Fast Forward Your Business

Fast Forward
your
Roger James Hamilton

8 paths to hyper-growth

Business

How to surf the waves of change

Fast Forward your Business 8 Paths to Hyper-growth

Copyright 2012 Roger James Hamilton Published by Entrepreneurs Institute 1st Edition, February 2012

www.wealthdynamicscentral.com

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“... and then I flew.”

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I have a hunch
I have a hunch that we’re almost the same, you and I. We seek out smarter ways to do things. We like meaningful connections and purposeful work. We are excited by a life of entrepreneurship. A part of us is unconquerable, and another part is a quivering wreck - inspired and anxious depending on the time of day. Sound familiar? I would almost say we’re like two peas in a pod. “How could he?” you might ask, as we may not have met. It’s OK. I won’t say that, because we’re not - unless it’s mushy peas. We’re all in the same boat - in the same pod, but it’s all a big mess. Like the Internet or a traffic jam, it’s all part of the same mush to someone on the outside. Botanists look at a cocoon, hanging like a pod on a plant, and call the things inside imaginal cells. It’s a big mush inside there, because the parts that used to be a caterpillar have turned into a soup. These imaginal cells are like atomic peas in a pod. They have no idea that POOF, like magic some become antennae, some combine into wings, and other eyes, and butterfly feet. In business we find caterpillars and butterflies - those who tried to fly before they should, and others who didn’t realize they could. This book is about hyper-growth - not the fat caterpillar kind, but the metamorphosis kind. This book is about you and me, the imaginal cells, and how greatness emerges from mere mortals like us.
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Contents
I have a hunch From Silicon Valley to Silicon Bali PART 1 - The Compass Warning! Already past sell-by-date From fast food to fresh food Let’s start with a story of GENIUS Opposing paths to hyper-growth The four dimensions of flow The eight paths to flow Creator: Creating a better product Star: Promoting a brighter brand Supporter: Leading the team Deal maker: Bringing people together Trader: Buying low, selling high Accumulator: Collecting growing assets Lord: Controlling cash flow Mechanic: Perfecting a better system Connect to your profile Too much information! Facebook success strategies Hold your horses! A million reasons to smile Everyone’s a genius 4 7 10 11 12 13 16 18 20 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 38 41

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PART 2 - The Map Wave 1: A.I. Everywhere How to surf the A.I. wave Personal plans for everyone! Watch Wave 1 Wave 2: Friction is fiction How to surf a frictionless wave All you need is a kickstart Watch Wave 2 Wave 3: The power of consumption Learning how to crowd surf Returning the money with Pinterest Watch Wave 3 The Magic Key Money making machines The five frequencies Creator hyper-growth Star hyper-growth Supporter hyper-growth Deal maker hyper-growth Trader hyper-growth Accumulator hyper-growth Lord hyper-growth Mechanic hyper-growth Attitude vs altitude The Wealth Spectum What’s your million dollar question? Connecting the dots

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From Silicon Valley to Silicon Bali
Why have I written this book? I have been an entrepreneur all my life. I have had my ups and downs. I studied Architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, and soon found I preferred building businesses to buildings. I failed many times in my 20’s, learning with every failure, and by 30 I had secured funding from a large venture capital firm, 3i PLC, to grow my publishing firm in Asia. This led to a multi-million dollar sale, and the creation of Wealth Dynamics, a profiling system for entrepreneurs to follow their flow - based on my belief (and experience) that when we find our flow, our success accelerates effortlessly. In my 30’s the popularity of Wealth Dynamics led to me traveling to over 20 different countries, speaking to entrepreneurs and growing our social entrepreneur network. I was riding a wave that carried me to New York in 2008, where I received an award from President Bill Clinton for the philanthropy work I was doing. On that trip I met entrepreneurs like Larry Page, the founder of Google, and Chad Hurley the founder of Youtube. It was a whole new world: I felt so old. They were both billionaires, much younger than me, and had surfed a technology wave that I had missed altogether. I saw new waves were forming, and I knew that I would miss them too if I didn’t smarten up. I joined a new institute in Silicon Valley based at the NASA research centre, called ‘Singularity University’. Launched by Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize that has led
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to the launch of commercial space travel, and Ray Kurzweil, author of ‘The Singularity is Near’, this think tank brings together the leading pioneers in technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, entrepreneurship and philanthropy. Through this journey, I saw that every pioneer at the cutting edge had something called “Future Presence”: A clarity about the future and how it might impact us. “It’s easier to kick a ball by going to where it’s going to be, than by chasing it from where it came.” I moved to Bali with my family and asked the question: “Could I run my businesses, make a difference, and stay on the cutting edge from a beach in Bali?” I focused at mastering my own ‘Future Presence’. That meant changing what news I looked at each day, who I followed, and what I focused on. We all know that the same silicon that we find in computers, we also find in the clarity of glass and the feel of sand under our feet. I began a three year quest to create my own “Silicon Bali”. What I learned was this: Not only was it possible to run my businesses from a beach in Bali, but the changes I had to make to the business, the way I managed them, what I chose to measure, the technology we used and the global outlook and perspective I gained made my businesses run better this way than before - with less of my time. Of course, this wasn’t all smooth sailing. There was daily trial and error, to see what work and what didn’t. But things formed around a template that I had envisaged - We bought the resort in Bali that I had on my vision board, I got involved in supporting the Green School in Bali, which is transforming education and the environment, I stay connected with entrepreneurs around the world each day
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with the Wealth Dynamics system online, our Talent Dynamics business to corporations is growing, as is the XL Nation Incubator for social entrepreneurs. I am in the middle of my own personal journey, as you are too. What we have in common in the success we achieve (if you subscribe to the same principles I share in this book), is that we stand by a simple code: We live what we love and we love what we live. I cherish my time in Bali, and have worked out how to use the latest tools in technology to keep current (something that wasn’t possible even five years ago). These tools will all change in five years time, and keeping current is all about keeping connected. I run my ‘Fast Forward’ tour every year to Australia (in March), USA (in June), Europe & Africa (in September) to connect face-to-face with entrepreneurs and thought leaders. It is during these tours that I share what I am doing, hear what others are doing, and invite the leaders I connect with to share their strategies with the audience to achieve sustainable success. As you read this book, if you find value in what I share, and resonate with my message, let’s connect. Why have I written this book? It takes more than two imaginal cells to make a butterfly. As I meet other like-minded people around the world, I’ve experienced a deep sense of shared purpose. I’m sure you have felt the same. I’ve written this book as part of my own efforts in connecting the dots - The dots between the present and future; Between the global picture and our personal circumstances; Between our current challenges, and our future, collective success. We’re in this together. Keep making magic, Roger James Hamilton
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PART 1

The Compass

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Warning! Already past sell-by-date
This book is about the future, and how it impacts you today. Unfortunately, it is already out-of-date (as I wrote it in the past). This is a tricky problem for most authors. They try and write books that are timeless, and avoid anything that might ‘date’ the writing. I am going to do the opposite! You’ll see me write about things that happened this week and even yesterday. Today is February 6th 2012. I am sitting in my resort in Bali, Vision Villas, and I am writing this in full knowledge that what I write will be out-of-date by the time you read this. “The future ain’t what it used to be.” - Yogi Berra The future’s speed of arrival keeps accelerating, and I know I will need to update this book often. There will be upgrades in the same way that the iPhone has already had an iPhone 2, 3, 4, 4S and soon 5. In the same way that this book is already out-of-date, your products are also already out-of-date. So are your forecasts, your assumptions and your winning formulas. The good news is, your problems are also out-of-date. My hope is that the coming pages knock your socks off, and you realize that what you’re worried about or what’s stopping you will simply evaporate, and be replaced with an entirely new world of opportunity and action.
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From fast food to fresh food
My kids don’t like McDonald’s. I was brought up in the fast food generation, so it was normal for our parents to take us to McDonald’s or Burger King. My children, on the other hand, are living in a fresh food generation. My fast food mentality goes beyond a quick bite. I’ve been conditioned to demand everything as a quick snack - My information, my learning, resources I need for my business, data on my customers, ideas for improvement. I don’t even mind if it’s old or full of artificial additives, as long as it’s packaged nicely and available instantly. That’s why the younger generation are beating us in business. The new generation of entrepreneurs don’t want a nicely packaged book that’s nicely preserved but ten years old. They don’t want teachers who teach from text books. They don’t want products preserved in stale brands. In a world of fresh food, they want real, authentic, home grown truth. Authentic, sustainable growth doesn’t occur once the fruit has left the tree, but while we’re still connected. Here’s the deal I want to strike with you: I’ll keep all the content in this book connected to real live examples and the trends taking place right now in the world, if you promise to connect this same content to your personal journey, to apply what’s relevant immediately and throw away the rest. Don’t look for fancy packaging, artificial sweeteners or quick fixes. If that feels good, go and throw out everything in your own business that isn’t fresh.
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Let’s start with a story of GENIUS
It was the year 1994. I remember it well. I was in my 20’s and had grown my company, Cityscapes, into a national publisher in England. We had pictorial, tourist maps covering 40 cities. Every map had 3D pictorial images of all the buildings, and colorful logos of our advertising retailers, from the national banks and local traders to every phone booth (remember them?) which British Telecom paid for at ten british pounds per booth. To create a map, we went through the painstaking process of visiting every single shop in each city centre, asking for them to advertise and to sell the maps in their stores. Year by year over four years we amassed a geographic database of every retail outlet in every major city centre in England. We never thought this would be of any value to anyone outside of our little maps. Having covered all of the cities, with nowhere else to go, I thought we had reached our limits of the business. Thinking technology was the only way for us to grow, I began investigating the latest in touch-screen kiosks. Something called an ATM was being installed in banks! Perhaps our maps could be on a touch screen display to help lost travelers? It turned out to be too expensive and impractical, and I gave up on the idea. Disillusioned, I sold the business to a printing company. The sale didn’t go well. I made all sorts of mistakes and ended up with far less than I expected.

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To make matters worse, I had changed the business into a limited company on the advice of experts when I sold it, and then - while sitting at home wondering what to do next - I received a big bill from the tax man for past profits, which I was now personally liable for. It was more than I had taken in salary in the last two years... With more debt than I knew what to do with, I heard of something new called the Internet. Apparently it was all driven by data. Within a few years, the first big Internet companies, AOL, Compuserve and others, started buying up anyone with local databases. A company similar to ours, called MapQuest, collected local data just like ours. They sold to AOL four years later for $1.1 billion. Needless to say, the headline of this chapter “Let’s start with a story of GENIUS”, is not referring to me. It refers to Dennis Crowley who, at 26 years old in 2003, wanted an easy way to let his friends know which bar he was in. These were the early days of text messaging, when many people were still using pagers. Unlike my way of thinking with Cityscapes, where I had little understanding of where technology and people’s habits were changing, Dennis thought people would begin to use group sms to let friend know where they were. He turned his idea into a business called “Dodgeball”, using existing sms technology and Google maps. Google bought the business two years later (in 2005) for $1 million. Google didn’t expect sms services to be replaced by smart phones so quickly, and ended up closing “Dodgeball” a few year later. Dennis kept the million dollars. What did Dennis do? Here’s where GENIUS comes in. He simply repeated his thinking that people want to let their friends know where they are, now using smartphones.
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In the same year that the iPhone came out, he launched a new company called “Foursquare”. It was the same idea, now on the iPhone and Android. Two years later, it has over 15 million users, 3 million check-ins each day, and in the last round of funding is now worth $600 million. Unlike my efforts to visit each store or restaurant, Dennis has his customers do it for him. Unlike my failure to act on the wave coming, he set himself to surf it as it arrived. Most importantly, it wasn’t some brilliant ‘idea’ that made him successful, The ‘idea’ is simply the surf board to stand on. It was his willingness to embrace the wave without getting attached to it. This is the key behind ‘future presence’. It is to be willing to embrace the waves as they appear, and to be looking out for them as they emerge. In the coming chapters, I will highlight three waves that will impact your business in the coming year. This is a map of the future. Before we do that, though, we need a compass to ensure you are on the right track for you. The REAL genius move behind Dennis’ story is not starting Foursquare. After all, he had a secure job at Google after selling Dodgeball. The real genius move was that he knew he was built to start companies, not work for them, so he quit Google in 2007 - two years before they closed down Dodgeball and two years before he started Foursquare. He kept to a path that would keep him in flow - starting new things. You also have a personal path. This is the compass that you need to navigate the map, and this is the subject of the next chapter.

