All Change: the extraordinary challenges for Sales & Marketing.

Advance news about a new course that discusses a key issue of huge relevance for any business.

Well, this started out as a bunch of notes trying to fathom something of what is going on in the world, particularly insofar as Business is concerned. Specifically, what is the future of Sales & Marketing? And how do Sincerity, Authenticity and Profilicity fit in to it all?

But as it progressed, it occurred to me that the notes were morphing into an outline for a course that I’m quite confident will be of value to anyone who sells anything. Might that include You?

An indication of the proposed content is given below. It’s not polished. Rather, it’s pretty much just as it has emerged. See what you think.

Things are summarized under the heading WHAT THE HECK’S GOING ON? at the end of this piece. So you could go straight there … or, to get a flavour of it all, read your way down to there.

For a start, what was the trigger for these noodlings?
Definitely, the emergence of AI, Artificial Intelligence.
Which is not the same as saying it is about AI.
The core topic is more diffuse than that. It is …
CHANGE.

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HELLO!

CHANGE fascinates me, or, rather, I should say ‘the sense of change’ does; the sense that the type and rate of change have, themselves, changed. META-CHANGE is perhaps the better label.

Almost half a century ago, when I was a marketer with a UK hotel group, I stood up in front of an audience at a tourism conference in Limerick, Ireland, and declared that, at that time, those of us in the West (I couldn’t speak for others) were at an inflection point … curving away from whatever track had hitherto prevailed.

Advancing age brings few benefits, however, I do think that direct recall of experience over the longer term (‘lived experience’ as the current terminology puts it) can be illuminating. And having now reached the ‘lean and slipper’d pantaloon’ stage of life, I am able to peer quite some distance back in time.

For instance, I actually remember that the same year I gave that presentation in Ireland, Microsoft celebrated its first birthday and new-born Apple released its very first computer. Also that year, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the world’s very first home computer convention took place. ‘Home computer’ - how quaint!

But I also remember that, at that time - when, by the way, telephones were still attached by wires and capable only of handling two-way voice communications - the predominant sense of computers and computing was that these machines were massive installations kept in air-conditioned cathedrals and overseen by a mysterious caste of white-coated digital priests.

That day in Limerick, the specific change that I talked about was the sense that the rate of change had broken through the generational barrier. Up until then, I argued, people had been able to accommodate change on a generational basis.

You didn’t understand or didn’t like that new-fangled thing that had come along? Don’t worry, you could carry on as you always had and leave the whizzy-whizzy new stuff for your kids to get excited about. But beyond that inflection point, the rate of change was going to be so rapid that it was necessary for any individual to take on board multiple changes within his or her own lifetime.

At the time, that seemed to me to be quite an important shift. Little did I realize that it was a mere tweak in a change-fest that would go on at an unimaginable rate to empower and disempower us in equal measure.

As a first step to make sense of all this I’m going to have a go at summarizing some of the key changes as I see them. I’ll try to be objective but, inevitably, what follows will be a largely subjective interpretation. Here goes, under four headings:

1. POLITICS

2. TECHNOLOGY

3. BUSINESS

4. SOCIETY

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1. POLITICS

It was the two world wars of the twentieth century that did it: pushed the idea of liberal universalism over the line, that is.

World War Two was the final nudge. After all, in the battle against Nazism, everyone had chipped in, regardless of nationality, class or creed. The sole requirement was to be anti-fascist.

Trouble is, there were two very different interpretations of the best way forward, two possible pathways. What were they? Well, as it happens, recently, in Red Square, Moscow, on the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin referenced both of them.

First, there’s the maintain-the-nation-state pathway …

Today is a day where we remember those who came before us, those who fell on the battlefield and in doing so became immortals, who joined the regiment of immortals, who gave up their lives for our country in the fight against Nazism. … we in Russia, we pay homage to the fallen soldiers. We pay homage to the veterans of America, of the United Kingdom. We pay homage to the heroes, the war heroes, from China. We pay homage to the past.¹

… but, in the same speech, he made clear his intense dislike for the other option, the globalist, liberal-universalism-(Western-model) pathway …

… the elite in the West, they keep talking of their exceptionalism, of how they are different, and they are the ones creating a sense of disruption between our people. They are the ones destroying family values, traditional values that make everyone on this planet human. They are forcing their will on other nations, forcing their rules on others. But it would appear that they have forgotten what Nazism was all about.²

Hmm, let’s go back a bit and try to work out where all this comes from.

