Terry Garrett

If you has asked me 15 years ago what I'd be doing today I would have answered, "I don't know". Same answer today.

My greatest passion is building new business models to exploit current market situations. That practically ensures I'll never know what I'll be doing in the future, except building something new, something that deals with the state of things 'now' and where things are going in the immediate future.

Each segment of my business career has segued into the next through paying attention to emerging trends and learning all I can about the underlying causes. For example, in the area of management and organization design, I became fascinated with knowledge workers and the knowledge organization. That led to development of how to build the responsibility-based organization, i.e. how does an organization encourage members to take personal responsibility and weave that into the fabric of a responsible organization in whole.

For the past 10 years I've been focused on the transformation of local media ecosystems and local economies. The old systems started breaking down about 20 years ago, but didn't become evident until the past decade. John Naisbitt wrote (my paraphrase) that to be an innovator, you must anticipate the emerging trends, but don't get so far ahead of the parade that people don't know you're in it. I think he's right about that—timing is everything when it comes to introducing new ideas.

Currently I'm developing a news media and business web platform. Essentially the content management system (Oasis) combines a journalism model with a new business model that uses the web as the hub or starting point. The thing we know about big market disruptions and transitions is that the old way doing of doing things erodes faster than the new system can be developed to replace it. That's where we are now with both the economy and with media. To create the new system requires enormous experimentation.
That's what I'm doing. Creating models that can be one of those new systems. Some will work and some will fail. And that's how we learn.

I live in the SF Bay Area and stand in amazement at the constant flow of innovative and inspiring activity coming from this region.