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Opposing paths to hyper-growth
In the last nine years I have seen the results that entrepreneurs have achieved once they gain the insights of their natural path to flow. Flow is that state where things occur effortlessly because you are following what you are naturally good at. I have seen entrepreneurs apply the principals of the Wealth Dynamics profiling system to understand themselves, their teams, partners and customers better. In recent years, I have also seen what happens when it is used like a surfboard to surf a wave. Results go from growth, to hyper-growth. How do we reconcile a success story like Dennis Crowley, who started a company that went into hyper-growth, with the success story of someone like Peter Thiel? Peter studied philosophy at Stanford. He left to trade derivatives for Credit Suisse, and then in 1999 got together with some of his friends to start Confinity - to have a way to take payments on a Palm Pilot (remember them?). Peter had no technical knowledge but was seen as the ‘people person’ and became the CEO. The Palm Pilot began to decline, and Peter put on his ‘dealmaking’ hat. Instead of trying to sell, as Dennis had done, he merged with a company called X.com and rebranded as ‘Paypal’. While his team focused at the product, he focused at the market, where online auctions began booming.

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The auction giant, eBay launched Billpoint to clear auction payments, but made it exclusive to just eBay auctions. Peter focused PayPal as the alternative payment system, and as the auction market grew, PayPal became far bigger than Billpoint. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and Peter walked away with $55 million from his 3.7% stake. Did he, like Dennis, try and start a new business? No. That wasn’t what Peter does naturally. Instead, he invested in other start-ups. His future presence is not in products. It’s in people. He has followed an entirely different part from Dennis, but it is his natural path. Ten years later, at the beginning of 2012, Peter’s investments had turned his $55 million into $1.5 billion. He invested in Youtube and LinkedIn, and became Mark Zuckerberg’s first outside investor in Facebook in 2004. Peter made news again in the last month, when Facebook announced its IPO. His $500,000 investment in Facebook eight years ago is now worth $2.5 billion today. In the Wealth Dynamics profiling system, Dennis is a ‘Creator’ and Peter is a ‘Deal Maker’. What profile are you, and how will this make all the difference to your future? The answer begins by understanding the four dimensions to hyper-growth. Remember - These are just two of many stories you will read in this book that are live and unfolding. Each one began within the last decade, and many I share will show hyper-growth within the last year. Every one of them are based on entrepreneurs courageous enough to stay on their natural path, without getting distracted by the advice or pressures of others. They understood the four dimensions of hyper-growth, what to follow, what not to follow, what to do and what not to do.
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The four dimensions of flow
Here is a crash course in Wealth Dynamics: Before we start any game, we need to know the rules. Entrepreneurship is a game, and there are rules to this game. The first rule of the game is that all flow in our economies occurs through a simple equation: Wealth = Value x Leverage Think of a river in which the height differential of the river controls the speed of water flow. In the same way, value differential in a product or transaction controls the speed of money flow: More value equals faster flow. Think of a river of any gradient, and it also has a width. The width controls the volume of water flow at that speed. In the same way, leverage in a market or system controls the volume of money flow at the speed that value is exchanged. More leverage equals greater flow. Growth in a business or brand comes from increase in value or in leverage. This is the plumbing we all follow. Hypergrowth comes when the river becomes a Niagara Falls. This is when the increase in value or in leverage grows exponentially - such as Dennis’s leverage with 15 million users adding 3 million pieces of content every day, or Peter’s $2 billion value gain when Facebook shares become open for the public to buy.
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Wealth Dynamics is based on there being two opposite ways to create value and two opposite ways to leverage. Just like Dennis and Peter, you have a natural tendency to one of the opposing dimensions in how you naturally create value and leverage. If you focus on the wrong dimension, everything will feel like hard work. Just because it works for your mentors, doesn’t mean it will work for you. The two opposites in value are innovation, and timing. This is based on what’s called your ‘thinking dynamic’ - are you more an intuitive thinker with your ‘head in the clouds’ (creating value through innovation), or more of a sensory thinker with your ‘ear to the ground’ (creating value through timing)? Dennis is more ‘head in the clouds’, and loves starting new things. He is a Creator like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs and is in his flow creating. Peter is more ‘ear to the ground’, and loves reading the market, and people. He is a Deal Maker like Donald Trump and Michael Ovitz. Depending on your natural profile, you will need a different team to succeed, and to stay in your flow. The two opposites in leverage are multiply, and magnify. This is based on what’s called your ‘action dynamic’ - do you have an introvert dynamic, where you naturally ‘make things simple and make many’ (leverage through multiplying), or do you have an extrovert dynamic, where you naturally ‘make things complicated and make only one’ (leverage through magnifying)? Dennis has more strength in systems and strategy, and as a Creator is great at starting businesses that rely on both. Peter has far more of a strength in people than systems, and as a Deal maker who is great at timing and people, he will have others take care of the engineering and technology.
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The eight paths to flow
Have you ever walked into a cinema showing a 3D movie, and the screen was a blur? Everyone watching has their 3D glasses on. You put yours on, and suddenly the blurred images become clear. They also jump into three dimensions which means you don’t just see a clear picture, you see more than a picture. You see in 3D. This is the same effect you will experience when you look at the chaos of change around us through the lens of Wealth Dynamics. You suddenly see why different authors and speakers give you opposite advice. You see why some things you’ve tried are so hard, and some are so easy. You notice what you should focus at, and what you can ignore. Like one of my Cityscape maps of London (you see, they’re still useful for something!), a map is of little use unless you know clearly where you want to go. There are eight paths that make up the Wealth Dynamics square. Each has a different combination of how they naturally create value and leverage. The profiles at the top of the square have a ‘Dynamo’ frequency with their ‘head in the clouds’ (Creators, Stars and Mechanics). The profiles at the base of the square have a ‘Tempo’ frequency with their ‘ear to the ground’ (Traders, Deal makers and Accumulators). The profiles to the right of the square have a ‘Blaze’ frequency with an extrovert action dynamic (Supporters, Stars and Deal makers); and the profiles to the left of the square have a ‘Steel’ frequency with an introvert action dynamic (Lords, Accumulators and Mechanics).
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The Wealth Dynamics Square

As well as looking each profile having a path that flows with their natural way of creating value and leveraging, they flow through a cycle where the four dimensions match the four seasons: ‘Dynamo’ is spring energy, ‘Blaze’ is summer energy, ‘Tempo’ is autumn energy and ‘Steel’ is winter energy. As a business goes through these four seasons, different leaders emerge with the natural strengths that match with what is required. Similarly as an industry goes through each season, the opportunity moves from one profile to the next. This is critical to pay attention to as we see industries change rapidly. It is the reason great entrepreneurs appear to have an uncanny ability to be at the right place at the right time. They already know which wave to catch.
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Creator
Creating a better product
Creators are great at getting things started, and terrible at finishing. They are the high in Dynamo energy, and are always using their quick thinking and imagination to get out of trouble. Their flow comes from expressing their creativity in valuable ways. Creators can’t resist creating. They keep creating long after they’ve run out of resources, money, and other people’s patience. In fact, they have their greatest creative breakthroughs after most others would have given up. Before Walt Disney’s first animated movie was finished, his distributor went bankrupt. Before his second movie was finished, he ran out of money himself. To produce the now famous “Steamboat Willie” featuring Mickey Mouse in 192, strapped for cash, he wrote to his brother Roy: “Slap a big mortgage on everything we got and let’s go after this thing in the right manner.” Many Creators fail because of their over-optimism as to what their business and their team can achieve. This optimism has led many to take on far too much, leaving them little time to do what they do best. Successful Creators delegate everything except the creative process itself – they focus on creating new products, or new companies, and others take care of the day-to-day business. Billionaire Creators, who share a common strategy to achieve their successes, include Bill Gates, Richard Branson and the late, great Steve Jobs.
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Star
Promoting a brighter brand
Stars are excellent promoters and are high in both Dynamo and Blaze energy. They are quick on their feet and can sometimes seem to dominate the conversation. Stars are best when they use their sparkle to shine the light on others more than themselves. The Creators set the stage, and the Stars steal the show. Stars get their most valuable feedback in the limelight, and find their flow while on their feet. As a result, they are able to evolve their attraction on the fly, and it is their personal magnetism that is their greatest value. Stars are naturals at creating a unique identity for themselves. It is their personal brand that attracts others. By magnifying their brand, they quickly magnify their attraction. Failed Stars do not realize this and have been attempting to build their wealth by improving their products, their systems or their teams – none of which come as naturally. Stars also get frustrated that others can’t do what they can do, and so make poor managers without the right deputies. Successful Stars are happy to leverage on the products and platform of others in order to perform their magic. They lead from the front with their name shining in lights, while others count the receipts. Billionaire Stars, who share the same winning (and, often losing!) formulas in their path to success, include Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart.

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Supporter
Leading the team
Supporters are excellent with people, and will always be found in the middle of the party. They are strong Blaze energy and often distracted supporting others. Their flow comes from being actively involved in leading others in fun and worthwhile adventures While Stars are busy shining, Supporters are busy lighting up others. Supporters are the strongest leaders, as they can translate value into action through people. They are masters at energizing teams by giving them the confidence they need to succeed. They supply the glue without which great plans would crumble. Many Supporters struggle to find the right business to start, despite their fabulous network. This is because they are asking themselves what business they should start, when they should be asking themselves which value creator they should support. Steve Ballmer has led Microsoft, giving Bill Gates the space to create, and his shares in Bill’s company now give him a net worth of over $1 billion. Some of the most successful Supporters can also be found in their own businesses – such as in public relations, headhunting and consulting where others will pay big bucks for access to the people they know. Where others would take months to find the right person, it often takes Supporters just one phone call. Notable Supporters include Jack Welch, Michael Eisner, Steve Case and Meg Whitman.