In the West, the idea of liberal universalism evolved over a long period, starting in late-seventeenth century England.

One of the great accounts of this period, England under the Stuarts, is by George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962). Here’s the start of Trevelyan’s introduction to his work:

England has contributed many things, good and bad, to the history of the world. But of all her achievements there is one, the most insular in origin and yet the most universal in effect.³ (My emphasis)

How true that statement has proven to be! So, what is it that England did? Trevelyan first sets the scene:

During the seventeenth century a despotic scheme of society and government was so firmly established in Europe that but for the course of events in England it would have been the sole successor of the medieval system.⁴

Wow! That’s a gutsy claim! He then goes on to explain that, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while “the Swiss cantons retained their liberty and were no longer of any account in Europe”⁵, Spain, Italy, France, Bohemia, Germany and Holland were coming to a common conclusion that “military despotism was the price to be paid for national unity and power”⁶.

He sums it up - with a delicious irony considering the way things have turned out - by saying that the European countries …

… were developing a political structure and a fashion of public sentiment akin to those of Tsarist Russia.⁷

Tsar Vladimir would, I suspect, smile happily!

So, what had England done? Simples …

[T]he transference of sovereignty from Crown to Parliament was effected in direct antagonism of all Continental tendencies.⁸

This was, of course, an exercise that the UK repeated in 2016 when it voted to leave yet another unaccountable Continental body.

Tsar Ursula would, I suspect, scowl venomously!

However, after the Second World War, it had looked to ‘the elite in the West’ as though the door for liberal universalism really had opened.

“After all,” they argued, “We’re all the same. Race, nationality, class, even religion - they’re just superficial differences. So many of us have fought together in a common cause. It proves the fact - we’re all human beings.”

Thus the concept of globalization was launched, judiciously at first, but then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990/1991 (Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history”) with increased confidence and vigor.

It’s just that nobody had actually voted for it.

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2. TECHNOLOGY

In the political arena, England’s shift of governance from Crown to Parliament demonstrated that, contrary to European opinion, liberty and not coercion could be an excellent basis for strength, provided the liberty was combined with efficiency. The English motto was, so to say, Freedom & Efficiency.

This was demonstrated in 1704, for example, when the Duke of Marlborough led the English army (part of a Grand Alliance of Dutch, Holy Roman Empire and English soldiers) against a Franco-Bavarian army at the Battle of Blenheim.

Marlborough’s victory was enabled, not least, by his keen focus on technological and operational efficiency. The English had to travel a great distance across Europe and Marlborough recognized the crucial importance of supply chain management so as to have his troops arrive well-fed, reasonably rested and equipped to fight.

So, to give just one example, he worked on the development of single-axle horse-drawn trailers. On uneven terrain, the traditional twin-axle versions often literally shook themselves apart but a single-axle trailer could bounce over the uneven ground without being stressed to pieces.

Subsequently, the West held on to its technological lead … Richard Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny … the Watt and Boulton steam engine with condenser … Carl Benz’s three-wheeled, self-propelled, petrol-driven motorwagen …Launoy and Bienvenu’s model ‘bowstring’ helicopter … and on and on … to the astonishing range of Thomas Edison’s inventions … to the awesome power unleashed by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team … to Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley of transistor fame … to Alan Turing’s groundwork for AI … to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web … to the Russian and American teams who kicked off the space race … and, now, with a more globally representative innovation force… to the developers now standing on the nursery slopes of fully-developed Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing.

But where is it all leading? And, specifically, what’s next for Sales & Marketing?

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3. BUSINESS

The POLITICS of Freedom & Efficiency allied with and enabled the amazing roster of TECHNOLOGY developments to produce astonishing results right across the board, including, of course, in BUSINESS.

Business enterprises had leveraged the political freedom that they enjoyed and also subjected their operational processes to increasingly sophisticated scientific thinking. All of which meant that they grew massively in scope and scale.

