Economy, until next time.
Important Links:
- Bija Company
- The Selling Disruption Show
- Cherie Aimée – Previous episode
- Executive Strategy Summit
- Borsetta
- Pamela Norton – Previous episode on Product Launch Hazzards
- Salesforce.com
- Tribalist
- http://ExecutiveStrategySummit.com
About Mark S A Smith
Working in the world of technology since 1982, Mark has used systems thinking to help organizations successfully bring new, disruptive technology to market, learning the secret to conducting conversations with customers who don’t think they want or need what’s being sold. In every case, he’s been up against the aggressive competition and identified ways to routinely win the business, even in tough markets.
Mark works with executives and their teams to develop strategy and elegant go-to-market models that are easy to execute, measure, and manage, and create a clear competitive advantage. He’s worked in 54 countries and six continents.
Heading his own consulting company since 1990, he’s researched & developed models and methods to predictably conduct successful executive-level meetings when multiple people must come to a conclusion to make important decisions. The result: his clients sell complex, expensive products and services as fast as humanly possible.
Mark is an electrical engineer, media technologist, computer programmer, hardware salesman, a software marketer, business owner, executive coach, author, professional speaker, video producer, podcaster (The Selling Disruption™ Show), blogger, musician, and father of five Millennial children who does not live at home.
Mark’s authored many books, business case assessment tools, sales playbooks, go-to-market strategy guides, sales channel launch plans, business plan tools, video-based training systems, corporate webinars, and hundreds of articles and blogs. Books include Pivot to Profit from IT Disruption, Security in the Boardroom, Linux in the Boardroom, Guerrilla Negotiating, Guerrilla TeleSelling, & Guerrilla Trade Show Selling. Forthcoming: Selling Disruption & Executive Strategy Skills.
Clients include Arrow Electronics, Agilysis, BEA, Broadcom, CDW, ConnectWise, Commvault, Dell, ePlus, Forrester Research, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft, IBM, IPED Consulting, Internal Consulting Group, Ingram Micro, Insight, Tech Data, Oracle, Raytheon, Ruckus, NetApp, Sanmina, Synnex, Lexmark, Viavi Solutions, Society of Government Meeting Planners, National Speakers Association, and Meeting Professionals International.