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Deal maker
Bringing people together
Deal Makers are strong in Blaze and Tempo energy, so they are down-to-earth. They have a strong sense of timing and loyalty, and always make sure everyone is OK. They are best when connecting people and ideas together for everyone’s benefit. Like Stars and Supporters, Deal Makers leverage by magnifying out in front. While Stars are high in the sky, however, Deal Makers have their ear to the ground: Creating value through timing, not innovation, and living in the present. Successful Deal Makers tend to catch the imagination of the business world, with their sweeping gestures that make millions in a moment. Of all the profiles, the Deal Makers rely most on the relationships around them. While a Star’s value grows as they become less accessible, a Deal Maker’s value grows as they become more accessible. They are constantly on the phone and on the move. They create their wealth by spotting connections in the market. Once the deal is done, the new value created enriches everyone involved. Struggling Deal Makers are often stuck trying to start a business or caught up in detail, as the idea of wheeling and dealing, wining and dining, just sounds like too much fun! Every successful Deal Maker has picked a niche from which to attract the best deals in their market. Celebrated Deal Makers include Donald Trump, David Geffen and Rupert Murdoch.
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Trader
Buying low, selling high
Traders have their ear-to-the-ground, with strong Tempo energy. They will always know who upset who, and how to keep things fair. Quiet by nature, they will often only share if asked, and find their flow in keeping the peace and keeping things on time. Traders are masters of timing but, unlike Deal Makers who make their money by bringing assets and resources together, Traders will buy and sell the assets and make their money from the spread. Extrovert Traders will do this where they can influence the price through hard bargaining. Introvert Traders prefer to trade through analysis rather than face-to-face bidding, and include many of today’s successful market traders. While Creators need to immerse themselves to create their wealth, Traders need to detach themselves. If markets were symphonies, the Creators are the composers while the Traders are the conductors. Value comes from waiting for and surfing the right wave while others get caught in the current. Many failed Traders have never taken control of the trade. As reliable and hard-working employees, they may see either the buy side or the sell side of a transaction within the company they work for, but often never the two together. Only when they are in control of both sides will Traders become aware of the natural talent that they have. Famous Trader profiles include George Soros, Peter Lynch, John Templeton and Jim Rogers.
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Accumulator
Collecting growing assets
Accumulators are excellent project managers and researchers. They have strong Tempo and Steel energy, and are always careful in their work. Don’t expect them to be overly creative. Their flow comes from collecting and organising what’s already there. While Traders create wealth by accelerating money flow, Accumulators create wealth by decelerating it. Rather than making money by buying and selling off waves, they make money by buying and holding on rising tides. Steady and dependable, if the profiles were compared to a football team, the Stars would be the strikers while the Accumulators would be the keepers. While Stars are quick to spend, Accumulators are quick to save. Accumulators often fail as a result of keeping too much to themselves, rather than building the advocates who will network on their behalf. They rarely act on impulse, and fail if they have not set the criteria to take action. Accused of procrastinating, they simply need more data to make an informed decision. Once Accumulators connect to the right team, are quickly uplifted while keeping the team grounded. They ensure that everything is in order and that what needs to get done gets done on time. Successful Accumulators are happy to remain down-to-earth, holding the kite strings while others fly high. Successful Accumulators include Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, and Li Ka Shing
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Lord
Controlling cash flow
Lords are great at the detail, with strong Steel energy. They won’t be the loudest voice in the room, but are the best at researching and studying information and coming up with considered decisions. They are best when looking after all the details. Lords love the detail, and are renowned for their thrift. They can squeeze out the cash flow from assets without needing to own the assets. Rockefeller became a billionaire in the oil industry without needing to own a single oil well. Mittal has become a billionaire in the steel industry without needing to own a single mine. Whether commodity Lords or land Lords, they have the patience to collect and crank up every cent of cash flow they find. While extrovert Supporters value people over numbers, introvert Lords value numbers over people, and don’t have time for politics or niceties. Lords love certainty and hate risk. They prefer to keep to themselves, and those who haven’t yet found their wealth often fail to see their analytical skills, risk aversion and need for control as their greatest strengths. Successful Lords are unrelenting once they find their niche, with the ability to consistently generate cash flow without the need for either innovation or timing, weathering market conditions and acquiring the competition until they are dominating entire industries. Successful Lords include Andrew Carnegie, Lakshmi Mittal, and Sergey Brin.
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Mechanic
Perfecting a better system
Mechanics are the best at completing things. They are high on Steel and Dynamo energy. As perfectionists they sometimes seem take longer to get things done. Their flow comes from taking things apart and finding better ways to put them back together. If Creators need to have their head in the clouds, then Mechanics need to have their finger in the pie. While Creators are great at starting things, Mechanics are great at finishing things. They are perfectionists, which is why they cannot resist finding ways to do things better. While Stars twinkle, Mechanics tinker. They get hands-on with their systems and prefer to study how to improve things with their hands dirty. Many Mechanics have yet to get going because they are still trying to figure out what business to start. Many Mechanics have companies with better systems than their competitors, but they have not leveraged these systems with stronger products produced by others, or their business is limited by their autocratic management style and high staff turnover. Successful Mechanics remain hands-on, fine-tuning their systems long after they have delegated many other areas of their business to others. This is where they see the greatest results, and where they gain the most satisfaction. Successful Mechanics include Henry Ford, Ray Kroc, Sam Walton, and Michael Dell.
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Connect to your profile
Here are two videos to give you a deeper insight into the Wealth Dynamics system:

Wealth Dynamics in 10 Minutes

Seven Truths of Wealth Dynamics View more videos on each profile Take the Wealth Dynamics test

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Too much information!
We used to live in a world of not enough information. We had no Internet to look things up or watch videos or ask someone the answer. Today we have the opposite. We live in a world of too much information. When you have too many options, you get paralyzed by choice. Opportunity cost goes up, as any decision means deleting all the others. So we decide not to decide. Or we try and do too many things all at once. The solution to ‘not enough information’ is more information. The solution to ‘too much information’ is more direction. If you know where you want to go, you can immediately delete all the noise. Information is like static. Direction is the music. Wealth Dynamics gives you a clear direction - a station on the radio dial so you recognize your music, you can tune in to your radio station and get a clear signal. In the following pages, I’ll share the map - the information what’s changing in the world and where the waves are emerging. Tune in to your frequency - your Wealth Dynamics profile - and see how much clearer it sounds. If you like the game, and you’re ready to play, come and join me at one of my Fast Forward events. I look forward to seeing you there!

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Facebook Success Strategies
I met Mari Smith at an event in Las Vegas in 2008. She took my Wealth Dynamics profile and came out as a Supporter. This was no surprise to her, as she loves people, and connecting comes naturally. Mari had just begun coaching people on how to use Facebook. She kept focused at building her brand, keeping up with the latest changes in Facebook, serving her customers, connecting directly and answering questions daily. Her consistent presence and daily activity made her a trusted source of information and advice. By the beginning of 2012, she had over 62,000 fans on her Facebook Fan page, and another 140,000+ subscribers to her personal Facebook page. 14,000 people registered for a webinar she ran at the end of January 2012, where she launched her training program “Extreme Fan base Growth.” Mari’s story is inspirational. It shows that you don’t need to build a big company to grow a global business anymore. You don’t need a big corporate brand when you have a trusted personal brand. Should you be inspired by Mari’s story? Yes! Should you try and copy her strategy? NO! In Wealth Dynamics, Mari’s strategy is a typical “Blaze” strategy. It works brilliantly for Supporters who love daily connection, building and giving loyalty, and responding to their network. In good times and tough times, Mari got pleasure out of interacting with her network.

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For other profiles, such a high level of interaction would be tiring. So what other options are there for success with Facebook? Alex Bernstein spent four seasons in the NFL as an offensive linesman. Naturally creative, he started a company called Echo to consult to companies on their digital marketing, and then worked for Virgin Digital in business development. If he had followed a path similar to Mari, he could have built a personal brand on Facebook and sold his expertise in digital marketing. But Alex isn’t the kind of guy to be in communication each day with large numbers of people. It would have been hard work. Instead, in 2010 soon after Facebook Pages launched, he saw the need for easy ways that companies could build their brands. He launched ‘North Social’ to build tools that companies could use to promote and manage themselves on Facebook. As a Creator profile, he saw more value in building products than building his personal brand. Within a year, the company’s Facebook apps were being used by 1,300 organisations. The company had built enough momentum that Alex sold North Social to marketing software company, Vocus for $25 million, with $7 million in cash and $18 million based on the next two years performance, which he is in the middle of right now. Alex is not a techie, but he is a Creator. This is an example of a Dynamo strategy, for those who are naturally better at building products and businesses. In fact, Mari in her Blaze strategy is happy to promote Facebook Apps from all different companies as they support her network. This is the power of being clear on your profile. By doing one thing well, you become of value to all the other profiles who are doing their thing well. Your value becomes their leverage.
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Those are two very different strategies on Facebook, on the top and right of the Wealth Dynamics square. What about the Tempo strategy at the bottom and the Steel strategy to the right? Jack Nickell was a struggling art student in Chicago, when he entered an online T-shirt design competition and got his friends to vote for him. He won $1,000 prize money, so used it to start up Threadless, a community which would let artists submit their T-shirt designs, that people could then vote for. Jack is a Trader profile, which means he’s sensory, values his friendships, but frankly would rather others do the creation while he manages the transactions. The Tempo strategy that Jack followed was reactive to the market (the opposite to the Dynamo strategy of giving the market a product they didn’t know they needed until they saw it). As he says, “So many of the decisions that we’ve made in the company in the last ten years have been things I never could have predicted. And since we’re a community-driven company, I can’t sit here and say, “this is what our community is going to want.” The one thing I know that we will be doing in the next ten years is listening to them.” In Facebook, Jack saw a way to mold it to suit Threadless. He doesn’t market his personal brand or sell marketing apps. Instead, he uses it to empower the Threadless community. Their Fan Page lets designers enter contests, lets participants ‘like’ their favourites, so voting is done through the Facebook system. You can buy the T-Shirts with the winning designs, see the artist leader board and join the latest Threadless Meetup in your local city. Today, Threadless has 85,000 artists submitting 300,000 designs, and 1.2 million participants voting. Their Facebook page features meetups in over 100 cities around the world, and has over 410,000 fans.
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When you see the Wealth Dynamics square as the four seasons in every cycle, it is no surprise that we are now seeing the Steel strategy (which is the winter strategy) begin to emerge. Every new technology goes through the same cycle where it begins with the creative, early adopters (Dynamo / Spring), moves to the influential leaders (Blaze / Summer), then co-ordinated transactions (Tempo / Autumn) and finally automated systems (Steel / Winter). Rajat Garg lives in New Delhi, India. He trained as an engineer and then worked at a series of company in product management. Rajat is a Mechanic profile, which means he looks at everything as a system, and is always trying to improve on it. One year ago, in 2011, he thought that there must be a simpler way for Facebook users to organise themselves. He set up company, SocialAppsHQ, to offer a full suite of Facebook apps for business. The difference between Rajat and Alex Bernstein, is that Alex saw his business expertise and connections as being as important as the technology. For Rajat, it was all about automated technology. The more it could grow automatically without him needing to speak to anyone, the better! Rajat created simple plug ins that can be automatically installed from within Facebook, tailored to industries like Real estate, restaurants, hotels and retail. In the first year, over 650,000 fan pages have installed his apps, including Carbury, Intel, PayPal, Stanford University and many brand names. Rajat has achieved all of this from Delhi, with a small team, doing he loves - building a better system. These are four very different strategies for success. Each of the eight profiles has one or a mix of two strategies to follow which is natural for them. Which one is natural to you? A bigger question is - How important is your social media strategy anyway?
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Hold your horses!
Do you remember what you were doing 10 years ago? The year 2002 - Three years before Youtube launched. Two years before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook (He turned 18 in 2002). One year before Skype began and Google launched Adwords. In 2002 everyone was watching AOL after it had merged with Time Warner. The US Government were debating the break up of Microsoft for being a monopoly. If you were looking for tips on your business, everyone was training on telemarketing and infomercials (!!) The smart money had already moved to email marketing and web stores (though few were giving training on it). If you were attending training on telemarketing and infomercials you were already too late... Do you remember 5 years ago? The year 2007. One year before Apple launched their App Store. Two years before Amazon launched the Kindle. Three years before the iPad. Facebook was less than 10% the size it is today. It was one year before the Global Financial Crisis. In 2007, if you were looking for tips on business, everyone was training on email marketing and web stores. But the SMART money had already moved to social media and ebooks (though few were training on it). If you were attending training on email marketing and web stores you were already too late...
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Here we are today. The year 2012. The smart money has already moved on to curated media, personal channels and mobile (though few are training on it). If you are attending training on social media and ebooks you are already too late. Imagine if you took all that training over the last 10 years, which was already becoming irrelevant... What if you had put that time instead where it really counted? The world will be very different in 5 years time. Where will you be? Swimming to catch up, or surfing a wave? “Don’t try to catch a wave that everyone’s already surfing.” The biggest mistake that we can make is to mistake a platform (like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or even online marketing, share trading or property investing) as value, instead of leverage. When Google bought Dodgeball, they saw value in the SMS marketing, but that was the platform, not the product. Dennis Crowley saw the value was in the idea - letting friends let friends know where they are. SMS marketing was the leverage, and as the platform changed to smart phones, Dennis moved his value to new leverage. The value is your surf board - What you hold onto. The leverage is your wave - What you fine to let go of. HyperGrowth comes from letting go of one wave to move on to the next, and getting on it in time, with your board. Here’s one more example of how this plays out when a wave appears.

