Businesses Need to Prepare for the Gathering Storm

Consumers are getting fed up. Businesses of all sorts may get sucked in if they're not ready.

The Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David, 1793 (Wikipedia, public domain)* 

“It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.” ― Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm

There’s a backlash coming.

We’ve all seen talk about the tech backlash, with firms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook in the cross-hairs of pundits and government officials. That’s centered around their consolidated power and use of data. And it’s a topic that deserves consideration.

The backlash I’m predicting is a different one. It’s rooted less in operations and more in culture.

The origins of this backlash are many, and I’ll outline some of them below.

*Before I do, let’s pause to consider the image above, The Tennis Court Oath, Jacques-Louis David’s painting brought to life a foundational event of the French Revolution. In it, we see the gathering of the middle class, who had sworn an oath for national unity over individual freedoms. It took courage to stand up to authority in …