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Rohit 
Toby Flenderson is not a popular guy. A few years when I spoke at a previous SHRM event, Toby was one factor in a palpable sense of extreme frustration I felt from many of the people in my audience. The Office was still on the air and Toby (the HR character on the show) cast … Read more
Domino’s just started fixing potholes on roads, to help your pizza get delivered undisturbed. In response to news stories of kids getting fined by overzealous city officials for running lemonade stands without permits, Country Time Lemonade created a fund to pay their legal fees. Both are stunts from brands taking a short lived Brand Stand … Read more
Yes, Elon Musk finally released his flame throwers to the consumer market … and people promptly began using them in totally inappropriate ways. It is a predictable side effect of our culture of Everyday Stardom that consumers behave badly … just because they can. This week, there were plenty of examples that maybe we don’t … Read more
This week Crayola branched out in a new direction by launching its own line of colorful beauty products. In the same week, Blackberry continued their own quest to maintain relevance and resurrect their fading brand by announcing the KEY2 (a new phone featuring a full keyboard) and Kodak showed off the first photos taken on … Read more
Is Twitter useful anymore (or was it ever)? Most of us who have been on the platform for some time have likely experienced a downward shift in its value. For me, the platform used to offer an interesting stream of real time commentary from friends and acquaintances. Over time it became a noisy flood of … Read more
This week AirFrance became one of the first airlines to experiment with subscription pricing by announcing a new pre-paid travel product called Le Pass which allows frequent travelers to purchase pre-paid coupons to lock in pricing. A few days later, Mercedes-Benz followed BMW, Porsche and Cadillac by launching their own monthly all-inclusive subscription model, at … Read more
Should technology be a source for hope or fear? That was the question that seemed to emerge this week as I read several stories offering a recap from the TED Global conference as well as new initiatives in natural language search from Google and a legal debate about how and if people should be able … Read more
Social media is under attack and all of us are trying to figure out what to do about it. Should we use Facebook less like a newspaper and more like a telephone? Is the best solution for the manipulated outrage on Twitter to just to turn it all off? An Op-Ed in the NYTimes this week tackled … Read more
This week my story picks range from exploring the future of luxury marketing and healthcare to addictive game design to the world of people who are paid to watch Netflix content. I have to admit, the one about the Netflix content taggers did intrigue me – as I never really thought about how all of … Read more
If you are a fan of the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror, this was a surreal week. Walmart patented autonomous robot bees (which get hacked to kill people in one episode) and China introduced a social rating system that gives citizens scores based on “good behaviors” (a plot line that leads to chaos in another episode). … Read more
Non-Obvious Thinking is my latest book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - relesaed 10/01/2024.
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