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A million reasons to smile
When we talk about Facebook, the numbers can reach hundreds of thousands rapidly. As I write this, a faster way to reach the hundreds of thousands, and into the millions, is through a product like this one - an ebook. I know what your question is! “What are the different paths to a bestselling book?” John Locke has an answer, but it’s only one of the possible paths out of four. Here are the other three paths: John Locke is a Creator profile. He is the first self-published author to sell 1 million books on Amazon. Last year he wrote a book about it: “How I sold 1 million books in 5 months.” Amanda Hocking is 31 years old. She is also a Creator profile, also followed the same strategy as John. Amanda had wanted to be an author all her life, and, just like John did, she had done the rounds of the publishers (more than 50) and been rejected by all of them. In 2010, desperate to make $300 she didn’t have to travel to Chicago for a Muppets exhibition. She put her books on Amazon, priced them at 99c, and saw her sales grow daily until she was selling 9,000 per day. She has gone on to sell 1.5 million books and made $2.5 million. In the last month, she has received a $2 million deal with St Martin’s Press for her next four books.

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There is no question that having an ebook on Amazon, Apple iBook and other ebook sites is easier than ever. It can also more effective in driving buying clients than social media, with many success stories of those that have launched books with 99c price tags. John and Amanda followed the ‘Dynamo’ Strategy to book sales, with their own product leveraging on the system of others. What if you aren’t naturally creative and have no idea what to put in a book? Vic Johnson is a mechanic profile. He is methodical, has built a system for his training business, and realised he needed a book to attract new subscribers to his database. What did he do? He decided to set up a site called asamanthinketh.net, and gave away an eBook of “As a man thinketh”, a classic selfhelp book written over 100 years ago by James Allen. The copyright had lapsed, so Vic simply repackaged it, set up the web site and gave the book for free to all subscribers. His list grew by 400,000 and he then sold them training programs based on the book. This is the ‘Steel’ Strategy to book sales, where you focus at the system with someone else’s product. He wrote a book detailing his strategy called “How I made a six figure income giving away a dead guy’s book.” A third path: Michael Ellsberg is a Supporter profile. Great with people, and a journalist by trade, he wanted to travel and meet great entrepreneurs who had dropped out of college, learning what made them successful. He decided to pitch the idea as a book “The Education of Millionaires”, lining up some of the people he wanted to include in the book. Penguin picked up the title and paid him an advance which covered his travel, interviews and creation of the book. This is a great example of a ‘Blaze’ strategy, where your book consists of conversations with others.

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What if you aren’t naturally creative, connected or systematic? Justin Halpern tried all of the above. He went to Hollywood looking for a writing job, tried selling his screenplays, nothing worked, and he ended up at 29 went back to live with his parents. His 74 year-old father had a way of coming up with gems of profane wisdom. Justin set up a Twitter feed called @sh*tmydadsays, to record the best bits. Within several months he had 100,000 followers, and was approached by Harper Collins to publish a book of the same name. In 2010, the book topped the New York Times Best Seller list, and today his Twitter account has 3 million followers - with Justin tweeting just once a month. This is an unusual example of the ‘Tempo’ strategy - which is all based on observation and research. Justin got excited when Warner Brothers came to do a TV show on the same theme. He got into ‘Creator’ mode to become the screen writer he had imagined himself as. The show starred William Shatner and was aired by CBS for a season in 2011. Like Justin’s other creative efforts, it bombed. His skill at recording and sharing a theme that captured the public’s imagination is his success formula, and this is the winning formula for those with a ‘Tempo’ profile. Have I shared these four different approaches because I think you should write an ebook? No. It is to illustrate, just like the Facebook strategies, that you have a natural path to success based on your profile if you choose either to focus at Facebook or ebooks. Now, more than ever, we need to focus on who we are to be clear on what to do.

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Everyone’s a Genius
“Everyone’s a genius, but if you a judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go through its whole life thinking its stupid.”
- Albert Einstein

It won’t be your strategies, or your tactics, or your hard work that will take credit for your ultimate success. It will be your genius. From your genius, all the rest will flow. Everyone’s a genius. When someone follows their natural path, it all looks easy. You could convince yourself that their path could be easy for you too. You try it, you find it hard work, and then doubt yourself. Like the fish who can’t climb the tree. Could you be learning strategies from people who make things look easy when they are not for you? Could you be learning strategies to try and keep up with the changes, only to already be out of date? Did you pick up this book hoping to find even more of those kind of strategies? This book is about the map and the compass. Know who you are and your natural path before you work on how to get there. This is the magic of the times we are in. To navigate the changes, we all must look inside. They didn’t need to do that 50 years ago when people had jobs for life. You don’t find your genius in a supermarket. You find it by following your natural path.

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PART 2

The Map

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Wave 1: A.I. Everywhere
Where are we heading? In this second part, I cover three of the ten trends from my ‘Fast Forward your Business’ tour. All of these trends are having or will have an impact on your business. From these trends, we will see how each profile can surf the wave in their own natural way. The first wave is already upon us: A.I. Everywhere. A.I. stands for artificial intelligence. This is the evolution of computers from simple computing to where they appear to understand relationships, meaning and emotion. Artificial intelligence begins with systems ‘understanding’ who you are and what you want, and advances on to machines being able to rationalise, hold a conversation and develop relationships with empathy and emotion. The ‘Turing Test’ is seen as the ultimate test of artificial intelligence - when we can no longer tell from a conversation on a topic whether we’re communicating with a human being or a computer. What’s happening in A.I. and how will it affect you this year? In February last year, IBM had their supercomputer, ‘Watson’ compete with the world champions of Jeopardy in the TV game show. You need to be a brain box, and understand cryptic clues to win. That means picking through subtlety in language to work out what’s really being asked. The IBM thrashed the champions and Ken Jennings, who had previously won a record 74 consecutive games, wrote:
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"Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines. 'Quiz show contestant' may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last." Watson has gone on to get a job in the medical industry, where ‘he’ is doing a better job than doctors can at diagnosing the diseases of patients. In the meantime, artificial intelligence is appearing everywhere. We see it in Siri, Apple’s talking iPhone launched last October. We see it in Facebook’s and Google’s targeted ads, and in the recommended products on Amazon and Netflix. This year, we will see increasingly intelligent behaviour from our software, websites and machines, where they appear to know what we want to look for or buy better than we do. This trend has an impact deeper than just offering us more personalized interactions. Computer generated trades now make up more than 60% of all trades on the New York stock exchange. Assessments on your credit worthiness, whether you qualify for that mortgage or that next job are increasingly involving computers in the decision making. Deciding whether that daily deal is on or whether you get extra rewards for what you do in that game are all automated, impacting you at a very personal and often emotional level without any other human being involved. Sooner than we expect, we will be using keyboards far less than touch screens and voice. Typing in a keyword search will disappear in the near future (in the same way that most of us no longer use telephone directories to find companies or numbers).

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How to surf the A.I. wave
There are three big impacts that all this artificial intelligence is already having. The first is that ‘bigger’ no longer equals ‘less personal’. In the past, you could be small and beat the big companies by offering a more personal service. No longer. Borders has gone bust in the last year despite being known for a great experience. That’s because when I go to Amazon, they tell me what they think I’d like, and I can buy it without having to pay for the cost of storage and rental that Borders needs to charge me. I don’t want ten thousand books to chose from. I want them to show me what the five are that I’m most likely to be interested in. Direction is more important than information. If you are not collecting data on your customers and offering them a personalized service automatically with this data, you will be beaten by a nimbler competitor within a matter of years. On my Fast Forward program, I go through the steps to do this - from choosing the right CRM system to connecting the right data collecting apps, automated touch points, redesigning your promotions to incentivise customers to share personal information for more personalised service, and reorienting your product range to cater for your different types of customers. The ‘one-size-fits-all-take-it-or-leave-it’ market is dead. So is the middleman. This is the second impact of artificial intelligence. Do you use a travel agent to book your holiday anymore? Many businesses and professions that used to help direct your choices are disappearing: From the travel
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agent and real estate agent to investment advisors and insurance agents. We will see the same occur in doctors, lawyers, teachers and trainers. Computers and platforms like Watson and Siri will be able to do a far better job in all these roles, by having a far bigger brain, flawless memory and ability to immediately deliver the most relevant advice or information to you when you need it. If you are in any industry that could be replaced by artificial intelligence, you will be. That doesn’t mean opportunities don’t exist. It just means the goal posts have moved. While there are few jobs in being a travel agent any more, there are more jobs in tourism - but these are at the marketing or service ends. Begin the shift in your position, brand and products now - away from information and advice, and towards service and engagement. The third impact of artificial intelligence is in how it changes your focus from ‘market share’ to a ‘shared market’. A ‘market share’ focus is one in which you spend time building expertise in marketing channels - from TV or newspaper ads to search engine optimisation on Google, to email marketing. This focus is based on you creating funnels to try and capture ‘market share’. The problem is, artificial intelligence is giving us a different expectation of how personal our daily experience should be. We want to see what our friends and trusted sources are recommending. We move away from any company that tries to control all our decisions instead of suggesting a choice. A ‘shared market’ focus is one in which you aren’t trying to steal a customer away from a competitor. It is a focus on adding value - even before money has exchanged hands, building trust, and encouraging recommendations. It’s about partnering with those we may have viewed as competitors. It’s about serving customers that don’t want to live in an either-or world.
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Personal plans for everyone!
What? Did you read right? Did I write that right? No more doctors or teachers? One of the roles I have taken on while here in Bali is the Chairman of the Board of the Green School. The school has caught the imagination of the world’s press for its unique focus on a natural education. Both my daughters, Kathleen and Theresa, attend the school. In this role I have had a front row seat to the future of education. The school I went to 30 years ago had a curriculum designed for one country (England) to do one thing (get into an English University). If I wanted to go to university in USA, or if I wanted the skills and know-how to start my own business, my school wasn’t much use. Today, at the Green School, my children have individual learning plans. Kathleen wants to go to art college in the US. Theresa wants to be a vet. Some of the students are working towards European universities, and others to be musicians and entrepreneurs. Each has their own individual learning plan and personal portfolio designed around their personal path. Technology allows this today, where they have more expertise and information on any subject than any one class teacher could possibly provide. Are their teachers? Yes, but the teacher of the future is more of a guide than a storehouse of knowledge, learning as much as the students. The future is a future of leading learners, not teaching teachers.