In the late-twentieth century, much of the advanced development thinking was augmented by smart people who had built up highly sophisticated advisory services: McKinsey, for example, and other management consultancies, together with asset management companies such as BlackRock (founded in 1988).

In 1990/1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, these smart advisors were in prime position to benefit from the opportunities made available by linking the new belief in universal liberalism with the startling advances in digital technologies.

The Big Thing was that it was no longer necessary to have most or all of an enterprise’s functions in close proximity. So, what followed was the Great Outsourcing - the West shedding itself of all the ‘dirty’ work and, of course, the associated carbon outputs - organized and managed by members of the new elite class of business advisors in cahoots with the liberal universalists. The result was deindustrialization on an unprecedented scale.

At which point, a brief personal anecdote seems in order. I recently spoke with a family member who lives in the north-east of England. He mentioned that his father and, subsequently, he, himself, had worked for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Today, he explained, the sites that ICI once occupied are now just wasteland. The desolation is on an epic scale because, until the start of 2006, ICI employed around 30,000 people in that region. Thirty thousand people! Then, in a flash, it was all gone.

Multiply that amount of change all the way around the country, and around much of Europe, and across North America, and other parts of the West! Devastating!

And, again, nobody actually voted for it.

Which perhaps helps explain why, by the mid-1990s, in the last work before his untimely death, Christopher Lasch wrote:

Once it was the “revolt of the masses” that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture. In our time, however, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses. This remarkable turn of events confounds our expectations about the course of history and calls long-established assumptions into question.⁹

That essay is titled The Revolt of the Elites.

In fact, Business expanded outwards, to operate around the world, and inwards, to apply market principles to more and more aspects of normal life - family life, education, the works.

All of which helps explain the accuracy of the full title of Lasch’s book …

The Revolt of the Elites and THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY

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4. SOCIETY

So, has there ever before been such an all-encompassing social upheaval? Difficult to quantify, of course, but I reckon the current instance figures very high on the list.

Yet again I think it all took off - full-spectrum liberal universalism, that is - towards the end of World War Two, in response to the fact that everyone had played their part regardless of class, nationality or creed.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the 1944 Education Act was part of it all. It created a secondary school system that included grammar schools to recognize and benefit more academically inclined children regardless of home background.

On the world stage, the United Nations charter was signed on 26 June 1945.

Back in the UK, the National Health Service came into being on 5 July 1948 - free healthcare for all, irrespective of class.

The new thinking supported immigration to help rebuild Britain after the war, so, in 1948, the Windrush generation started to arrive in the UK from the West Indies …

What a joyful news Miss Matie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs’
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.¹⁰

And there were all manner of cultural shifts right across popular culture.

Just think, for example, of fictional heroes. In 1953, in Casino Royale, author Ian Fleming introduced a rather upper middle class secret agent to the world - James Bond. But in 1962 in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File along came someone very different - a secret agent who was a working-class chap who has been described as “a grammar school boy among public school boys”.

And there was a period of years when ‘kitchen sink drama’ ruled London’s West End theatres. A flavour? Here’s part of the opening stage direction of Arnold Wesker’s 1958 play, Roots:

A rather ramshackle house in Norfolk where there is no water laid on, nor electricity, nor gas. Everything rambles and the furniture is cheap and old. … An assortment of clobber lies around: papers and washing, coats and basins, a tin wash-tub with shirts an underwear to be cleaned, Tilley lamps and Primus stoves. Washing hangs on a line in the room.

You get the idea? That is Kitchen Sink Land! A far from grand home, nor a lord nor lady in sight.

This barrier-smashing did a great deal of good for the UK by supporting meritocracy and empowering a much wider talent pool.

But, then, something strange happened. To my mind anyway.

As the 1990s went on the UK (and the West generally) outsourced ever more industrial work to other parts of the world. The coal and steel industries, the heart of any industrial economy, had already been declining for a couple of decades, and the offshoring of manufacturing of all kinds accelerated.

Then, in 1997, the British voted in a new left of centre government under prime minister Tony Blair. A key action was their encouragement of immigration.

Why?

