Our grandest NGT!s have formed our profession's foundation.

Discovering the next great thing has a cost: failure. The basic stumbling block is doing nothing, or doing nothing new.

-Scott Briscoe, Executive Update On Line

Ah, the thrill of "The Next Great Thing!" (NGT!) It makes the nostrils flair and the blood boil. It promises good times and great fun-not to mention a buck or two. But it has been a while-and it is getting a bit stuffy in here. Call me crazy, but when the wirehouses start talking about "Fee-only" and "Life Planning," it is definitely time for us to start rethinking.

Sorry, but we are all getting older and "Fee-only" and its "I'm on your side" variants are no longer new. Neither is "Life Planning." Or "Asset Allocation" or "Variable Life." Or "Monte Carlo." Or "Scenario Planning." In fact, it has definitely been dry times for NGT!s. Yet NGT!s have been constant companions. They consistently take authentic financial planners to new, primary sources of progress, product and/or profit.

Traditionally, NGT! signals a change in the way we do it out here on the bleeding edge. It would be "the Buzz;" the next breakthrough in our advance to becoming an authentic profession while enabling practitioner profitability.

NGT! can be light or shadow; yin or yang. It can be idealistic and visionary or practical and realistic. Or, hopefully, integral combinations. It can also be seductive and deluding. NGT! is always new and always challenging. It is the arguably good/great, but yet unproven. Necessarily containing the seeds of failure, it terrifies the timid and tantalizes the adventurous.

Delightfully, NGT! has been significant to our cultures since our humble beginnings. After 30-odd years, both the data and sufficient perspective enable us to look at our profession's history. We can see trends and repetition. We can inform the present with the past, gain insights to our future and assess the visions enabling our growth. Simultaneously, we can look at our temptations, our miscellaneous bumps and bruises, at opportunities missed, at ideals not met, at short paths leading nowhere, and wonder at the potentially magical implications of our work in the modern world. Taken in aggregate, both trait and trend are observable.

From our initial ideals and a whiff of an "NGT!," we evolved a wonderful profession devoted to enabling and improving the lives of millions, maybe, ultimately, billions. That said, our work has not been always grand, or even defensible. Worst case, we have self-served. Not far behind, we frequently divert, taking other industries' problems as our own, bearing primary risks of early adoption, serving as low-risk profit centers and low-cost, highly effective focus groups. Unfortunately, too often, "us" is confused with "them."

As much as we have benefited by our professional wanderlust, it is fair to argue that several NGT!s derailed us. Some of these came at the expense of our growth and our emergence as an authentic profession.

Some of this has been great-we continually pushed the borders of our implications. Some was not so great-we tend toward repeating essentially identical mistakes, particularly where the NGT! engages both high profitability and technical challenge.

Curiously, we began as a "Next Great Thing!" They sold financial products naked in those embryonic days. Alone. Without context. Intuiting both the stupidity and the opportunity, conscientious sales people spotted an NGT! in the making. In the process of getting to know their clients, they saw multiple needs-like insurance and investments for one client-and the seemingly obvious sense of combining the two. From nascent perception, they noticed insufficiency. There was more. There were wills undone, taxes gutting family net worth, isolated ancillary advisors, and increasingly incomprehensible employee benefits and terrifying inflation. Nobody was keeping track; nobody was integrating. Financial complexity and money demands were pummeling regular folks. Foresightful salesmen saw the need for something that worked with whole persons and their aggregated issues. This naturally became "comprehensive" financial "planning."

Voila! Our profession was its very own NGT!

Idealistically, our profession has sparked successions of NGT!s. Some made money. Many did not. Some were grand in vision. Some were not. Some worked. Some did not. But we persisted.

Perhaps some of our grandest NGT! forethoughts formed our profession's foundations. We developed a brand new educational institution, generated an appropriate curriculum and empowered its teaching. We created credentialing bodies and professional associations. These continue to thrive. Concurrently, we developed different forms of practice, ranging from enabled solo practitioners to efficient firms to reconstructed relationships within the financial services industries. None of these existed 30-odd years ago.

Financial planners face consistent strains between ideals and profit centers. Our hearts have tugged at our wallets as our wallets have tugged at our hearts. This, in turn, brought us to new products, services and business practices-and ongoing ethical dilemmas and the insistent paradoxes of modern life.

The dynamic is interesting. As advisors in matters financial, we know for certain that we cannot stay in business if we don't make money. As human beings, we know we can't do this business if it is only for the money.