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Watch Wave 1
Here are two videos to give you a deeper insight into Wave 1 - A.I. Everywhere:

Wave 1 - A.I. Everywhere

IBM A.I. beats humans at Jeopardy View videos on each profile Take the Wealth Dynamics test

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Wave 2: Friction is fiction
‘Friction’ is the cost of doing business that slows things down while adding nothing to the value of your product. Things like delivery and storage are examples of friction. Making payments are examples of friction. This second wave is about how all the most successful companies are using technology to cut out friction altogether, with products becoming cheaper and more instantly available. I remember just a few years ago it would take two months of planning and promotion to fill a conference hall with 400 participants for a business seminar. Today, it takes less than a week to promote and register a webinar with the same content, with over 1,000 registering. All the friction has been radically reduced: No expensive media advertising to get the message out, no conference hall to book and pay for, no travel time for participants and no restriction on location. It’s cheaper, easier and more effective to run a global event online today than it was to run a local event with a fraction of the size and results. Physical money is also friction. The reason that we are seeing so many Amazon, Apple and eBay millionaires is that all their customers don’t have to fill in their credit card details to buy from them. They just click the button, as Amazon, Apple and eBay already have their credit card details. This means having your store on a frictionless platform will multiply up your sales in ways it can’t if you just have a physical store or a web store where people have to enter payment details.
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In the last six months, Amazon Kindle has launched, Youtube and Amazon have entirely redesigned their home pages for Internet access by mobile and TV, Facebook's IPO filing sees! transactions as a big part of their future revenue, and rumour has it the iPhone 5 out in 2012 will be NFC enabled - (This means it can replace your credit cards and cash as your virtual wallet). By the end of this year, we will be seeing most of us buying without needing to enter our credit card details. In the same way that right now we are buying songs, ebooks and apps for 99c, we will be watching videos, reading articles and buying virtual products from as low as 1c a time within 12 months. We will all find it as easy to create an online mobile store for our customers as setting up a facebook account. All products in competitive markets eventually reach their marginal cost. That’s because smart entrepreneurs use systems and technology to reduce friction down to the cost of producing the product. If the marginal cost is zero - as it is with media content, then eventually it all becomes free. That doesn’t just include the information, news and entertainment that we receive (which is already mostly free online), but also everything from all recorded advice, books, music and video to our children’s education. The ripple effect of friction becoming fiction has already left entire industries in its wake. Casualties from Kodak to Newsweek have fallen as economies of speed replace economies of scale. What most people are not fully aware of, is that this ripple effect is only growing and will impact your entire business if it has not already.

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How to surf a frictionless wave
For this second wave, there are also three big impacts that you can already prepare for. The first is in how we and our customers experience the world: From ‘static’ to ‘fluid’. As everything moves this year to mobile, touch screen and voice command, our relationship to what we select, buy and share will become increasingly seamless. Physical stores are being replaced with virtual stores. The most popular online books in the next five years will turn from text only to a multimedia mix of text, audio and video. Online landing pages are being replaced with video landing pages. Customers need to work far less and pay far less to receive the same value. That means you need to be smarter in how you connect with your audience. Last year, in Korea, the supermarket chain Tesco saw a decreasing number of visit to all stores. Busy people simply had less time to shop, so were increasingly doing it online. The solution? Tesco took their store to the people. They bought all the billboards in the underground train stations, posted photos of their store shelves with QR codes on all the items. People waiting for their train took photos of the products they wanted to buy, pressed ‘buy’ on their phone, and their groceries were waiting for them when they arrived home. Setting up an online presence to reach your audience with your products is surprisingly simple.

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Especially when you are on the ‘Big 5’ existing platforms of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Ebay and Google. This gives you an immediate market of over a billion people. The second big impact is in the ‘product spectrum’ of every company. There used to be a time when people would need to pay before they could try your product. People would spend time with you explaining what they needed so that you could prepare a quote for them. Today, no one wants to spend that time. Today, at the entry point we are seeing companies turn all their services into products. Everything is packaged into products with different service tiers and price points. Customers can immediately see what the different offerings are and make a decision. Have a look at any service - from banks to mobile phones, and you will see this switch in action. At the back end, the opposite is happening. Companies are turning all their products into services. The cost of keeping a customer is going down as quickly as the cost of finding a new one is going up. Its now worth the time to automate a system to look after your customer with newsletters, special promotions and value added services. Products are upgraded at least once if not twice a year, keeping the customer engaged and replacing what they have with the latest new offering. Have a look at your own product range. Is it where it needs to be to take advantage of this wave? Do you have a schedule of new releases each year and vibrant community of customers from those receiving free content to those at your ‘first class’ level? If not, the third impact is here to the rescue! The third impact of this wave is that you have an even greater benefit from friction disappearing than your customers do.
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Finding the right talent is friction. Building the right systems is friction. Accessing resources and funding is friction. Finding the right marketing partners and access to markets is friction. These barriers are all tumbling. Today you have the same access to these resources as any global multinational. The way I designed my businesses to operate while I had my home base in Bali was thanks to this third impact. I set the criteria that every business platform we used needed to be world class, an industry leader, with its own app store and developer community. That way, our technology system would always be at the cutting edge, at a fraction of the price of developing our own. We migrated our accounts to Quickbooks Online, our CRM system to Salesforce, we linked our web store on Interspire directly to our affiliate system on Post Affiliate Pro. All orders, together with all emails linked seamlessly to Salesforce in the ‘cloud’. Our project management and team communication are on Basecamp. All of this at a fraction of the cost of building our own system. As all these different platforms already have iPhone and iPad apps, I can see the performance of all my businesses in real-time, on the move, at the beach, anytime, anyplace. We have our project team in Singapore, accounts team in India, design team in England, video editing in Philippines and we have sourced world-class talent via linkedin, elance, logotournament and other freelance networks. The biggest change has been to shift from a position-based company, where everyone had full-time jobs, to a projectbased company, where teams form and re-form around specific projects. If you know you have world class talent and world class systems ready to support your next project, what project would you take on?
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All you need is a kickstart
One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs think they have is lack of funding. Funding is friction. Today, authors can no longer have the excuse that they don’t have a publisher. They can simply go direct to market. It’s now the same with entrepreneurs. They can by-pass banks, angel investors and V.C.s, and go direct to market. In 2008, Yancey Strickler joined the wave of new crowdsharing sites by launching Kickstarter with his friend, Perry Chen. The site allows entrepreneurs to raise funds direct from a willing public. Instead of offering shares for sale, budding start-ups offer advanced sales and specials on the products they want to launch. As the crowd-funding wave grew, more people found their way to Kickstarter, attracted by the quirky stories and innovative projects. In the month that I write this (February 2012), I saw Yancey blog about their first $1 million project, where the money was raised in a matter of days. On the same day, Yancey blogged again as a second project also raised $1 million (from people pledging amounts from $10 to $5,000). That second project, Double Fine Adventure (for a video game) has gone on to raise over $2 million, and a third project (for a comic book) has become the third to raise $1 million... There was a time when raising a million dollars in advance orders took time. Now, it can be done in less than 24 hours: Provided you have a great idea and are ready to let people know about it. What’s your great idea?
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Watch Wave 2
Here are two videos to give you a deeper insight into Wave 2 - Friction is fiction:

Wave 2 - Friction is fiction

Tesco virtual subway store View videos on each profile Take the Wealth Dynamics test

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Wave 3: The Power of Consumption
The industrial age was based on the ‘power of production’. Those that had the means of production, and ownership on their product and intellectual property, could control entire markets. This age was all about control and competition. The shift from the ‘’power of production to the ‘power of consumption’ comes with technology and global connections. Daily deal sites like Groupon, auction sites like eBay and social gaming companies like Zynga provide consumers what they want at the price they want it. It is no longer about economies of scale, but economies of speed. Producers match the price consumers are willing to pay, rather than consumers needing to match the price that producers set. This is the power of the crowd, empowered by platforms like Kickstarter, Kiva and Living Social. This wave is upon us now. There are many sites that are built on the power of the crowd that have got the attention of the media in recent months. Groupon had their IPO in November, raising $700 million. Today the company is worth over $12 billion. Zynga had their IPO in December, and is now worth over $9 billion. Too many of us are putting too much focus on the old model of trying to create products and then looking for customers. By changing our focus to the power of the market, we can quickly find out what people in our market want, and how much they are prepared to pay for it.

