Over the last 9 weeks I’ve been on a plane every week, have been on 26 flights or inter-city trains, and delivered 28 keynotes or workshops across 8 countries. This week I will be at home all week :-).
I have long had the concept of “the right amount of travel”, that is enough but not too much. How much that is depends on personal temperament, your relationship and family situation, health, life stage, and many other things. I do love travelling but there is certainly such a thing as too much. Fortunately on the European segment of my recent travels Victoria and the girls spent four weeks based out of Paris to overlap with me, so we were able to spend time together there and in London, which made it a lot more palatable.
The nature of my work is that I do have to travel extensively, so it is critical that I get the most out of my time travelling. I need to work at getting better at it myself, but here are some principles that I try to work by, and you might find useful.
1. Travel is the ultimate learning experience.
I am fortunate in that I travel widely rather than to the same places all the time, so I always have things to learn wherever I go. Wherever I go I look around myself continuously to learn from what I see, whoever I meet I ask about what they are seeing change, whatever companies I engage with I observe their unique culture and experiences. While all of this is of course essential to a futurist, I believe we all need to take every opportunity available to learn what is happening across the glorious global diversity of business, society, and humanity.
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Zynga’s new game The Ville takes virtual sex to the masses
By Ross DawsonThis article was originally posted in Future of Sex magazine.
Social gaming giant Zynga, purveyor of Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, is making things a little racier with its latest product The Ville, launched today.
As the video shows, users can build the “home of your dreams” and invite their Facebook friends over to have fun there. The fun can start with talking, cooking, and dancing, and then go a little further.
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Sorry Grant Thornton, amorphous fears about IP loss should not trump value creation
By Ross DawsonSorry, Grant Thornton, I think your instinct is very likely wrong.
I saw this advertisement (also in French and Flemish) in Brussels-Midi station when I was recently passing through.
Grant Thornton claims to have an ‘instinct for growth’. For some reason it seems to have an instinct (it appears without any evidence) that expanding into new markets will lead to loss of intellectual property. So the instinct is one for inaction, and in turn no growth.
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Sunrise: The technologies that will change our lives
By Ross DawsonYesterday morning I appeared on the Sunrise national breakfast program together with science broadcaster Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, being interviewed about the big ideas and new technologies that will change our lives. The video clip is below.
The four ideas that I pointed to were:
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Free webinar July 19 on the Future of Media – Mobile, Social, Cloud… and Paid? with Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard
By Ross DawsonGerd Leonhard is a greatly valued friend and colleague in our shared calling as media futurists, and work together in The Futures Agency.
As part of our intent of working more together in both public forums and with leading media organizations we are announcing a free webinar:
The Future of Media: Mobile, Social, Cloud… and Paid?
July 19, 2012
8am US EDT
1pm United Kingdom
2pm Central European Time
8pm Singapore & Beijing
10pm Sydney
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The potential massive social impact of gamification for weight loss and savings
By Ross DawsonLast night I was fortunate to be at a dinner with innovation strategist Charles Leadbeater, hosted by Martin Stewart-Weeks of Cisco. One of the conversations we had together with Hugh Morrow was about the potential of gamification of weight loss and personal savings.
Diet and savings habits aggregated across a society have a massive impact on the common good. Poor diet and obesity lead to vast increases in health care costs, among other issues, while savings do not only drive economies, but mitigate against financial stress and dislocation.
Anything that can have even a minor impact on diet and savings can have extraordinary value. As such, we certainly need to apply what is being learned in the field of gamification, particularly its social aspects, to see how it can help positively change behaviors.
Health Week Plan reports that:
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Why do you curate? The 3 intents of curation and how they create value
By Ross DawsonI was recently in Rome for 24 hours to run a workshop for the senior technology executives of a global Fortune 50 company. While I was in town I was keen to try to catch up with collaboration and new media expert Robin Good, who I have known online for many years but never met, so I got in touch to see if we could catch up.
