williams inference intro. presentation

Williams Inference Service


Observational Awareness

1. The greatest difficulty in dealing with change is eliminating obsolete knowledge and procedures.

2. A reasonable approach is to view change with an unencumbered mind.

3. To let go sounds simple, bit it is not easy.

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”


Asking questions

1. Have we seen examples of this theme in work or our personal lives?

2. Where does this theme seem to be headed?

3. Does the theme pertain to any issues within the our company such as Human Resources, Technology, Management, Purchasing, Marketing, Public Relations, Logistics, or other areas?

4. Could this theme affect our company’s market, potential or existing customers or goals?

5. Can our company devise a new revenue stream around this theme?

By broadening our thinking and promoting dialogue, we discover valuable insights.


Bacteria and Viruses 1. Viruses can “hide” in genes. Many diseases that we thought were

hereditary may, in fact, be more accurately attributed to microbes.

2. The human animal is mostly composed of microbes “getting along”. The majority of research money is aimed at removing toxins and killing microbes that invade our bodies and cause harm.

3. Researchers are now looking for new antibiotic and antiviral medications to fight chronic ailments that before now were thought to be unrelated to the microbes.

4. If the majority of the human animal is made up of microbes, then killing off microbes may not be the best answer. This methodology has been shown to cause the rise of more virulent strains.

5. Finding ways to coexist with microbes makes sense. Chicken pox and Mononucleosis are examples of how our bodies have learned to do this. Research is now being done to locate ways to coexist or indirectly and softly attack instead of ways to attack aggressively.


Inference and Questions

1. What customers of our company will this demand affect?

2. Where are these customers?

3. What is an appropriate response to anticipate?

4. Are there any other related issues?

Inference: Medicine is becoming a science of ecology, which is a chaotic system. This type of understanding demands pattern recognition and the computing power to understand.


Free Agent Culture

1. Not holding a job and working for oneself is becoming a new work system

2. There are an estimated 31 million free agents in the U.S. workforce. The values defining this group are: freedom, self-reliance, authenticity and defining your own success.

3. Work has become more of a quest for meaning than money.

4. Loyalty no longer moves vertically from employee to boss. People are loyal to the clients, colleagues and projects.

5. Talent, more so than capital, is the most important resource in today’s economy.

6. Retirement is changing. People will not simply quit working, they will continue to earn.

7. By definition, free agents develop their own talents. This is the essence of modern meaning in work. Good leaders inspire this behavior in their workers.


1. How does our company provide meaning to its employees?

2. How is loyalty created within the organization?

3. How does this affect the long range planning?

1. Retirement issues

2. Demographics, i.e. labor statistics, customers, employees, etc.

4. How can our company maximize this trend’s upside?

5. What are the potential dangers involved with this trend?

Asking questionsInference: Loyalty is changing. Authority is dead. You cannot tell people what to do, you must guide and question them regarding their feelings toward a goal. Loyalty is horizontal, not vertical as before. Loyalty is more about choice than duty.


Global Inequality1. The global distribution of income is becoming more unequal and

polarized. The middle class is disappearing. In 1980, a new employee with an advanced degree earned about twice as much as someone who did not finish high school. The spread has now widened to 4:1.

2. The income divergence also points toward a divergence between the zones of peace and turmoil. A key difference in the polarization occurring is that many of the poorest people now have access to television, which allows them to see that they are poor.

3. The wealthiest 20 percent of American households own 96 percent of the stock. The rich are buying stock at the cost of savings.

4. Most people in the world have little or no capital available to them. This portends a gloomy outlook including perpetual class conflict, struggles for power and prestige and a society divided between the dominators and the dominated.

5. In the New Economy, “the victims are not only exploited, they’re excluded.” This is dangerous.


Asking questions

1. What markets show this trend currently?

2. How does our company deal with the issue of inequality?

3. How does potential instability get factored into planning?

Inference: Inequality, exploitation and exclusion lead to greater instability.


Babies

1. Parents are wealthier and doting on their children more than ever.

2. BabyPressConference.com is one of the first websites to allow families separated by geography to visit with one another over the Internet and be involved in welcoming a new member to the family.

3. High-end baby outfitters are finding that consumers are interested in fancy swaddling such as titanium strollers with leather seats and Kate Spade diaper bags. Increased birthrates among women in their 30’s and 40’s, wealthy grandparents and smaller families contribute to the phenomenon.

4. “It’s a thing of pride, you wash your car, you polish up your baby.”

5. Increased incidence of twin births of more than 55 percent over the last 20 years has some stores packaging baby supplies in twin packages.

6. Last year there were 560 24-hour childcare facilities in 18 states, and now 25 states have approved licensing for such centers.


Asking questions

1. What is our company doing to provide for the babies? the parents?

2. What does this say about our customers?

3. Is there a potential market entry point here?

Inference: For these parents, nothing is too good for baby.


