Economic structural change is NOT industry compositional change

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I am currently preparing a number of keynotes for senior business audiences over coming weeks. In preliminary conversations with one group I encountered a very common and deeply misleading view of how business is changing today.

We engaged in discussions on “economic structural change”, that were in fact only about changes in industry composition. The mindset was to consider the changes in relative sizes of industries in the economy, such as manufacturing getting smaller and tourism becoming larger. This perspective is prevalent with economists, who like to predicts shifts in industries over time.

However this is a deeply fallacious perspective in thinking about change in the economy.
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The latest in 3D printing trends: guns, ears, body parts, and now in your local store

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It’s been a busy day in the world of 3D printing. Below is a roundup of the latest developments, all announced in the last 24 hours or so. 3D printing is one of those trends that has been visible for a long time, is just beginning to have a real impact, and in the long run could transform many aspects of our lives.

Different issues are raised by each of these stories, showing the breadth of the impact of 3D printing. I have made brief comments under each story.

Anyone looking at the future must keep abreast of the growing scope of capabilities of 3D printing and what it could mean for industries and society.

First completely 3D-printed gun shown
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Crowdsourcing Week in Singapore promises to help catalyze the global potential of crowdsourcing

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Epi Nekaj, the founder of crowdsourcing innovator Ludvik + Partners, first got in touch with me in early 2012 to discuss his plan to run a landmark global event focused on crowdsourcing.

On June 3-7 Crowdsourcing Week will be held in Singapore, bringing the Crowdsourcing Week team’s vision to fruition.

Ross Dawson_500
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The effective CIOs of the future will be internal and external entrepreneurs

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As part of the recent Tomorrow-Ready CIO event series run by CIO Magazine and IBM, I was interviewed on the messages I shared in my keynote and the supporting Future of the CIO Framework. The brief video, available on CIO Magazine, is below.

Some of the points I make in the video are:
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Professional services will be at the heart of our economic future

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Last night was the announcement of the winners of the annual BRW Client Choice Awards.

Each year Beaton Consulting compiles the opinions of large professional service clients – this year 40,000 of them – who collectively select the best professional service firms in Australia. The results are announced at a gala dinner and published in BRW magazine.

The full list of winners is here. The magazine’s lead article on the awards Client choice awards: Savvy, digital, global: the face of the new professional, provides interesting insights into the state of the professions in Australia.

I gave the guest keynote at the event, with the intent of providing inspirational yet light-hearted perspectives on the awards.

My theme was “Creating Australia’s Future”, about how professional services firms are at the heart of Australia’s (and all developed countries’) future.
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New Prezi: The 45 elements of the Future of the CIO framework

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One of the ways in which I use the frameworks I create is as a foundation for my keynote speeches. Since in many cases the frameworks are designed to distil the key ideas in a domain into a single graphic, they can provide a valuable lattice and flow for the ideas in a presentation.

Visual presentation tool Prezi can be a great way to do this, in showing the logic and structure of the framework through the presentation, while allowing me to zoom in through the presentation to illustrate the specific detailed concepts.

I have used Prezi in this way for keynotes on The Transformation of Business and The Transformation of Government.

For the current Tomorrow-Ready CIO series of events run by CIO Magazine and IBM I am using Prezi to run through my recently created Future of the CIO framework. The Prezi is below.


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Launch of Future of the CIO framework

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Over the next few weeks I will be giving the keynote at the Tomorrow-Ready CIO Series organized by CIO magazine and sponsored by IBM. The events will be held over breakfast in Canberra, Perth, Sydney, Auckland and Melbourne, with an audience of CIOs and other senior IT executives. Full details on the events here.

My keynote will be on the Future of the CIO. I have recently pulled together my thinking on the topic, drawing in particular on a series of CIO workshops I ran across Europe last year.

Below is the Future of the CIO Framework that I will be sharing at the events. It is now up on my complete list of visual frameworks on RossDawson.com.

FutureoftheCIO_500w
Click on the image for the full-size pdf
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Our future depends on the humanization of work

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One of the reasons that my focus is increasingly shifting to the future of work is that it is in fact a large part of the future of humanity. And if we don’t get this right it might not look pretty.

The two primary drivers of a changing work landscape in coming years remote work and work automation. Almost all work will be able to be done anywhere, and a growing proportion of today’s jobs will be supplanted by machines.

The replacement of human workers by machines is of course a large part of human history, and so far we have consistently created new jobs faster than old jobs have disappeared.

However machine capabilities – including robotics, spatial cognition, and natural language processing – are developing so fast that there is a real chance that there will be insufficient new jobs to replace the ones that disappear.

In the ebook Race Against the Machine, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both of MIT, describe the challenge of the inexorable rise of machines in the workplace, concluding with a rather gloomy view of our ability to respond.

John Hagel of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has made a great video responding to the book’s ideas.


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Thinking about the future: Why predictions usually (but not always) have negative value

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A few days ago I spoke at the opening dinner of a strategy offsite for a professional firm, on the topic of ‘Thinking About The Future‘. It is a very common style of engagement for me, being briefed to set the broadest possible mental frame for executives before their in-depth discussions on directions for the business. The session went extremely well in provoking some very interesting conversations during the evening, and I gather driving new thinking through the rest of the offsite.

Just before I spoke the executive group had heard from a well-known economist who was giving them economic forecasts for the next 10 years.

As such, in my presentation I explained why forecasts usually have negative value. I spent a long time working in financial markets, and I have seen market and economic forecasts tremendously abused.

The most important point is that almost all forecasts will turn out to be wrong. The future is unpredictable. Giving numerical values to future economic or market data can easily shut down useful thinking about the reality of uncertainty and the range of possibilities that may transpire.
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Parallel entrepreneurship goes mainstream

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Back in the 1990s I became enamoured of Bill Gross’s IdeaLab, which was spinning off new web companies initially housed in its own support ecosystem. I loved that it generated and developed its own projects rather than looking outside for ideas.

Since then I’ve closely followed what I’ve thought of as “parallel entrepreneurship”, in contrast to the usual concept of serial entrepreneurship: establishing many ventures rather than doing them one by one.

Despite many leading lights saying that founders should be focused on one venture, I’ve always believed that it is possible – albeit extremely difficult – to launch and run multiple simultaneous ventures.
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