Fortunately he was available, and he took the opportunity to do a video interview with me. He has excerpted part of the interview in a great post Curation – A View from The Future: Ross Dawson, which includes 4 brief videos of me sharing my thoughts on curation.
Here is the fourth video in which I talk about the 3 intents of curation.
Here are the 3 intents, presented in reverse order from the video.
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Big moves at Fairfax: The global extinction of newspapers moves closer
By Ross DawsonToday’s ‘Fairfax of the Future’ announcement from Australia’s second largest newspaper publisher Fairfax is massive news in Australia, and very significant in a global media context.
It has been a busy media day for me, so far doing interviews for SBS World News and ABC24 News as well as a number of radio stations, due to my earlier predictions of the extinction of newspapers. My Newspaper Extinction Timeline was launched in October 2010, at the time getting mainstream media coverage in over 30 countries and being seen by well over 1 million readers within one week.
Click on image to download full framework
Recently I have been reconsidering some of the forecast extinction dates for a number of countries, notably after my recent European speaking tour. Fairfax’s announcements today significantly shift forward the likely loss of news-on-paper as a significant media format, and in fact make 2022 seem an exceedingly optimistic timespan for newspapers to survive in Australia.
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Travelling for work: 7 principles for productivity and value
By Ross DawsonOver the last 9 weeks I’ve been on a plane every week, have been on 26 flights or inter-city trains, and delivered 28 keynotes or workshops across 8 countries. This week I will be at home all week :-).
I have long had the concept of “the right amount of travel”, that is enough but not too much. How much that is depends on personal temperament, your relationship and family situation, health, life stage, and many other things. I do love travelling but there is certainly such a thing as too much. Fortunately on the European segment of my recent travels Victoria and the girls spent four weeks based out of Paris to overlap with me, so we were able to spend time together there and in London, which made it a lot more palatable.
The nature of my work is that I do have to travel extensively, so it is critical that I get the most out of my time travelling. I need to work at getting better at it myself, but here are some principles that I try to work by, and you might find useful.
1. Travel is the ultimate learning experience.
I am fortunate in that I travel widely rather than to the same places all the time, so I always have things to learn wherever I go. Wherever I go I look around myself continuously to learn from what I see, whoever I meet I ask about what they are seeing change, whatever companies I engage with I observe their unique culture and experiences. While all of this is of course essential to a futurist, I believe we all need to take every opportunity available to learn what is happening across the glorious global diversity of business, society, and humanity.
Read more →
Tapping the Power of Crowdsourcing for marketing: Free webinar on June 14
By Ross DawsonI will be presenting a free webinar on June 14 at 11am US EDT, organized by Ketchum’s Global Media Network. Webinar details are here or you can register directly here.
In the wake of the launch of my book Getting Results From Crowds, one of the fields I am spending the most time on is crowdsourcing for marketing. One of the first and most important corporate applications of crowdsourcing is better marketing. While there are already many great examples and case studies, we are still early in what is a fundamental shift in how marketing is done, moving to being increasingly based on crowds.
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Open innovation is now a fundamental capability for nations and regions
By Ross DawsonI have just participated via Skype in a BBC Creative Collisions debate in Northern Ireland, centered around how the media landscape is changing, and the implications of the rise of open innovation.
Some of the comments from the locals involved in the debate were that while there is ample talent and innovation in Northern Ireland, there is not the same attitude to collaboration and information sharing that there is for example in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
I emphasized that while collaboration within Northern Ireland will be critical for competing on a global stage, it will also be essential to be able to draw on global capabilities. The skills of vision, project management, production, and more can be at the summit – or part – of a global distributed team. Small nations and regions in particular must have a mentality, not of lauding their own world-beating talent, but of being able to marshall capabilities across borders.
There are fundamental attitudes that are required to do this well, but also skills and capabilities, embedded into specific organizations and also the broader business ecosystem. Nations and regions that do not excel at open innovation will find challenging times ahead.