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We might then find the very best product to fit their needs already exists, we can deliver tomorrow what they are looking for, receive an affiliate fee from the provider, and save ourselves all the effort of trying to create something that is too little, too late. Our resort in Bali, XL Vision Villas, now gets most of its guests from daily deal sites like Scoopon in Australia. This is a new avenue that only began last October. At that point, there were almost no other deals on deal sites to Bali resorts. While our resort neighbours are still setting their rates in isolation, and then scratching their heads as to how to compete in the market, we have gone to the market with a price that attracts them, and then worked backwards to see how we can manage our business at that price. The result is radical changes in our model. We now have Vision Adventures, that takes our guests on adventure tours. Before, someone who came may have spent 50% on the room and 50% on extras, today they pay less on the room, but then spend double as much on extras. This wave means changing your focus from producing your product to serving your market. Crowd sourcing and crowd funding sites means we can now extend this focus to how we source our suppliers, our talent, our resources and our funding. Where will this wave lead? Already, Google and Facebook set their ad prices based on what people are willing to pay. On elance and freelancer, we set the price of the experts we hire. As platforms grow to give instant feedback to businesses from the market, customers will set the price of everything from the places they stay to the tutors they hire, from the property and cars they buy to the bank fees and mortgage rate they choose. The economies of industries are being turned upside down, and so will the economies of your business.
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How to surf the crowd
As with the last two waves, this third one has three big impacts that you can prepare for and profit from today. The first is that we live in a new world of transparency. Have a look at the stock market. Thirty years ago you needed a broker to buy shares in a company. You needed that broker to be on the stock exchange of the city in which the company was listed. Twenty years ago trading became computerised. Ten years ago companies like etrade enabled the public to trade any stock over multiple exchanges. Today, we have access to global markets and instant trades across everything from stocks and commodities to sophisticated trading instruments. As a crowd, we set the price of everything on the market based on what we are willing to buy or sell at. The level of information in the stock market shared by companies is already enormous, allowing everyone to make informed decisions that reflect more accurately the true value of the assets being traded. This first impact of more transparency is spreading from stock markets to all crowd-driven sites and collaborative networks, where we get an incredible level of information whether it is the stats of our facebook ad, to the special offer on the daily deal site, to the ratings and history of the new accountant we are hiring. How you let your customers participate in the shaping of your products will make all the difference to their level of loyalty: From the testimonial they provide to the options
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they choose in your test marketing, determining your next products and your pricing. This brings us to the second impact: A move from economies of scale to economies of speed. One of the greatest costs in start-ups is investing too much time and energy on something that falls flat in the market. We can now test market different products, pricing and promotion on a daily basis and get instant feedback. This means being far nimbler, with the opportunity every day of doubling your results from the day before. It means planning each month based on what you are going to test, and setting your rhythm with your team to be reviewing far more frequently what is working and what is not. The third impact is the collapse of the industrial model of ‘control and conquer’, which is being replaced with ‘attract and engage’. There are now independent video bloggers on youtube that attract a larger daily audience than national cable channels. There are authors who now have larger followers than national magazines. This ‘attract and engage’ shift is as personal as the ‘control and conquer’ model was impersonal. 33,000 people follow Virgin on Twitter. 1,800,000 people follow Richard Branson. We are entering a world in which the personal brand of an individual in your company (whether that is you, or a Star profile supporting you) will grow attraction and trust far faster than your corporate brand. Have a look at the words on your web site. Is it written in the third person, or is it written in the first person, direct to the reader? Now have a look at the businesses at the cutting edge. In the last five years they have turned all their words to speak directly to you. The impact of all this technology, ironically, has led to us needing to be more social, friendly and considerate. How can you shift the DNA of your business, at every detail, to be more human?
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Returning the money with Pinterest
I was asked last year on the Fast Forward Tour where I thought the Internet would move to in the near term. I said it wouldn’t be long before social media moved from conversation and connection to reorganising and recommending. This is because all industries go through cycles, and always in the same order. Knowing this allows you to always be where the waves are rising. The first season in every cycle is the ‘Spring’ phase. On the Wealth Dynamics Square, it is always the Creators and Stars who profit during this phase. When the PC industry began in the 1980s, it was the early creators like Apple and Microsoft that took the lead. At the beginning of the Internet, in the 1990s, it was creators like Mark Andreeson who launched Mosaic, one of the first web browsers, that hit the news. At the beginning of Web 2.0, after 2000, it was the social platforms with a purpose, like eBay for auctions or MySpace for music that were the first to take off. The second season in every cycle is the ‘Summer’ phase. This is always where the mass market follow the early adopters and communities built around a common platform. In the 1980s, PC manufacturers like Compaq and Dell grew rapidly and Apple fell by the way side as scale beat innovation. This is the season to ‘magnify’, on the right side of the Wealth Dynamics Square. In the 1990s, the early start-ups on the Internet got swallowed up by the big networks like Compuserve and AOL. These were ‘walled gardens’ that didn’t share their
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data with the rest of the Internet. In Web 2.0, Facebook and Linkedin are the equivalent of Compuserve and AOL. The third season in every cycle is the ‘Autumn’ phase. This is always where there is a critical mass in the market who no longer want to be restricted by the walls, and begin to self-organise their own communities out of the chaos of conversation. In this third stage of the PC industry, it was the regional computer superstores and computer magazines that saw the biggest growth. In the early Internet it was when companies like Webvan, boo.com and pets.com, gave the market the way to find the products they wanted organised by their interests. What about the ‘autumn’ season of Web 2.0? This ‘reorganise and recommend’ phase has hit the headlines this month. Pinterest has been billed as the fastest site to reach 10 million users. It gives users the chance to pin their favourite images and products onto pinboards. It is part of the shift from ‘conversation’ to ‘curation’. At this early stage, Pinterest already drives more referral traffic to company websites than Google+, LinkedIn and Youtube combined. Sites have already launched that allow users to not just look at products based on what their friends recommend, but to buy them then and there. What does this mean to you? The days of trying to drive email lists to a landing page to buy something (Spring season) has past its glory days. The days of trying to attract a social media following (Summer season) is already a sink hole of time (Less than 4% of followers to any Face book fan page even see a posting from that fan page on their all. The percent of your followers who actually see your tweets on Twitter is even lower). In the next six months, those who have value worth collecting, sharing (and pinning) will grow their attraction far faster.
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Within the year, we will all have the ability to easily create our own store front, selling the products we like and recommend to friends and followers. We’ll be able to share our virtual library of books, music selection, gallery of art, favourite products, travel recommendations. We will be able to buy what we like from the collections of those we follow, and we will see more products selling directly via referrals and recommendations. How you set up yourself to be found in your niche will determine the success you achieve in this next phase. What comes next? It won’t have escaped your notice that most of the companies I have mentioned in this chapter have already disappeared or had to dramatically reinvent themselves. This will be no different for Facebook and LinkedIn, and even the new kids on the block. The fourth phase, the ‘Winter’ season, is when we move to consolidation. This is the storm, form, norm, perform cycle - create, connect, curate, collate. The PC industry shifted from product to service, when service providers like Salesforce and Google begin taking over from the software and hardware providers, disrupting both. In the early Internet, it was when Paypal, Amazon and Apple made it easy for transactions and micro-payments, changing the pricing of everything. The fourth phase in Web 2.0 will be when each of us can be our own bank, accepting micro-payments and transacting in multiple currencies (including the ones we create ourselves) anytime, anywhere. We will find ourselves with multiple earning (and spending) opportunities every day. In the meantime, Internet TV is about to begin in Spring. The Mobile Internet is already in Spring, moving to Summer. Your country is in a season, as is your industry. All these waves simultaneously add up to a perfect storm.
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Watch Wave 3
Here are two videos to give you a deeper insight into Wave 3 - Power of Consumption:

Wave 3 - Power of Consumption

Collaborative Consumption View videos on each profile Take the Wealth Dynamics test

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The magic key
No how-to book would be complete without a magic key. This book has one too. Unlike most magic, I’m going to tell you how this key works. This is the key to being able to surf these waves. This is the key that keeps us fixed on our path yet flexible with the wave. It’s the same key in every entrepreneur success story, and it’s the key that let’s the butterfly fly. “What keeps things in place but doesn’t?” I studied architecture in Cambridge. One of my professors was very eccentric (actually, many of them were), and would often talk in riddles. One day in my first year, we were having a group discussion on flow in form - what creates movement in architecture. “All things consist of threes.” He said. We looked at him quizzically. “Pythagoras” he said, as if that would explain it. We looked at him, even more confused now. He tried to explain “Degrees of freedom come from degrees of movement. Fixed and fixed make fixed. The third element is what creates the freedom. Always the third element. Always hidden.” In a final attempt at clarity, he said “Establish the triangle and the problem is two-thirds solved.” I remember writing that down, thinking it must be important. He nodded in approval. “Pythagoras” he repeated, in case we accused him of perjury. That was the end of the lesson.

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Two years later I was wind surfing in Hong Kong. There was a big typhoon approaching, and I was mad enough to go out as the wind began picking up. Isn’t it at the most unlikely times that you have a revelation? On each run, I was picking up speed. The waves were getting bigger, and the sail was getting more difficult to control. It felt like I was going to flip on every turn, faster and faster. In all the chaos, I suddenly hit a power zone that point where my angle to the wind was just right, and I went from speed to hyper-speed. As I held on for dear life, I had a magical experience. As the sea around me flew by in a blur, I suddenly felt like the sail had become perfectly still. Instead of feeling like I was moving, I felt like I was stationary with the sail. We were motionless, while the world zoomed by. I watched the board appear to bump around on the waves. I saw the universal joint between the sail and the board, working in all directions, with the full force of the wind above and the waves below concentrated on that one point. Everything went quiet, and I found myself at one with a little rubber universal joint. The two of us were holding it all together. I was totally relaxed, because she was doing all the work. At that moment, my professor’s words came back to me: “The third element is what creates the freedom. Always the third element. Always hidden.” I remember running back to the house as the rain arrived. I remember swinging the doors open to look at the hinges, which I had never really noticed before. I looked at the hinges on the windows, the cupboards, I opened the fridge, and everything else that moved in the house. When I was done with that, I started feeling the joints in my arms, legs, fingers and toes. I had found the third element.

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As an entrepreneur, I began to look for the third element in the role models I admired. The hinge is always there, and it holds together the fixed position of what each great leader stands for with the movement of the market. Dennis Crowley started both Dodgeball and Foursquare with a hinge: A product template with clear criteria and standards that all his ventures must meet, whatever the weather. It’s the same with Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and every other Creator. You can’t see the hinge, but it shows up in everything they do. Peter Thiel invested in Paypal, Facebook and LinkedIn with a hinge: A deal template with clear criteria and standards that he had set to know when a deal was right and when it was not. It’s the same with Donald Trump and all other successful Deal Makers. Like a matching jigsaw shape, they can rapidly go through a box of pieces, comparing to the template, and find the one they are looking for. Our path each year is from A to B. On the path, we get no perspective. When we walk away from the path, and look at it from a detached third point, we create a triangle. When that third point is our hinge - our fixed value template with a clear standard to compare all opportunities and activity to, we find that is the only thing that needs to remain fixed, and all else is free to move. Like a playground swing. “Establish the triangle and the problem is two-thirds solved.” - Pythagoras All eight profiles have a different hinge - a different template that they follow. It is the key to going from growth to hyper-growth. It becomes the foundation so you can stay in your flow. What keeps things in place but doesn’t? Your hinge. In life, your value template is your hinge. A board is your hinge when you’re surfing. And a butterfly? The butterfly is a magical living hinge, with wings to fly.
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Money making machines
Before I cover the eight paths to hyper-growth, and before we step into the future, I want to take you back in time. In the mechanised age we live in, it’s worth stepping back and asking “What is a machine?” We drive in a machine called a car. We wash our clothes in a washing machine. We surf in the Internet on multiple machines and we make money in a machine called a business. What all these machines have in common is that they leverage - they allow us to achieve more work with less effort. Is your hinge a machine? Warren Buffett makes his billions by having a billion dollar investment template that he compares all opportunities to. Mark Zuckerberg has a system template that he compares all system changes on Facebook to. Sounds like a hinge helps you achieve a lot more with less effort. But a hinge isn’t a machine. Over 2,300 years ago, Archimedes was the first to talk about ‘simple machines’ the lever, pulley and screw. The Greeks added two more, and in the Renaissance it was the likes of Galileo and Da Vinci who completed the set with a total of six ‘simple machines’. They are the same six our children learn at school today: The inclined plane, lever, screw, wedge, pulley, and wheel & axel. All businesses and products fit into these six categories. Facebook is a pulley. You repeat the same cycle each time,
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as a repeat customer - connecting with more friends in a shorter time than visiting them all physically. The movie you just watched is a lever. In 90 minutes of time you received hundred of hours of work by those who produced it. Unlike a pulley, you aren’t going to watch it again tomorrow. I won’t go through all six right now. Because this isn’t about the machines. This is about the hinge. All six of these rely on the hinge to work. The inclined plane, lever and wedge are in a straight line (think of single-use items or one-time customers who don’t repeat the same purchase). All three have a fixed and flexible connection with a surface. That is the hinge. In school physics, it’s called a fulcrum. The screw, pulley and wheel & axel all rotate. They have a fixed and flexible connection at the center. This is the hinge. A rotational hinge is called a pivot. Most entrepreneurs I see who are wondering which way to go have lost their fixed point. Without the fulcrum, the lever can’t lift. Without the pivot, the pulley can’t rotate. You can’t swing a swing or play on the see saw when the hinge isn’t fixed. When you are clear on your fixed point, suddenly all the movement and chaos can be harnessed. The car can accelerate, the boat can set sail, the butterfly can take flight. On the following pages, we will see how every one of the eight Wealth Dynamics profiles has a different hinge, which stays fixed while all else is flexible. Every time I add a new business or new product, I know which type of machine I have created, I know it fits the market, and I know it is fixed where it needs to be to my template. The more I move, the more I stand still. The more I grow, the more I become of who I’m meant to be. “Be still like a mountain, and flow like a mighty river.”
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The Five Frequencies
If you have taken the Wealth Dynamics test, you will have received a 42 page report that explains the foundations of the test, that go back to the Chinese elements and a book called the I Ching. The Chinese, in all their wisdom, saw time as a cycle, flowing naturally through five frequencies. Understanding these five frequencies allows us to unlock the key to why we have different winning formulas in life. These five frequencies show a natural cycle, where water creates wood, which feeds fire, which settles to earth, from which we can mine metal, and the cycle then repeats.