Well, when I Google the topic the typical responses include …

Year: 1997. Leader: Tony Blair. Policy Milestone: Labour wins election; focus on economic growth through migration.¹¹

Now then, I’m probably showing my ignorance of economics but isn’t it a tad counter-intuitive that, just at the time you’re actively sending millions of jobs out of the country, you encourage millions more people to come in to the country … to work?

Not only that but the whole thing ratcheted up: particularly when, in 2001, China was admitted into the World Trade Organization and the rest, as they say, is history.

In the twenty five years up until 1997, total net migration into the UK was around seventy thousand. From 1997 until 2024, total net migration into the UK was of the order of seven million. That is a one-hundredfold increase.

This only makes sense, it seems to me, if one goes along with the conclusions reached by American legal scholar Philip Bobbitt in his 2002 book, The Shield of Achilles. He posited a shift from the Nation-State (rationale: “The State will better the welfare of the nation”) to the Market-State (rationale: “The State will maximize the opportunity of its citizens”).

So, what is a market-state? Here’s Bobbitt’s answer:

In the market-state, the marketplace becomes the economic arena, replacing the factory. In the marketplace, men and women are consumers, not producers (who are probably offshore anyway).¹²

It is a huge shift. Expanding on this point, Bobbitt quotes Michael Walzer:

What can a hospital attendant, or a schoolteacher or a marriage counsellor or a social worker or a television repairman or a government official be said to make? ... More important than the producers ... are the entrepreneurs – heroes of autonomy, consumers of opportunity – who compete to supply whatever all the other consumers want or might be persuaded to want ... competing with one another to maximize everyone else’s options.¹³

Okay, so that’s the future is it? And the punch line:

The market-state is, above all, a mechanism for enhancing opportunity, for creating something – possibilities – commensurate with our imaginations.

Well, that was Bobbitt’s analysis twenty or so years ago, and it’s how things continued, with immigration into the West going up and up and up … accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by some cultural assimilation going down and down and down.

BUT … not everyone bought in to this plan. As indicated earlier, Russia was strenuously against it from the outset. As was China. And as have been numerous other countries.

Then recently, and more or less single-handedly, U.S. President Trump has brought about something of a rethink. I’m drafting this just a few days after President Trump has returned to America from a tour of the Middle East. The central premise seems to be that everything is susceptible to a deal. Everything!

Will it all work? Only time will tell. I recall a book that I read back in the 1980s - by Richard Bach if I remember right - which played with the idea of having human conflicts settled through sports contests of various kinds.

Is Trump’s idea a variant of this, where conflicts might be settled through business deals? Well, if it is, it at least has the virtue of being far more peaceful than current methods. And with AI and Quantum Computing very much in the offing, the situation may need a radical calming-down factor.

So, if all of the above is translated into a presentable course, what shape might it take? Here’s how it’s emerging …

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WHAT THE HECK’S GOING ON?

The course will cover the four stages of development in the Western world that have featured in my lifetime; each stage flagged in terms of Politics, Technology, Business and Society as I see them. To say this is a broad brush view is a massive understatement but it suffices for the purpose of this document.

STAGE 1 - up until, say, 1990:

P = Nation State
T = Electro-mechanical
B = Business sells Products … Customer buys Production. Customer decision based upon Sincerity of offer.
S = Homogeneous

This is where I started my working life - in Sales and Marketing at the tail end of the product age, but the product age nonetheless. Which meant that, although there were some shifts towards a more modern view of things, the predominant view (if ever one even thought about it at that time) was that Value was intrinsic to a product. Product qua product. Features and benefits.

A supplying company sold Product. Customers bought its Production. Period. We bought lawn mowers because they cut grass; detergents because they cleaned clothes; mousetraps because they caught mice.

Also, at this time, I think it fair to say that the nation state model seemed fairly secure. It certainly did to me, and when companies operated across national borders they used a regional structure.

STAGE 2 - 1990 to 2007:

P = Hybrid, still predominantly Nation State but with the emergence of Global elements
T = Hybrid: electro-mechanical and very early stage digital technologies
B = Business sells Product with Added Value … Customer buys Productivity. Customer decision based upon Authenticity of offer.
S = Homogeneous, with progressively increasing immigration, including from non-Western civilizations

At this time, both technology and politics were changing with astonishing speed. In the 1990s advances in digitization enabled something entirely new: the ability for corporate functions to be geographically dispersed without the whole enterprise falling apart, thus making mega-scale outsourcing possible.