With our theoretical development, there are repetitive processes. Someone notices shortcomings in current systems or individual products. We create the appropriate response and establish a niche. Within that niche, we are beloved by our clients but laughed at by current practitioners and the established Godzillas of the financial services industries. Bambi, CFP®, carries on regardless, establishing conceptual legitimacy and commercial viability. Slowly but surely the detected shortcomings of the dominant systems become increasingly apparent; Godzilla loses market share as the crazy visionaries prosper. Shortly thereafter, the status quo folk find themselves losing business or adopting the methods of the niche. Life proceeds merrily for some time as the vision becomes the status quo, the early adopters accept the sweet fruit of victory in lieu of rational compensation for their achievements, and life goes on. Then a group of visionaries sees something wrong with the status quo. They anticipate NGT! The cycle repeats.

Technologically, we were among the first to embrace computers and what they could do to help us keep and analyze meaningful data. We pushed for more comprehensive programs and enabled support technologies that have, in turn, included the latest and greatest NGT!s in portfolio management and related functions. We have contemplated Monte Carlo analyses, embraced scenario planning and pondered "life planning," all in the name of NGT! Where these go, nobody knows, but it is safe to say few other professions have pursued such intangibles with our vision and vigor. We have collectively loved comprehensive financial planning; this love has driven us on this path.

We are unabashed explorers. We have been early users of all sorts of technologies and theories. We jumped into adventurous, meaningful relationships with various ancillary services and supports. We engaged in new and ambitious forms of business. We consistently pursued the untried and untested. All of these, in turn, served as the engines of rather extraordinary growth, social acceptance, individual and collective opportunity, realization of ideals and, yes, successful, profitable businesses. In short, collectively we are pioneers-visionaries and capitalists. "Selfless" or "selfish," NGT! has been a consistent enabler for a very long time.

But we can't forget our shadows. These NGT! phenomena have been intensely "practical" and self-serving. Nothing inherently wrong with that, except it involved considerable nonsense over time. Plus, we became confused as to our genuine identity. We needed something reliable, remunerative. We needed something that paid. It needed to be in the idealistic spirit of financial planning. Most especially, it needed to serve perceivable client interests. But whatever might be other qualities of NGT!, ample remuneration was essential-but sometimes this took tragic turns. Or it took unfortunate priority over our drive to be an authentic profession. Sometimes it has led industry types to believe that our profession was for sale.

But let's not get too cynical about getting paid. Thanks to some of these NGT!s, many fine practitioners have prospered; along with them, the profession has attracted and maintained the sorts of strengths and ambitions necessary to develop an authentic profession. Simply stated, we can't explore if we are not in business. We cannot attract talent if our profession is not financially attractive.

Some of these NGT!s have been complex. They require experts to grasp and implement them, meaning new skills and aptitudes. Sometimes, this diverts would-be "experts" from generalist's wisdom. This, in turn, spawns tension between comprehensive planning and profitable product mastery, wisdom v. craft.

It has been ever thus.

Authentic financial planning has always been a profession of and for idealists. Yet, others regard us cynically. They note those tempted by the merely profitable, i.e., those content to pitch NGT! while avoiding process integrity. Not without reason, they surmise a collective tendency to succumb to the siren song of easy money.

Accordingly, we had tremendous diversions into the gloom. There was our early seduction by aggressive tax planning and multiple write-off partnerships. We hopped on insurance industry bandwagons of various sorts. The securities industry gave us some truly terrible products. Some software has been blatantly self-serving. Even our forays into "I'm on your side" financial planning led to the temptation to trade our fundamental purpose for the expediencies of asset gathering.

Observers note perceptively that practitioners who thrive over time are typically those who stick with their financial planning knitting and have the process integrity to ride out the inevitable crisis. They note the continuous, predictable departures of those who took the financial planning cream and forgot the basics, yielding to remunerative temptations at the expense of vision and profession.

Looking back, it seems our profession has grown and matured within a curious, dynamic tension between idealism and cynicism. We have alternated between selfless altruism and our own needs for financial well being. Nothing dishonest, just very human. All these NGT!s reflect our own profession's strains; tensions grounded in the money forces and our own need to live and work within them. Even as we attempt to advise others and practice within the frames of our highest ideals, we, too, must make our livings. This is a new, authentic profession. What else would we expect?

But we cannot stay here. The world moves quickly; nowhere more quickly than in the world of money. Our world. The one that promises a host of NGT!s.

The future beckons ... NGT! ...'Til next time ...

Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP, is the principal of WorthLiving LLC, based in Denver.