Come and take a look on how the future will be, and how to prepare for it

A few days ago Mark Reuss, head of development at General Motors, announced that GM believes the future will certainly, be for the electric car. Not just words: GM will produce 20 electric models in the next 6 years. In the same period Ford will launch 13 models. The biggest automakers in the world take this historical change for granted. Imagine what this means for the oil market and for Brazil.

At the same time, Google introduced its earphones language that translate the audio, in real time, from one language to the other, as in Startrek’s science fiction movie.

With those three news, only last week, we can conclude: the future is coming much faster than we imagined.

Wayne Gretzky, the greatest ice hockey player in history, said his secret was to run where the ball was going and not where it was at that moment. This means that either we try to predict the future, or our business and career will be driven by outside forces, just as it happened with taxi drivers when Uber arrived. It may be that our area is not directly and immediately impacted, but the effects will reach us: increased competition, decreased purchasing power of our customers … or, who knows, our costs may decrease opening new markets possibilities!

Innovation opens new opportunities, for example: learning has never been so cheap thanks to online courses as well as communication with customers through Facebook and Whatsapp, selling online has also become easier through sites like eBay and OLX. Once you understand what you need, finding and using a tool is easy. Sidney, for example, is an active hairdresser in the Turística neighborhood who uses a system to remind the scheduled hour for a customer via SMS. The customer can even see if there are any free openings.

Being aware and being curious about the changes we see (and knowing English) are attitudes that are becoming more and more important. Learning something new is part of the weekly tasks, so choosing what to learn and how much time to devote are key skills.

In addition to attitudes and skills, a great wealth in this time of accelerated change are personal relationships, the value of knowing someone who can show you a good course, help you understand how the market is evolving or give an opinion about a new easy and useful tool. Entrepreneur Roque, who owns a grocery store, instead of lowering prices like all his competitors, has decided to react to the crisis by focusing on the 50 closest customers families, narrowing relationships and individualized services to increase customer loyalty. As all experts confirm, empathy-based businesses are likely to be the least impacted by innovation.

Aventura de Construir October’s training is aiming to help in this context. We will interact with Vaney Fornazieri, Seepix Digital director, a digital communication agency in São Paulo. Besides working for a large, fast-moving industry for many years, he will tell us what it’s like to live in California’s Silicon Valley nowadays (a little anticipation: there are not only autonomous cars there – but among a thousand other things – drones that deliver goods and laboratory produced food) and how he is preparing himself for the future.