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Overlaid on the Wealth Dynamics Square, imagine the wood is the spring energy at the top of the square, the fire and summer is on the right side, the earth and autumn at the base and the metal and winter on the left. The water and spirit frequency sits above the square, like the apex of a pyramid, and in life we don’t go through a learning cycle as much as a learning spiral, each time growing our entrepreneurial spirit. As we go through the cycles in our business, our industries and our economies, we flow through each season. With each season, there is a different question. In spring, the question ‘what’ sparks value through innovation. In summer, the question ‘who’ sparks leverage through people. In autumn, the question ‘when’ sparks value through timing, and in winter, the question ‘how’ sparks leverage through systems. We then move to the most important question at the end (and beginning) of every cycle. We ask the question ‘why’ which sparks value and leverage through contribution. Every one of the eight paths to hyper-growth begins with the question ‘why’: A compelling purpose. As we will see, each of the eight profiles then have a hinge based on their frequency. Dennis Crowley surfs the wave from his ‘what’ the product template he stands for, whether delivered via sms or smart phone. Peter Thiel surf the wave from their ‘who’ and ‘when’ - the deal template he stands for, whether its a payment gateway or a social network. Surfer’s don’t need a new surfboard to surf each new wave. They also don’t try and surf the wave after it has lost momentum. By keeping hold of one thing solid - their surf board - their hinge, they can grow in strength from wave to wave, from product to product, from market to market and from business to business.

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The Creator Path to Hyper-growth
I met Sebastian Thrun when I was at Singularity University. We were lucky enough to be part of the first viewing of the driverless Google Car. Sebastian’s passion is in artificial intelligence and specifically robotic vehicles. He won the DARPA Grand challenge in 2005, with his robotic car, Stanley, winning the race. He then joined forces with his competitors to create a prototype that they then took to Google. Today, Google has driverless cars criss-crossing the landscape, and Nevada is now making it legal for anyone to have driverless cars in their state. Sebastian’s product template is clear. His ‘why’ is to create a better world with A.I. He shared his vision of how driverless cars would reduce car accidents, traffic jams and the need for car parks. They would transform the time wasted driving the spaces freed up in cities. Sebastian’s ‘how’ is to share knowledge of A.I. in whatever forms reach as many people as possible. At the end of last year, Sebastian took his A.I. course that he taught at Stanford, and packaged an online certification so the public could also participate, watching the lectures he gave and taking an online test to gain a certificate. For a lecturer who was used to class sizes of 200, he found himself overwhelmed with over 160,000 people registering for the course. What do you do when confronted with this kind of wave? Sebastian took his board and surfed it. This year, at the end of January, he quit from his job at Stanford.
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When leaving, he said “Now that I saw the true power of education, there is no turning back. It’s like a drug. I won’t be able to teach 200 students again, in a conventional classroom setting.” He has now launched a new online education site, called Udacity. His first two courses are on building a search engine and programming a robotic car. In the coming years, we will see a new flood of video and interactivity online. Web pages will become 3D spaces, and virtual worlds. Keyboards will increasingly become speech and touch. Smart phones will move to smart glasses and contact lenses. Education will shift online and mostly become free. 3D printing will give us all the power to print out the physical products we want without any distribution or storage cost. None of us know the timing on all of this, but the trend is clear. Through all of this, Sebastian will be educating and innovating with the same product template, equipped for each wave as it arrives. The students and sponsors he attracts will stick with him as he is clearly separating the medium from the message. They aren’t with him for the wave, they are with him for the board. The Creator Path to Hyper-growth is to be focused at ongoing creation and innovation, testing and measuring different products and price points based on your product template, and the value you want to deliver. The critical step that Sebastian took was to be of value to both Google and Stanford, starting with small projects and building trust with them to enable him to experiment from within their brand. This allowed him to keep testing new paths to market, and spend time around other Creators to hear of their strategies, successes, failures and learning. Creators like Sebastian will always stay nimble so, as each new wave arrives, they have already dropped off the last one, paddled back out, and be ready to jump on it and surf.
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The Star Path to Hyper-growth
I 2007, Ray William Johnson was studying law at Columbia. A fan of Youtube, he decided to start his own Video Blog. His content was haphazard, and without clear direction. After a year, he had 30 fans. Stars are great at promoting, but do much better when they have a ‘what’ to connect to the ‘who’. He wanted to create viral videos, but hadn’t figured out how. So he did the next best thing. As he set up a show called “Equals Three” where he blogged about the latest viral video. By keeping to a rigid format and adding his own commentary, with videos twice a week, he began seeing his subscriber numbers going up. As youtube viewers went up, and the number of viral videos Ray had increased, his channel grew. This February, Ray now stands as the most popular channel on youtube, with over 5 million subscribers and 1.6 billion video views. That compares to 2.6 million viewers on Disney Channel and 1.8 million on Fox News. 30 year old Ray now reportedly earns over $1 million a year from the youtube partnership program and product sales. Is Ray resting on his laurels? No. Seeing that music videos were growing more popular than random viral videos, he began an animated music video channel on youtube, Yourfavouritemartian. The videos now get double the views of his original channel, with 10 million views per video not uncommon.
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As with Mari Smith earlier in the book, the key to the Star strategy is to engage your audience, and give them what they are looking for. Ray features a question of the day to viewers, and features five favourites on the next channel. ‘Ray, like Mari, has also chosen a platform to launch on, and kept very focused at that one platform. Too many Stars spread themselves thin over multiple platforms, and so never get the consistency or critical mass in any one place. The hinge of a Star is not a product template. It is a brand template. Ray’s template is what has made him successful not once, but twice. The ‘why’ is to entertain and engage the most number of people with the most popular content. The ‘what’ is videos on the most popular theme that his audience is watching - as that changes, so will his product. The ‘who’ is a very specific market - a new generation who prefer to watch online video clips than traditional TV. Despite offers, Ray has kept away from TV deals. It doesn’t fit his template of staying irreverent and relevant. Youtube has revamped their channel for the coming wave of smart TVs, which will revolutionise the TV industry in the same way that smart phones are revolutionising the telecoms industry. They have announced they are investing $100m on personality based channels. Ray will profit from this. He will ride the smart TV wave, the mobile TV wave and the tablet TV wave. Stars take the value of products and magnify them through the value of their brand consistency and audience. With every new platform comes new opportunity to stake your space. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to create all your own products, or spreading yourself too thin. Keep to a rhythm of delivery, and maintain it. See what’s sparking, and turn the spark to a sparkle. It’s easier now than ever to shine, but as Ray found out, a Star’s power lies not in shining a light on themselves, but the products of others.
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The Supporter Path to Hyper-growth
I met Chris Anderson last year when he visited the Green School with his wife, Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of the Acumen Fund. Born in Pakistan and schooled in the Himalayan mountains, Chris chose a career in journalism. In the 1980s he started a publishing company “Future Publishing”, reporting on the latest in video games, technology and design. Supporter’s make for great leaders. Not because of the products they create or brand they promote, but because of the people they bring together. The hinge of a supporter is a team template. This team includes their close team, and the community they want to be in. Chris chose his team template. They ‘why’ was to make a difference in the world with technology, education and design. The ‘who’ were the pioneers who were out there making a difference. In 1986, Chris started the Sapling Foundation, to ‘spread great ideas’. Then, in 2001, with Future Publishing now a listed company, Chris looked a product platform that he could magnify with his template, given that print media had a limited life span. Through his network, he met Richard Wurman, who had been running an annual conference in Monterey, California called TED, which stood for ‘Technology, Education and Design’. Chris bought the event for $14 million, and then began to magnify it. In 2005, he started sharing the TED 18 minute talks online for free.

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"TED went from being 800 once a year, to half a million every day in a shockingly short space of time," Chris said. "And instead of destroying the business model, which is what a lot of people thought, because essentially it's giving away the crown jewels, it actually boosts it because more people have heard about it."As each new technology platform appeared, TED wasn’t far behind: On youtube, on iTunes, with apps on iPhone, iPad and Android. TED went into hyper-growth, with the tag line “ideas worth spreading”. The TED Prize attracted top award winners, the talks attracted the best minds. A TED fellows program was launched, and then TEDx, with local events hosted by a network of partners who took the risk and effort to host each event, giving Chris a global funnel of talent. This year, TED announced it is running a global talent search with world wide auditions for TED2013, with auditions in 14 cities to find “The young, the wise, the undiscovered”. The power of a Supporter hinges on their community. Through recognition and connection, they create a draw where the community can generate its own content and products. Tickets to attend the TED Conference in person now sell for $6,000, and is by invitation. Supporters magnify in person (Chris is the curator at each conference) and multiply through systems (with videos available free). Supporters will attract multiple Creators and Stars who want to connect to their community, or are already part of their community. Bill Gates, Al Gore, Richard Branson and many brand name pioneers have been attracted to TED, and will continue to be as the waves approach. Using each wave, Chris stays focused at how to best magnify the platform of TED, and as with all Supporters, personalising the message - with TED MED, TED ED, and TED Global. Staying fixed on the community allows him to keep experimenting with increasingly leveraged ways to deliver.
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The Deal Maker Path to Hyper-growth
Inspired by a talk she heard from Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the micro-finance pioneer, Grameen Bank. Jessica Jackley headed out to Kenya in 2004 to start a new job to support micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya. While there, she saw what a difference a small amount of money could make to create a new, sustainable enterprise. The hinge of a Deal Maker is a deal template. Looking at micro-finance, she could see that it wasn’t that easy for an entrepreneur in Kenya to get even a small loan without going to loan sharks, and it certainly wasn’t easy for the ordinary person in the West who had some money spare to provide it as a loan. With her husband, Matthew Flannery, Jessica launched Kiva (which means ‘Unity’ in Swahili) in 2005. The site made it far easier for individual donors to loan money - via Paypal - and micro-entrepreneurs to receive and repay the loans. From this simple idea, as online payments and micro-financing hit the mainstream, deals went into hypergrowth. The site grew into the largest micro-financing network over the next six years. As of today, Kiva had distributed over $290 million in micro-loans, with over 695,000 lenders, the average loan size at $385 and a repayment rate of 98.9%. By 2009, the micro-finance boom was becoming saturated. Crowd-funding was just beginning. Kickstarter had launched, and Jessica saw a way to build a platform to help small entrepreneurs in America raise funds. With a friend,
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she launched profounder.com in August 2009. The site allowed entrepreneurs to raise their own funds in equity rounds to their stakeholders. The company grew rapidly over the next two years, leading the way in crowd-funding. This month, as US regulations have made it increasingly difficult for small businesses to raise funding from large groups, Jessica decided to merge the Profounder team with GOOD Magazine, which has established itself as a leading community for social entrepreneurs. Jessica now has an involvement on the Board of Kiva, within GOOD, and as a venture partner in the Collaborative Fund, which invests in crowd-source networks including kickstarter, simple, codecademy and skillshare. These different roles spread Jessica across multiple communities. Yet the hinge that connects it all together is Jessica’s deal template. Her ‘why’ is to support the growth of entrepreneurship. Her ‘who’ is purpose-driven, social entrepreneurs. Her ‘when’ for each deal is at the point of need within a crowd-sourced environment. This focus means that she not only knows what to say no to, she also is sought out by those looking for deal makers with her niche expertise. In the near future, micro-financing will have migrated online. Peer-to-peer lending will be common place. Companies like kickstarter will be global and multi-language, multi-currency. Virtual marketplaces where investors and entrepreneurs can meet will have sprung up, and mobile video will become free, giving a chance for entrepreneurs to connect directly with investors and show them their business far more easily. As all these changes take place, Jessica will surf the waves, building her network and connections, while staying fixed on the type of deal that has become her expertise. As with other smart deal makers, her deal volume will go from hundred of millions to billions of dollars.
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The Trader Path to Hyper-growth
In 2002, when Jordan Insley was 20 years old, he heard of the auction site, eBay, and the money that could be made in selling collectibles. He tried selling sports memorabilia, with limited success. He went and got a job as a waiter, but had a niggling feeling that there was a wave taking place that he was going to miss. In 2004, he saw the shift on eBay from collectibles to a trend in electronic goods, and so he moved from New York to Seattle, which had a better distribution hub, and began to selling mobile phones and cameras. Under the company name ‘QuickShipElectronics’, Jordan made the commitment to keep focused at what sold best, and increasing efficiency to keep prices as competitive as possible. Hyper-growth came with Apple’s launch of the iPod. Jordan already had an established market and the reputation of delivering. He saw sales shoot up, with 300,000 iPods sold, and revenues have now grown to over $8 million per year. Today, he has moved from his garage to a fully automated warehouse, and is focused at selling LED TVs and 3D HDTVs. The hinge of a trader is a trade template, where they know what they need to make on the spread of a trade, and when the market can bear that margin, the trade is on. In Jordan’s case, he continues to move with the market, from within the eBay platform. All traders, whether trading in products, equity, commodities, currencies, property or
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any other assets, operate in the same way, with clear criteria on what makes a good trade, and a clear sense of where the market is heading. Gabby Leibovich also started on eBay, but wanted his to have a wider range of products than the electronics that the site was becoming known for. With his brother, Hezi, they branched out from eBay to create their own trading platform in Australia, which they launched in 2006. Called ‘catchoftheday’, the site had just one product every day. Their original target was to sell 60 items in a day. Then hyper-growth took place. The daily deal wave that Groupon and Living Social pioneered came to Australia. Catchoftheday grew to between 3,000 to 4,000 items sold each day. As Gabby says "Today we have 600 suppliers and a destination for suppliers wishing to get rid of end-of-line stock. This is the secret of our success.” In 2010, Gabby and Hezi saw the shift in group buying to services, and launched Scoopon, which has since become the largest group buying site in Australia. When we put a five night deal to our Vision Villas resort in Bali on Scoopon, we sold over 100 packages within three days. In October last year, the pair sold a 40% stake in their business for $80 million, to a group of investors including James Packer. The pair see their two sites doubling in size in the coming year. The trade template for both sites has a big ‘why’ - to reach the mass consumer market specifically in Australia. The ‘when’ is a specific daily deal with a 24 hour turnaround on fulfillment. Each trade has a specific margin that needs to be made, and as technology and consumer habits shift, Gabby will shift with it. Most importantly, Gabby made the move away from eBay at the right time, and is reaping the rewards of the new group-buying wave they are riding.
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The Accumulator Path to Hyper-growth
The hinge of an Accumulator is a collection template. Not so interested in being in the limelight, Accumulators like to collect, organise and analyse things. Billionaires like Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim and Li Ka Shing have collected assets based on their templates of ‘when’ they collect and ‘how’ they release cash through efficiencies. As we see the wave of Web 2.0 move into autumn season, it is the Accumulators that are beginning to ride the wave. As with the last online wave, when Paypal and ebay had their day, it will be the time to collect. Ben Silbermann collect bugs. As a child, one of his hobbies was entomology. Living in Iowa, he said “I collected insects maniacally.” Growing up, Ben never saw himself as an entrepreneur: "As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people." He got a job making charts for a consulting firm, which led to a job at Google making charts for the advertising department. Two years ago, he left Google to begin a company to help people collect. With friends, they began working on a website. Being an Accumulator, it took time. They build 50 versions of the home screen. When they launched in March 2010, no one came. "It was like stealth without us trying to be stealth," he said.
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Accumulators are private people, and not so creative. When Ben launched the site with his two partners, they made it invitation only. It was Ben’s wife who came up with the name for it: Pinterest. Gradually, over time, through word of mouth, numbers grew. Those who, like Ben, were interested in collecting and organising the images and products they liked found the site refreshingly simple. There was no need to chat with friends or respond to friend requests. Everyone could just quietly get on with their own collecting and browse the pinboards of others. As social media moved from conversation to curating, Pinterest was the board in place to catch the wave. From last July to this February, visitors increased from 1 million to 12 million, making it the fastest site to reach that mark. At the end of last year, Silicon Valley V.C. firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invested $27 million at a reported valuation of $200 million. As with all the other stories of hyper-growth, each caught the wave not by swimming after it, but staying fixed on a template and being in position when the wave comes. For Ben, he has a collection template which is simple and understated. We will see this curating and collection phase extend and expand. While Google has taken the web 2.0 approach of ‘organising the world’s information’ through a massive staff of people, Pinterest will do it far more easily in Web 2.0 style, by empowering the public to do the organising. In Web 3.0, as we move into an online 3D environment, we will see the same cycle repeat itself.

