In PwC’s global report on the workforce of the future 10,000 people from Germany, China, India, the UK and the US were asked about their feelings, predictions and hopes for the future of work.

The question as to how confident respondents are about their own skills and what they expect from their employers is of particular interest. In this context, the report analyses the different forces that will affect the labour market in 2030. Four different scenarios have resulted with respect to what tomorrow's world of work might look like:

The Red World: Innovation.

In the Red World, innovation rules. Customers take centre stage, companies are racing to give them exactly what they really want. Individualised products and services will be the winners, digital technology and innovative platforms are making it possible. But in a world where innovation outpaces regulation, the risks are high.

The Blue World: Capitalism.

In the Blue World, corporate is king. Capitalism reigns supreme, bigger is better. Organisations are looking at their size and influence as the best way to protect their profit margins against intense competition from their peers and aggressive new market entrants. Companies are growing to such an extent that some become more powerful and larger than entire economies.

The Green World: Responsibility.

In the Green World, companies care about the future. Corporate responsibility is not just nice to have but it is a business imperative. Sustainability, diversity, environmental responsibility and social commitment are central. Trust is the basic currency underpinning business and employment. Instead of profit maximisation, companies have to place their societal purpose at the heart of their commercial strategy.

The Yellow World: Humanity.

In the Yellow World, humans come first. Workers and companies are seeking out greater meaning and relevance in what they do. Only those who place society and communities at the centre of every action are successful. Crowdfunded capital flows towards ethical and blameless brands and companies with a social heart.

Understanding a Black Swan

The term was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a finance professor, writer, and former Wall Street trader. Taleb wrote about the idea of a black swan event in a 2007 book prior to the events of the 2008 financial crisis. Taleb argued that because black swan events are impossible to predict due to their extreme rarity, yet have catastrophic consequences, it is important for people to always assume a black swan event is a possibility, whatever it may be, and to try to plan accordingly. Some believe that diversification may offer some protection when a black swan event does occur.

Taleb later used the 2008 financial crisis and the idea of black swan events to argue that if a broken system is allowed to fail, it actually strengthens it against the catastrophe of future black swan events. He also argued that conversely, a system that is propped up and insulated from risk ultimately becomes more vulnerable to catastrophic loss in the face of rare, unpredictable events.

Taleb describes a black swan as an event that

1) is so rare that even the possibility that it might occur is unknown,

2) has a catastrophic impact when it does occur,

and 3) is explained in hindsight as if it were actually predictable.

For extremely rare events, Taleb argues that the standard tools of probability and prediction, such as the normal distribution, do not apply since they depend on large population and past sample sizes that are never available for rare events by definition. Extrapolating, using statistics based on observations of past events is not helpful for predicting black swans, and might even make us more vulnerable to them.

The last key aspect of a black swan is that as a historically important event, observers are keen to explain it after the fact and speculate as to how it could have been predicted. Such retrospective speculation, however, does not actually help to predict future black swans as these can be anything from a credit crisis to a war.

Examples of Past Black Swan Events

The crash of the U.S. housing market during the 2008 financial crisis is one of the most recent and well-known black swan events. The effect of the crash was catastrophic and global, and only a few outliers were able to predict it happening.

Also in 2008, Zimbabwe had the worst case of hyperinflation in the 21st century with a peak inflation rate of more than 79.6 billion percent. An inflation level of that amount is nearly impossible to predict and can easily ruin a country financially.

The dotcom bubble of 2001 is another black swan event that has similarities to the 2008 financial crisis. America was enjoying rapid economic growth and increases in private wealth before the economy catastrophically collapsed. Since the Internet was at its infancy in terms of commercial use, various investment funds were investing in technology companies with inflated valuations and no market traction. When these companies folded, the funds were hit hard, and the downside risk was passed on to the investors. The digital frontier was new so it was nearly impossible to predict the collapse.

• Small means that the founder is involved in a far greater percentage of customer interactions.

• Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them quickly.

• Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change your business model when your competition changes theirs.

• Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

• Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

• Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others while you keep all the power because you invent something that’s remarkable and tell your story to people who want to hear it.

• A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart, small companies are happy to hire them.

• A small restaurant has an owner who greets you by name.

• A small venture fund doesn’t have to fund big, bad ideas in order to put their capital to work. They can make small investments in tiny companies with good ideas.

• A small church has a minister with the time to visit you in the hospital when you’re sick.

• Is it better to be the head of Craigslist or the head of UPS?

• Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.

TEN TIPS EVERY GOOD MARKETER SHOULD KNOW

Assuming you’re like me and the rest of the people I know (which means you haven’t figured out everything there is to know about marketing), here’s a list to get you started:

1. A product for everyone rarely reaches anyone.

2. Cheaper is the last refuge of the person who’s not a very good marketer. It’s a short-term hit, not a long-term advantage. Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.

3. Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.

4. If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.

5. Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.

6. Good marketers tell a story. Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to. Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in a conversation-rich world. Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.

7. Conversations among the people in your marketplace

8. happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

9. People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want. What people want is the extra, emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.

10. Business-to-business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.

Marketing is not an emergency. Marketing begins before the product is created. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.

1. Stick to simple rules

2. Build in redundancy and layers (no single point of failure)

3. Resist the urge to suppress randomness

4. Make sure that you have your soul in the game

5. Experiment and tinker — take lots of small risks

6. Avoid risks that, if lost, would wipe you out completely

7. Don’t get consumed by data

8. Keep your options open

9. Focus more on avoiding things that don’t work than trying to find out what does work

10. Respect the old — look for habits and rules that have been around for a long time