The Profit Prophet

In collaboration with Barry Thornton. In the Shared Economy two or more parties (or companies), each of which has a signifi cant part of what is needed to cause a transaction to occur, come together and pool their resources and in the processes also take part in the sharing the revenues of the transaction. In the “old sense” it is almost like a barter situation, but in the new sense it is more complicated. It is actually the thought of sharing the risk and sharing the rewards. A good example today would be something like a UBER , AirBnB , and Zipcar . UBER has become successful not by buying fleets of cars and hiring thousands of drivers, but instead sharing a know resource (car owners with free time), to solve an existing problem (getting someone without a car from point A to point B). UBER makes its money by offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that allows car owners to charge clients a fare for their rides, much the same as a taxi does. Unlike a taxi service,...

Over the 100,000 plus years we and our brains have been evolving. During that time, our minds have grown past our primitive lizard brains and as such have brought us intelligence; which in turn has allowed humans to accomplish some fantastic things. Even with all that time and evolution, we and our brains are still guided by these four most important motivators: avoiding threats, minimizing energy, seeking certainty (reducing risk) and obtaining rewards (increasing pleasure). It is easy to see why these four conditions motivate us not to change, because change usually involved reducing certainty while simultaneously increasing risk and expending energy, often without any guarantee of obtaining a reward. Essentially, due to in a large part to our primordial past, when we find ourselves confronted with change, either on a personal level or say at your company, all the fears from our lizard brain are triggered. So, how can we get past those fears and anxieties that our gene...