Will the next big technology company come out of the fashion world?
I’ve had a very interesting evening at the latest Sydney event of Decoded Fashion, a global network of events on the future of fashion.
Here are a few of the many interesting insights and ideas that came up during the evening, either directly from the speakers or evoked by what they said.
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I have recently returned from a 10-day round-world trip, including 85 hours in airplanes and airports, with a number of speaking engagements and fortunately a little fun fitted in-between the travel.
This brings me to 56 hours of timezone changes within the last two months. I already have another 25 hours of timezone changes scheduled for the next month.
Dealing with jetlag is a required competence for my job, and fortunately I am pretty good at it. I thought I’d share how I approach it in case it is useful for others.
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Yesterday I gave two keynotes at the Congreso Internacional de Retail in Lima Peru.
The first keynote provided a big picture view of the changing world of business, while the second keynote focused on the future of retail.
Here are the slides to my first keynote. The slides to the second keynote are here. As always, my slides are designed to support my presentations, not to stand alone, but may be useful to others.
I am in South America this week, giving keynotes at the sCRM-CEM y Redes Sociales conference in Bogota and the Congreso Internacional de Retail in Lima.
Latin America is a fascinating and exciting region, both culturally and economically. However the region, while highly visible in North America, does not tend to get much attention from the rest of the world.
The dramatic economic rise of China is a dominant theme of this century, with India likely to gain ground on China in coming decades due to demographic shifts. This is drawing pointed attention from business executives around the world to Asia as a growth region. However to a certain degree the rise of China and India, and that of the rest of Asia, are distinct stories.
This first chart shows GDP of the major developing countries in Asia and Latin America (excluding Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as established economies that are growing more slowly or not at all). China completely dominates in the extent and consistency of its growth. Considerably behind is Brazil, the second of the BRICs, followed by India.
Source: World Bank
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My wonderful wife, the talented jewellery designer Victoria Buckley, has had her boutique in Sydney’s historical Strand Arcade for 21 years.
The Strand is the best possible location for her in Sydney, with its classic Victorian architecture and rosta of leading Australian designers such as Akira, Alex Perry, Scanlan Theodore and sass & bide.
The Strand is producing a series of videos titled We Are The Makers, featuring the stores in the arcade. Below is the video of Victoria, which in less than 2 minutes successfully captures some of the vitality and creativity that is expressed in her jewellery. A very nice write-up of the interview is also available.
Today I was interviewed on the Daily Edition about virtual reality, in the wake of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift.
You can click on the image below to watch a video of the segment.
It is staggering that the very old idea of ‘virtual reality’ is finally about to reach its fruition with new technologies such as Oculus Rift, which have low enough latency to fool the brain into believing it is in a new world.
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PewResearch Internet Project has just released a report on Digital Life in 2025 based on expert interviews.
One of the interesting aspects of the report is the ‘theses‘ that they have distilled from the interviews, which they have divided into ‘more-hopeful and ‘less-hopeful’, concluding with one very important piece advice. These are:
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Earlier this week I ran a two-day workshop in Bali for the Malaysian Directors Academy on The Innovation Zone: Unleashing The Mindset.
I ran the same program in Phuket last October for another group of directors of large Malaysian companies, with the feedback from that session prompting the Malaysian Directors Academy to ask me to run the workshop again.
The topic of “innovation mindset” is an excellent one for company directors, as that must be the starting place for successful innovation initiatives.
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Today the ever-inspiring John Hagel spoke in Sydney today about passion at work as part of AMP’s Amplify series, organized by Annalie Killian.
The story in summary, told at more length in the Unlock the passion of the Explorer report, is that:
* Technological change is creating ever-increasing pressures and challenges for institutions and individuals;
* In this world the rationale for large organizations to exist is no longer scalable efficiency, but scalable learning;
* The Center for the Edge looked to find examples of “sustained, extreme performance improvement” that reflects this scalable learning;
* What they found in common was deep passion, but a particular type of passion that they dubbed the passion of the “Explorer”
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Earlier this week I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Chartered Accountants/ Centre for Accounting, Governance and Sustainability Thought Leadership Forum in Adelaide.
The day’s theme was The Australian Accounting Profession and Asia, with a strong emphasis on education given the participation of most of the heads of accounting departments of Australian universities. As such in opening the event I was asked to speak on the broader theme of “Australia’s Engagement with Asia”.
In my keynote I started from the broader context of the ancient and modern history of Asia and Australia, looked at current trends including demographic shifts that are shaping our relationship, the most important intersections between our economies and cultures, and finally the leadership required for Australia and Asia to engage more deeply into the future.
In the course of my research for the keynote I looked at changes in Australia’s population, and generated the following very interesting chart:
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics
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