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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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.
The Power of Innovation keynote in Luxembourg
By Ross DawsonI recently gave the opening keynote at the Golden-i Awards in Luxembourg. Luxembourg for Business has produced a five minute video about the event, including an interview with me and also the organizers talking about my “very inspiring” keynote. Click on the image below to see the video (start from 1:00).
The video provides some more context to my recent post on How Luxembourg is playing to become a technology hub. It was fascinating to see the energy and innovation in this small country in the heart of Western Europe.
Will offices still exist in the future?
By Ross DawsonI’m currently doing a five-city speaking tour for Canon, speaking about the future of workspace. In my keynote I talk about the driving forces of change in work and organizations, the changing nature of the workspace, and the leadership required to create the next phase of work.
Until recently there were two major workspaces for knowledge work: offices and field work. Communication technologies, economic shifts, and changing corporate attitudes have enabled the rapid rise of home workers. In addition, co-working facilities or what I call the cloud workplace are becoming prominent in providing many of advantages to workers of office work without requiring commuting into a central office.
When we think about the future of workspace, given the massive shift to distributed work, the question arises of whether centralized office will still have a reason to exist in the future.
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MIT global study on social business: Executives increasingly understand the value and success drivers
By Ross DawsonMIT Sloan Management Review together with Deloitte have just launched 2012 Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project, drawing out some very interesting insights from a survey of almost 3,500 executives from 115 countries.
Below the slides of the report I have selected several of the interesting slides with brief commentary.
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How Luxembourg is playing to become a technology hub
By Ross DawsonA few weeks ago I gave the keynote at the IT Nation Golden i Gala and Awards and earlier in the day ran a CIO workshop on Creating the Organisation of the Future.
In my brief time in Luxembourg I learned about some of the many things that are happening in the tech scene in nation. As a tiny country of half a million people, it has the highest GDP per capita in the world, currently based primarily on its strong financial services industry, facilitated by its strong banking secrecy laws. Luxembourg is the second largest funds management market in the world after the US. However an economy dependent on financial services is not necessarily the best position to be today. As such the government and business sectors are seeking to build Luxembourg into a technology hub, with ICT named by the government as the third of five pillars for national development.
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