Tweens

1. Britney Spears had her first hit at 16 years old. She is the top selling teenage singer of all time, being the youngest star ever to have a 12X platinum album.

2. Tweens are defined loosely as youngsters 9 to 15 years old. They are the largest such group in two decades, and the wealthiest ever.

3. This is an era of “Girl Power” in which females 13 to 15 years old are hyper-consumers. Nothing makes clothes trendy faster than the seal of approval from kids with babysitting money in their pockets.

4. Children, 8 to 12 years old, spent $200 million of their own money on home furnishings in 1999. “Kids have a much higher design level these days.” They are demanding more classic, adult styles for their own rooms.

5. A kid spends more time in his/her room than before and therefore the roles of the room and adolescent have evolved to accommodate more responsibility and unsupervised time.

6. A “fourth meal” has evolved. The time between lunch and dinner is longer because of working parents. This “snack time” is driven almost exclusively by kids’ preferences.


Asking questions

1. Can our company get tweens as customers more effectively?

2. How does the influence of tweens affect our business?

Inference: The best way to develop persistence in a child is to allow them to fail. A life full of rewards is less aspirate of sticking with the job than if it’s interlaced with disappointments. We are cultivating an intense comfort among these youngsters unlike ever before. This may be a danger in the future.


Oldies 1. One in five Harley owners is over the age of fifty five. They bare

breasts, drink beer and pass along tips on how to soothe arthritis while sharing neatly rolled marijuana joints. This group “refuses to carry an AARP card,” as long as they ride Harleys.

2. People are working past 90 years old as barbers, fashion publicists, composers, ministers McDonald’s cooks, doctors and lawyers.

3. The number of disabled elderly has declined with the widespread knowledge of the benefits of diet, exercise, smoking cessation and improved drugs and medical care. Fewer people are going to nursing homes.

4. People under the age of 55 are getting sicker than their elders, who are relatively healthier. “Diseases of progress” such as diabetes, asthma and heart disease are the culprits.

5. More prescriptions are being written than ever and there is a shift towards the use of more expensive medications.

6. Dr. David Morris suggests that many of the elderly are “overmedicated”. He claims that many pills intended to alleviate one ill may cause surprising harm. Another doctor claims that, “we still have a gaping hole in our knowledge about how drugs behave in the elderly.”


Asking questions

1. Is this an opportunity that is being ignored?

2. What does this lead to when the Boomer gets old?

3. How does the pertain to risk taking and what implications are there?

Inference: Boomers, despite being less healthy than the elderly, are denying old age. They refuse to give up the Harley. The elderly living longer and healthier lives create new demands.


Symbolism – The Cow


Symbol – The Cow 1. The cow is becoming a dominant symbol in the U.S.

2. Only 23% of households in the U.S. contain traditional families. The nuclear family is disappearing faster on television than in real life with only 11% of prime time characters that are parents of any kind. Families rarely watch television together, so it isn’t considered necessary to satisfy many generations at once.

3. Corporations are having trouble defining what a family truly is.

4. Growing numbers of clergy in mainstream denominations are embracing a new formal divorce ceremony. Couples can end their relationships on a positive note by returning rings, exchanging vows of mutual respect, and even receptions afterward.

5. 33% of all U.S. births in 2000 were to unmarried women. In the past three decades the percentage of American women who have never married has more than doubled.

6. Some 38% of 14,000 young people surveyed chose heroes from their own families. The youngsters showed a keen eye for how well their heroes balanced work, family and community.

7. 73% of Gen Xers said they favor a return to more traditional family values.


Symbolism – The Gargoyle


Hedges

1. The symbol of the gargoyle has gone away.

2. Corporations, esp. insurance companies, are looking for comprehensive risk-management tools.

3. The Bank of International Settlements reports that total derivative positions currently exceed US $95 trillion while World GDP is only US $30 trillion.

4. $25 billion in convertibles were issued in May alone, compared with $46 billion for all of last year. Hedge funds are among the largest consumers of convertibles, and they normally finance those transactions by selling short the company’s common shares.

5. Weather insurance can be purchased through brokers such as Enron.

6. Many blue-chip investment banks are marketing derivatives to the retail audience, expanding the investment strategy beyond the once exclusive domain of institutions and super rich.


Asking questions

The Cow

• How does our company define family?

• Can our company provide for this void of family in some way?

The Gargoyle

• What sort of risk management is being done? Is it enough/too much?

• What will our company do if the risk-taker disappears?

Inference 1: Obviously, the cow is a symbol of the mother, but it is also a symbol of family. We embrace symbols of what we do not have.

Inference 2: We first reported the gargoyle symbol 3 years ago. At that time people were taking risks, but didn’t know how to manage it. The gargoyle filled this void. People are finding ways to manage risk. The symbol of risk management is gone.


Religion

1. A growing number of Christians across the country are choosing a do-it-yourself worship experience in what they call a “house church”. Participants tout the ability to respond to individual needs more quickly.

