In the future what will we look back at in horror about our world today?

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An article in Sydney Morning Herald today, What we do now that will be unfathomable by 2050, looks at what we might not be able to imagine about our lives today.

The piece quotes me on cars and parking:
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Improvisational theater and the free flow of ideas

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I recently was interviewed by Christina Gerakiteys for SingularityU Australia’s podcast series Inspire for Impact in a very enjoyable conversation. You can listen to the half hour episode here: Zen, Improvisation and Collaborative Value.

The premise of the podcast is asking for 5 points of inspiration for impact in my life. I chose to speak about:
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If you help bring the networks to life… you will create success for yourself

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My book Living Networks was dedicated to “all those wonderful people in the world who are bringing the networks to life with their energy and passion”.

It is of course now abundantly clear that networks are the underlying structure of business and society.

Seminal social networks (in their pre-digital sense) pioneer Ron Burt proposed the term ‘structural holes’ to refer to the connections between people that did not exist but could create value.
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The power of giving away 50% of your profits

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Companies giving away a percentage of their profits to charity is the result of two trends converging: nonprofits becoming more commercial, and fully commercial businesses seeking to have a social impact. But deciding to give 50% is the perfect result, according to futurist Ross Dawson.

“We have for-profit organisations, which increasingly are trying to have a social impact, and we have not-for-profits legislated to reinvest all their profits,” says Dawson.

“But there is incredible power in the model of giving away 50%.”
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The coming rise of virtual professional service firms in a COVID world

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I have been thinking and writing about the rise of virtual professional service firms for over two decades, since my first book.

Professional services are, by definition, delivered by experienced professionals. While there are significant reasons for teams of professionals creating value for clients to be co-located, they very often are not, even in traditional firms.

From the beginning of our highly connected century companies like Axiom Legal have been helping clients access top-tier professionals without the unnecessary and substantial costs of office space and partner leverage (i.e. paying for the partners’ new sports cars when an associate is doing the work).
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Summary of the new US Intelligence Global Trends report on 2040

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The US National Intelligence Council has been using scenario methdologies to look into the future since the 1990s.

Today they released the 7th edition of their Global Trends report, examining the risks and challenges of the next 20 years.

Below I have selected some visual highlights from the 156 page report that distill some of key insights.
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Innovation Strategy Cheat Sheet: a succinct guide to setting your innovation course

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On Friday I spoke at the Distinguished Leadership & Innovation Conference organized by the Caribbean’s premier business school Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business.

I delivered the opening keynote on Shaping the Future of Business and also a workshop on Building and Implementing an Innovation Strategy.

Since it was a brief workshop to cover a very big topic I shared an Innovation Strategy Cheat Sheet with attendees, shown below, and as an interactive workshop took them through the issues they need to consider in creating an effective innovation strategy. Click here or on the image below to download the full page pdf.
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From brain drain to brain gain – expats returning home due to COVID boost local economies

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Expats forced home in the wake of COVID are helping build the cross-border networks needed for global innovation, according to futurist Ross Dawson.

They’re the elite of Silicon Valley but they don’t live in Palo Alto. They’re expats at home for the first time in years, looking for new opportunities. Their employers no longer care where they work.

These are the digital nomads of COVID. People who can choose to work anywhere they want, and who are driving a reverse brain drain unlike anything seen before.
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How the integrated enterprise shifts us from Big Data to Small and Wide Data

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In perusing Gartner’s Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2021 it struck me that the most important meta-theme was integration.

The last decades of enterprise technology could be viewed as shifting from monolithic – and in large organizations almost inevitably siloed – computing to richly integrated platforms, though that journey is far from complete in most companies.
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