In An Uncertain World, These Are The Business Trends We Can Count On

This is the tenth essay in our series of 10 Lessons From 10 Years Of The World’s Most Innovative Companies.

It’s never been good form to talk about politics among friends, but today it just can’t be helped. The Trump Administration is approaching governing in a radically different way, and the uncertainty that it breeds can have a paralyzing effect. But let’s be clear: We have already lived through a wave of uncertainty over the past decade, as new technological and economic forces have remade not only our marketplaces (“Macy’s, I’d like to introduce you to Amazon Prime”) but our cultural expectations. So how did we navigate through (March 16, 2017)’s ambiguity, and what can that teach us about today and tomorrow?

One method—which we try to apply here at Fast Company when we’re calibrating our coverage—is to ask: What are the things that we can count on? What are the things that we feel confident will be true, regardless of other forces? Over the past 10 years, those trends have included the rise of social media (we didn’t know Facebook would be the big winner, but we believed the format was unstoppable), the spread of mobile smartphones and the app economy (to which we have all become addicted), the breakdown of traditional TV viewing habits (hello, Netflix), the deepening gospels of resource-sharing (Airbnb, Uber), the inexorable march of cloud computing (Amazon Web Services).