I caught up with Napier Collyns in Sydney the other week, after having seen him in both New York and London earlier this year. His highly peripatetic lifestyle means that we’re often not in the same place at the same time, but we’ve managed to cross paths more regularly recently. Napier had just spoken at the Australian Leadership Retreat organized by the Australian Davos Connection on a number of topics including peak oil.

I thought it would be a great opportunity to record a video conversation with Napier. We sat down for an hour after a pleasant lunch and spoke on a wide range of topics, including many aspects of scenario planning and its history and future, Global Business Network, social networks, geopolitics, oil, and how we notice what’s important from an excess of information. The video is below, and a timeline of conversation topics at the bottom of this post.

Conversation: Napier Collyns and Ross Dawson from Ross Dawson on Vimeo.

I’d originally thought we’d create three 10-15 minute self-contained segments on different topics, but that’s not how conversations work. It ended up as a free-flowing discussion over an hour moving far beyond the intended starting points. There were some extremely interesting insights in the conversation, I thought, particularly for anyone interested in scenario planning, so I’ve posted the entire conversation, together with a chronology of conversation topics so you can go to the points of greatest interest to you.

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I just got an email from Tom Stewart saying he is leaving Harvard Business Review – this was announced today with the press release below. He has been editor-in-chief for six years, during which time he maintained a strong consistency in HBR’s established editorial approach, but also injected his own highly innovative perspectives. I find HBR an essential read, not least through the pronounced focus on forward-thinking perspectives. I sincerely hope HBR doesn’t move away from this style with Tom’s departure.

I first met Tom in 1998, when I was organizing an Intellectual Capital seminar in Sydney, primarily intended for the funds management community. Tom had published his landmark book Intellectual Capital in 1997, after writing cover stories for Fortune magazine, where he was a writer for many years, on Brain Power in 1991 and on Intellectual Capital in 1994. At the time, drawing on my background in capital markets, I saw an immense opportunity in applying the nascent ideas of intellectual capital to financial markets and investor relations. (Some of these ideas are described in a 2002 speech I gave at KMWorld titled “A Financial Markets Perspective on Intellectual Capital”). I took Tom to visit many of the top fund management teams in Australia. At the time it was great to see the very positive reaction to his ideas, but the reality is fund managers globally have been rather slow to take up the ideas. The response from the broader investment community is improving, but it’s slow going.

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In my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote about the gradual shift to open accepted standards. Earlier this year, in the context of the social network battles, I wrote Is the trend to openness accelerating? Social networks as an inflection point.

I think we can now safely say that the trend to open business is inexorable, and that in hindsight, we are quite likely to point to 2007 as the turning point.

The latest is the extraordinary news that Verizon Wireless will introduce an “Any Apps, Any Device” option for its customers in 2008, allowing them to use any phone runnning any application. There are sceptics, but because there is the real potential to attract new customers and thsu create competitive advantage, this massive step is likely to create followers, shifting the industry.

Let’s review just a few of the other steps towards open business in the last six months:

May:

Facebook opens its developer platform

September:

New York Times online goes open

October:

Google launches Open Social

Path 101 established a ‘naked start-up’

November:

Google launches Open Handset Alliance

Murdoch says he will open up access to Wall Street Journal Online

Verizon Wireless announces open access

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[UPDATE]: This and other videos, with many other resources, are available at my newly launched speaker website: rossdawson.com.

Conference organizers and meeting planners always want to get a good idea of the style of the keynote speakers they’re considering booking for their events. I usually get booked through reputation, recommendations, or people who have seen me speak already, but to reach beyond that audience it’s essential to have a speaking video.

My new speaking video below is a sorely overdue update from the last one, which was created several years ago now. From now on I’ll keep the video updated with new footage and improved design as we go. We’re also shortly going to launch a new website for my speaking and strategy facilitation activities – details soon.

The eight-minute video contains a smorgasbord of interesting ideas, including snippets on the attention economy, forecasts for the next doubling of the global economy, the development of infinite content, sex and work in Second Life, outsourcing to India, and the role of energy in organizational networks.

Richard Watson, our esteemed Chief Futurist at Future Exploration Network, is speaking at what looks like an extremely interesting innovation conference in Melbourne on August 28-29, called Innofuture 2007. It has a great cast of speakers, including Tom Kelley of IDEO and Frans Johanssen, author of The Medici Effect.