And, politically, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the West declared victory in the Cold War and seems to have believed that the entire world had become accessible for the promotion of the Western liberal model. This was the logic that led, for example, to China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Also, crucially, as technology enabled the age-old problem of achieving consistent quality to be overcome, product focus shifted to ‘enablement’ - the ability to upgrade a product and do more with it in terms of achieving outcomes in the life of the customer.

So, Value was no longer regarded as an intrinsic product feature but, rather, as extrinsic, as perceived by individual customers in terms of how the product fitted into and enhanced their lives.

STAGE 3 - 2007 to 2024:

P = Hybrid, Nation States but Globalization makes further advances
T = Digital, early stage
B = Business sells Possibility ... Customer buys Possibility. Customer decision based upon Authenticity of offer.
S = Increasingly Multicultural

In June 2007, the Apple iPhone was launched. It is not putting it too strongly to say that it marked the start of a completely new stage of human history. The iPhone and other variants that have emerged of these multi-purpose, pocket/purse super-computers, together with the multitude of other apps enabled by them, are emblematic of the way that technology has wholly and globally transformed human communications.

This seems to have put all of the developments in all areas on steroids. Not least, it meant that the implicit Sell versus Buy contract between business enterprises and their customers reached something approaching an agreement … with enterprises more and more recognizing that customer value is entirely determined and decided upon by the customer. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

So, we arrived at a point where a business enterprise could more accurately sell what was bought.

But making any sense of the emerging world means being concerned with much broader considerations. What does the future look like for humans?

In 2000, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), a Polish-British sociologist and philosopher, published his thesis, Liquid Modernity, a brilliant overview of the situation. In 2012, in the foreword to a new edition of the book, Bauman wrote:

When more than ten years ago I tried to unpack the meaning of the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ in its application to the form of life currently practised, one of the mysteries obtrusively haunting me and staunchly resisting resolution was the status of the liquid-modern human condition: was it an intimation, an early version, an augury or a portent of things to come? Or was it, rather, a temporary and transient - as well as an unfinished, incomplete and inconsistent - interim settlement; an interval between two distinct, yet viable and durable, complete and consistent answers to the challenges of human togetherness?¹⁴

Good questions … but, as Bauman went on, we do not have a clear image of the destination that we are moving towards, although he did assume that it…

…needs to to be a model of a global society, a global economy, global politics, a global jurisdiction …¹⁵

Hmm, really? I wonder. Anyway, in the short term we are experiencing a counter to that view, which leads us to Now.

STAGE 4 - 2024 to ?

P = Hybrid … a great deal of power has shifted to the Globalists … but the Nation State Strikes Back
T = Digital, more mature stage
B = The arrival of AI and Quantum Computing. Business sells Promise … Customer buys Promise. Customer decision based upon Profilicity of offer?
S = Continuing immigration … with some hardening into multicultural ghetto-ization … but counterbalanced by significant individualization in many sectors.

Endnote: a key point of all this is that all four modes are still potentially in play. Sales & Marketing people need to be able to identify which Sell-Buy mode is dominant in any articular situation.

More news will follow shortly about next steps but, if you’re interested, do please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

1. Vladimir Putin, Victory Day 2025 speech: https://www.rev.com/transcripts/putin-delivers-victory-day-speech-transcript

2. Vladimir Putin. Ibid.

3. G.M. Trevelyan. England under the Stuarts (1904)

4. G.M. Trevelyan. Ibid.

5. G.M. Trevelyan. Ibid.

6. G.M. Trevelyan. Ibid.

7. G.M. Trevelyan. Ibid.

8. G.M. Trevelyan. Ibid.

9. Christopher Lasch. The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

10. Louise Bennett. Colonisation in Reverse (1960)

11. https://www.davidsonmorris.com/labour-immigration-policy/

12. Philip Bobbitt. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002)

13. Philip Bobbitt. Ibid.

14. Zygmunt Bauman. Liquid Modernity (2000, 2012)

15. Ztgmunt Bauman. Ibid.