Futures In Focus: Recent Episodes
Michael Gale
Forbes Insights Futures In Focus is about tomorrow’s world and how visionaries and leaders are thinking about it, helping us design for it, and guiding us towards it so that we can thrive. Nothing is certain about the future except the need to design differently for it than the world we live in today. Host is Michael Gale, best-selling author of The Digital Helix.
Eric Laakmann, the CEO of Seachange, discusses the initial steps in the following manner: Globally, there are 34 million vessels, all of which will eventually necessitate replacement with sustainable alternatives. The current pace of oil consumption, whether on land, in the air, or particularly at sea, is deemed unsustainable, given the delicate equilibrium with natural ecosystems.
Specifically, domestic commercial vessels, comprising ferries and tourism vessels, account for a substantial $500 billion in capital expenditure, which must be replaced. Furthermore, there exists a substantial $47 billion recreational boat market. Boats, as a category, pose a distinctive challenge when considering electrification, given their inherent inefficiency, primarily attributed to the substantial energy expenditure in water displacement. Nonetheless, their indispensability necessitates innovative solutions.
Within this context, there exists a requisite starting point, as colossal supertankers cannot emulate the airborne capabilities of airplanes or rely on battery propulsion. However, ferries and pleasure craft offer promise in this regard. The pivotal issue revolves around orchestrating a holistic evolution, encompassing three concurrent dimensions: mitigating the resistance confronted by boats in the water, innovating potential power systems, and optimizing the overall cost of ownership.
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By 2030, the statistics from 2016 indicated that 10.5 million individuals in the United States would be self-employed. Nevertheless, by the conclusion of 2019, 30% of the US labor force were freelancers, and this 2030 prediction had been realized a decade earlier than anticipated. Should the labor landscape of 2032 and onwards diverge, it is apparent that certain transformations will have been instigated by our collective responses, not solely to COVID-19, but to the broader societal shifts in values.
This week's podcast features the author of "NO BOSS! The Real Truth about Working Independently: 12 Lessons from 30 Years of Bossing Myself Around," Steven Cristol. The crux of the discourse revolves around the depth of introspection necessary to ascertain one's compatibility with the realm of self-entrepreneurship in the evolving context of 2033 and beyond. In essence, it encompasses a comprehensive self-value driver analysis, founded upon his cumulative reflections as a notably successful master of his own endeavors over the past three decades.
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We have had 500 consecutive months of temperatures above the average temperature for the 20th century. If you search for terms like climate crisis and food supply or climate crisis and the automotive industry on Google Trends the index for how many times this has increased in the last year goes from a one hundred percent increase to a one thousand percent increase. If you live in the United States or Europe you are experiencing historic highs or floods or forest fires. July was the hottest in recorded history and the head of the UN just declared that we are entering an era of global boiling.
However, the guest this week, Dr. Jeff Arnold of MITRE Group as a climate expert believes that there is a playbook here for CEOs and corporate leaders to make a fundamental difference. 75% of global emissions are associated with energy production and consumption. If you are in business, then you have the direct capability and responsibility to reduce that impact and get us away from the 1.5C barrier we are trying to avoid as a planet. The podcast covers simple steps for a CEO to drive their organization's sustainability prerogative.
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Rowing is one of the great forgotten sports. It was the first and most popular inter-collegiate sport before college football and one of the first in the revised Olympic movement at the turn of the 19th century. It is still seen as the preeminent elitist college sport still, and that needs to change as we widen the opportunities for access to these sports where resources (water and boats) are tough to find a digital experience that can replicate the experience of rowing on the Cam or the Thames or the South China sea from a garage, a front room or bedroom.
Twenty minutes of exercise a day is seen as being able to reduce the overall costs of healthcare in the US by 20%. In a multi trillion-dollar industry, we should be looking for as many variations as possible to keep reducing this cost for society. Rowing exercises 80% of the body’s muscles and is six times more efficient than cycling.
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We talk a lot about how the world will become software-centric. How we book experiences on Airbnb or order a taxi on Uber, and how AI will make decisions at level and consistency humans cannot yet achieve. The idea is that the supply chain issues we are all experiencing now are radically reduced because software is essentially an infinite resource, available when, where, and how we want it deployed. You cannot say the same for a tractor or a robot. More importantly, if something breaks on a machine or it needs a hardware change, the software cannot do this. It might not even be a major piece or machine. It could be a cog in a kitchen mixer.
By 2033 our guest Nadav Goshen argues that the ability to 3D print near anything will make hardware as agile as software promises. In effect, killing the idea of supply chain challenges because the word “chain” is instantly removed. Just imagine receiving a text that a part for your car has been printed at your local garage based on sensor feedback from your last trip. Preventative maintenance can cut the overall cost of car ownership down by twenty-five percent. Imagine your favorite food mixer your mother gave you can now have a simple replacement piece printed. All these elements already happen in the aerospace and defense industry, so the steps to mass customization at home, in the factory, or even in space are a few steps away.
We live in a radically transforming world on every front. Demographics are shifting more than ever before; mass personalization of products and services, global markets, and shifting expectations of what a company should do for society are changing how we need to act as leaders. Key questions exist about how company boards have reacted to these changes, and it could be existential as boards need to navigate an inherently more complex and ambiguous world. In a world where there are new stakeholders, new employee imperatives, and a different sense of company value to the world, the company board should be the agent of change and not the brake that holds changes back.