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The Lord Path to Hyper-growth
Lords love to analyse. At age 13, Jack Dorsey’s hobby was dispatch routing. That’s right: co-ordinating multiple routes at the same time. In fact, his dispatch logistics software is still being used by many tax cab companies today. The hinge of a Lord is in their distribution template. When he was 24 years old, in 2000, Jack had ideas of a ‘frictionless service market’, and thought about how he could take his thinking about distribution networks into communications. Jack joined a startup called Odeo, run by Ev Williams, the founder of Blogger. The idea of the company was to turn phone messages into MP3 podcasts that could be hosted on the Internet. Then, in 2005, Apple announced that iTunes would have a podcast platform built in to it. Everyone at Odeo panicked. They didn’t want to compete with Apple. Ev told everyone to figure out a new direction, and that’s when Jack shared his vision of distributed messages. To begin with, no one really understood his template, but Jack was adamant. If a text to one person had value, why not multiply it and allow them to send it to multiple people, via the Internet. In 2006, the team launched twttr. The service went nowhere to begin with, despite Dorsey trying to explain it to everyone. Ev Williams wrote to investors of Odeo in September 2006, saying one of the few products they had, now lengthened to Twitter, only had 5,000 users after two months. He returned the $5 million he had taken in funds from investors.
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Five years later, those $5 million in shares were worth $5 billion. What changed? As with all Lord enterprises, things start slowly but, based on a multiplying model, gain speed as users each repeat their actions. This is a pulley system where every new member adds a new pinwheel to the system. By 2007, there were 400,000 tweets per quarter. By 2008, there were 100 million tweets per quarter. By 2010, the rate was 65 million tweets per day, and by March 2011 this was 140 million tweets per day. By the end of last year, Twitter was valued at $8.4 billion, after a $300 million investment from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Jack Dorsey, in the meantime, was expanding his vision with a new company, called Square. Jack’s distribution template has a ‘why’: To empower individuals with the power to multiply one point to many. His ‘how’ is by leveraging technology to provide a scalable distribution platform - like a global taxi dispatch system for individuals. Square fits his template by empowering every one to effectively be their own bank. A square swipe on your iPhone, iPad or Android phone lets you swipe a credit card, and take payments anywhere, anytime. The card readers and apps are free. Launched in 2010, Square already has over 1 million active merchants, and over $10 million in payments processed every day. In January telecoms carrier T-Mobile began offering Square readers and from this month the Obama 2012 campaign announced it is using Square to take mobile donations. Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins and even Visa have invested $100 million in Square in the last year, valuing the company at over $1 billion just two years after launch. This shift from PC-based Internet access to Mobile-based is being led Lord’s like Jack Dorsey. By connecting his hinge to mobile payments, Jack has created a billion dollar pulley system that will outshine Twitter in the next two years.
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The Mechanic Path to Hyper-growth
While Lords have a distribution template, measured by the leverage on each transaction, Mechanics have a system template measured by the leverage on each step of the process. The entire franchise industry and superstore industry that spurred our fast food, consumer culture, was led by Mechanics like Ray Kroc and Sam Walton. Where are Mechanics riding a hyper-growth wave with system templates? The answer is in health and education. Both industries are in the winter season. What is now occurring with them is the same collapse that is already playing out in the music and publishing industries. This is where the control on distribution of content breaks down, and the mass market moves to faster, simpler, more relevant and bite-sized value. Every Indian will know of Salman Khan as the famous Bollywood actor. There is another, quieter, Salman Khan, who is making waves in a different field. In 2004, Khan, a Hedge Fund manager, was tutoring his cousin, Nadia, on mathematics. When other friends and family asked for his help, he created a system to post his tutoring notes on youtube for them all to use. They precise, practical, systematic approach he took on his videos became so popular, in 2009 he quit his job and set up the Khan Academy. As he says “With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. I can't imagine a better use of my time.”

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In 2009, he received the Microsoft Tech Award for Innovation. In 2010, Google donated $2 million to the nonprofit Academy. Khan’s style as a Mechanic is counter to that of a Star. While a Star will be in the video, Khan’s video doesn’t feature him or any presenter, just an animation and voice over, working through a maths problem out loud. When asked why he has made it a non-profit instead of a business, Khan replied “When I'm 80, I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world... I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need?” His vision is a free education for all. Two years after launch, Khan has produced over 3,000 videos, and delivered over 125 million lessons. Videos have now expanded into lessons on physics, finance and history. As the wave in education moves from class-based and teacher-centred to globally-available and student-centred, it is the systems from Mechanics like Salman Khan, and the content from Creators like Sebastian Thrun, that will result in many more students in the coming generation selforganising into learning groups, and choosing a free education from world class experts over paying to sit in a classroom with a single teacher. This is where we come full circle, from Mechanic back to Creator. At the end of every wave comes a new one. Each of these stories of hyper-growth isn’t about chasing the wave or trying to get on it when others are already surfing. They are about staying true and fixed to your own template, setting the hinge to create leverage. They are about setting the board to be ready to surf. They are about turning from a consuming caterpillar to a butterfly with wings.
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Attitude vs Altitude
Seriously?! A billion dollars in two years? Some of these stories will have inspired you, and others can be equally intimidating. There is a wide spectrum between being a Creator who has a go at writing an ebook, and a Creator who attracts 160,000 students onto a class. For every Wealth Dynamics profile, there are nine levels of mastery of that profile. I have codified this in the Wealth Spectrum test. A Trader at Orange level is looking to follow a strategy to move from a job to self-employment. A Trader at Green level is looking to step out of their business and run multiple investments. An Infra-red Trader is simply looking to get out of debt. Knowing your level is a key part to knowing what steps to take next - at that level. If you’re just learning to surf, don’t start with the 30 foot wave. If you have been inspired by the stories in this book and the need to maintain future presence in your own journey, visit the following links and connect up with me. Take the Wealth Dynamics test and Wealth Spectrum test if you haven’t already, and join me on the Fast Forward tour. The future keeps coming in waves. If we’re going to surf them, let’s surf them together.

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TheCollaborative Wealth Spectrum Consumption
Here are two videos on the Wealth Spectrum and your million dollar question:

Wealth Spectrum in 10 Minutes

What’s your million dollar question? Take the Wealth Spectrum test Take the Wealth Dynamics test

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What’s your million dollar question?
I have a hunch that we’re almost the same, you and I. Like two mushy peas in a pod. Imaginal cells waiting for something magical to happen. Whilst all around us, the magic is already unfolding. We’re living in an age of transformation. The pace of progress is as fast moving and unpredictable as the waves in the ocean. Now it’s time to ask you the big question. What keeps things fixed but doesn’t? For you? What’s your million dollar question? The one that will set the big ‘why’ for you to surf the coming waves. On the last page I’ve included a link to a video where I ask you that question. Please take the time to watch it. This is not a caterpillar question. The caterpillar has no belief in a butterfly, and the butterfly has no memory of the caterpillar. This is a butterfly question. We live in extraordinary times. We are equipped with unprecedented opportunity to realise our full potential. This book has been about these times. It has been about hyper-growth - not the fat caterpillar kind, but the metamorphosis kind. This book has been about you and me, the imaginal cells, and how greatness emerges from mere mortals like us. Now get out there and make it happen. Surf’s up!
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