2. Pagan traditions are being incorporated into Christian churches as a way of enriching the experience.

3. Buddhist centers are spreading through the Catskills in New York. Buddhism seems to have attained a new level of recognition now that the Dalai Lama appears in ads for Apple Computers. “…it’s not considered weird anymore.”

4. The aging baby boomer maintains a brash materialism coupled with an intense interest in spiritualism. This will be leavened by the Internet and the rising culture of religious diversity.

5. Churches are expanding to meet more broadly the needs of parishioners.


Asking questions

1. How do we anticipate this trend affecting us within the organization?

2. How do we anticipate this trend affecting our customers?

3. Are there new demands among churches not being anticipated?

Inference: Spirituality, like morality and work, is becoming more aligned with the self. People are demanding tailored everything. Diversity becomes more important.


1. Corporate behavior is shifting from firms’ fearing they’ll lose sales if they are environmentally active to fearing they’ll lose sales if they aren’t.

2. Carbon trading is one way for companies to sell the right to pollute to others for whom it is more expensive to reduce emissions.

3. Suburbs in Atlanta, Austin and Chicago are finding ways such as taxes and bond referendums to raise money to preserve open spaces.

4. GM has declared that it has dropped its long held skepticism regarding global warming and has come to believe the trend is real.

5. Although America rejected the Kyoto Protocol, multinationals will be forced to behave in a more environmentally friendly manner abroad. Many companies are betting that by acting now, they will aver tougher rules down the road.

6. Iceland is interested in using its cheap electricity to produce hydrogen to be used in fuel cells.

7. China’s emissions of CO2 have shrunk by 17% since the mid 1990’s

Green


Asking questions

1. Is our company behaving similar to other firms with respect to the environment?

2. Can our company make more money from this demand for nature?

3. Can we save money by behaving in an environmentally friendly manner?

Inference: The natural world is closely linked to the spiritual world in many minds. This trend is made more evident by the world’s fastest growing religion: Buddhism, which does not separate the two. Pagan rituals offer this as well. People demand more nature.


Internet

1. The death of the Internet has been exaggerated. Although dot-coms have been failing, online customers have been exploding.

2. Microsoft is shifting to a revenue model based on subscriptions. They are also interested in Interactive TV, web access and “back office” software for corporations. They would like to encourage companies to sign multiyear licensing agreements, some of which come with automatic upgrades.

3. Despite the death of Napster, file sharing is booming. Shifting the data from centralized computers to the user has made file sharing difficult to enforce.

4. Aimster, a secure mail service that wraps all messages in an envelope of encryption is being used by political activists in repressive countries and by lawyers to maintain confidentiality during file exchange. Pornography is also being transmitted.

5. Until recently it has been difficult for computer telephone callers to locate each other. This is changing. Microsoft’s Passport, the company asserts, will change the very nature of the telephone.


Asking questions

1. Can our company make more money from the Internet?

2. Is there a potential market in data sharing?

3. How is Internet telephony being anticipated?

4. Where is “new demand” appearing for Internet services?

Inference: Companies are finding ways of making more money from the Internet.


Lagging Theme - Optical1. Wave Division Multiplexing – There may be a glut of unusable

bandwidth, but there will be no glut of connectivity.

2. Three ways to beef up optics:

a. Simply laying more cable is not a viable option as it costs too much.

b. Increasing the number of channels available.

c. Make the data travel faster along each channel

Erbium-doped fibers

Raman Amplification

3. Photonic Band Gap Crystals

1. Several years from widespread use

2. “Leak” less and carry higher intensity pulses

3. Currently fibers of PBGC are made up to 100 meters long


Asking questions

1. What effect does the demand for connectivity have on our strategic plan?

2. How does optical innovation get factored into planning?

Inference: New developments in optical networking demand more connectivity.

Williams Inference ServiceFounded in 1965 by James S. Williams, today, the service is the oldest and most respected name in inferential intelligence. Williams Inference has been featured in: Barron’s, Fortune, Private Asset Management, Worth, Chief Executive, MSN Money Central, The Financial Times of London and John Mauldin’s Investor Insight. Four (4) Roundtable Seminars Every quarterly seminar is led by a Williams partner during which they address 10 to 13 areas where we find change occurring, and discuss the opportunities and dangers within. The presentation will be tailored to meet individual client needs. *Due to increasing demand, a mail out version is now available, digital/hard copy. Four (4) Issues of Inference Update Quarterly magazine of highlighted demand pressures. Four (4) Issues of Anomaly Quarterly magazine that looks at anomalies occurring within a variety of industries. Sixteen (16) Inference Probes / Reports A broader and more in-depth look at current key inference files. Four (4) Quarterly Reviews with Stock Matrix Brief synopsis of Williams Inference thinking for the quarter. Includes an outline of market consequences. *Pricing is annum, paid at inception of service. Soft dollars welcome.

williams inference intro. presentation

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