By 2030 PWC estimates that 70% of the growth in global GDP will come from AI, the Edge, and the tens of billions of machines, computing, sensing, and learning in real-time. How we, as humans, billions of people, interface with those machines is a whole new world. How these machines, billions of them, talk and work with each other and us is a whole new perspective on the collision paths of technology and the human experience. It is unlikely that we can avoid these challenges because we each will need to work, play and live with and around these new, almost life forms, machines.
The design principles for this new world of 2033 and beyond are going to require us to reconnect the way we have evolved rapidly with our intellects through technology, the web, and in the future with a software-centric world with the ways we have evolved (far more slowly) with our empathy. Suppose we cannot re-address these evolutionary disbalances. In that case, we under-deliver on the promise of these technologies to deliver hope, better health, and a more plentiful environment through machines, software, and human interaction.
New principles will drive how this happens, and as we all become or want to be software-centric companies, these principles will increasingly need to be practiced daily by all of us and not just a select few companies. Learn how to apply these rules and principles in the new world with examples from transportation to robotic surgery with our guest Crystal Rutland a recognized UX expert and TED speaker, on these future-forward strategies for the new augmented age world we will all be part of living in. Many of us will be part of the building.
Farms use 70% of water for natural consumption, and half of it is lost. The ability to micro-control water consumption in very small and unique environments may be one of the most important developments in society. Multiply the ability to do this by the tens of millions of fields across the globe in easy and difficult places to reach, and technologies like small-footprint embedded devices might be part of changing our resources on the planet. Imagine this challenge and apply it to the thousands of industries and use cases around us where resource efficiency becomes an increasingly important priority.
Our guest, Ron Martino of NXP, talks about the power of these 75bn connected devices to change the world of 2035 and beyond at a very practical level. This new edge economy could be at least $4 to $5 trillion by 2030, where 64 zettabytes of daily data are processed locally at the edge. In this case, at the micro point of the field where the water is being controlled. This is all additive to the traditional core economy.
Is the idea that big retail is dead by 2030 a commonly held belief or will retail have evolved so significantly that it will get over get over the hump of e-commerce, near infinite choices for consumers, and the desire to get everything within fifteen to thirty minutes from when it was ordered. This is the new world of commerce by 2030 for every one of us, according to our guest Michael Lagoni, the CEO of Slackline. How companies react to this in the next few years will define if they are around in 2030 to take advantage of this world.
Lagoni’s view is that the data scientist will make over 80% of all product marketing decisions by 2030 as if they were hedge fund managers on Wall Street; the building never realized niche market opportunities in near real-time. This is a radically different world of choice as consumers transact nearly everything on the phone and one where brands and product managers have to focus on cultivating a direct relationship far more than they do now.
There are six hundred thousand restaurants in the USA and tens of millions of restaurants around the globe. In the US, Fifteen million people work in these environments, often on minimum wages and supporting families. There we 98,000 non-fatal accidents or associated illnesses from restaurants in the US in 2019. The restaurant industry is under immense pressure to evolve fast. This week's guest believes that intelligent robots can reduce injuries, free up valuable labor for more front-of-store activities and revolutionize the economics of a loved, vital, but under threat industry that brings color and variation to our lives.
Neil Cloughley is the CEO of Faradair aerospace his ideas about opening up airspace to the idea of the greyhound in the sky that is quiet, operationally far lower cost, and environmentally eco-friendly promises. This is a whole new way to move people and things around that will use many existing technologies without having to reinvent a lot. Imagine opening up the skies for $30 flights to and from the 5,700 regional airports in the US versus having to drive for five hours to get somewhere. This type of certified solution will open up whole new global markets as part of our new daily lives – a true Greyhound bus for the skies. The company, Faradair, is based in Droxford in the UK in the air hangar that housed the very first Spitfire squadron and where Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, had learned to fly and work from 1929.
If you sit on a board, then it is likely the following statements are common feelings about them. You receive a foot-thick set of pre-read documents and reports a week or so before the board meeting. The agenda is very tight, measured in minutes like a day in an NFL training facility. The feeling that you are going to spend a day or longer with some of the brightest people you have ever met, but you only really get to have deep discussions at lunch, maybe for the evening meal or possibly for an hour between agenda items.
In a world of constant change, organizations that thrive on this idea are five times more successful financially than organizations that do not accept this reality. That capacity to thrive and respond starts at the very highest levels, the company board. To succeed in a world ten years from now dominated by blockchain, remote work is the norm, and everything starts with the digital experience and ideas like the machine economy driven by machines; these board meetings will become increasingly important front driving window activities and not rear window reflections.
The idea of autonomous vehicles delivering products straight to our door may not sound novel, but there are not a lot of examples of that level of the last yard or meter delivery in practice right now. Ten years from now, the practice of doing this will be commonplace. There are approximately one hundred and forty million households in the US and over 10,000 major cities worldwide. To do this with autonomous vehicles to a universe of large destinations is inherently complex, but we have to start doing this somewhere now where the environment is somewhat representative of a wider world of moving bodies, other modes of transport, and some levels of unpredictability.
In ten years, time, web3.0 and blockchain will drive each of us to have a digital ID as our prime ID. This means our various identifications on social platforms will be fluid. The social media platforms will have no control as you move your ID and private blockchain wallet from place to place. This could be the end of the platform age.
The conversations today are less about the social media platforms dominating our personal expressions but the shift away from the platform economy that has dominated Web.2.0 to the open source self-identification economy that will dominate the next ten years. This stretches across financial and healthcare sectors and how governments sustain sovereign control over the value of nearly anything as each of us becomes our own market (physical and virtual) that is protected by our own digital wallet and the power of blockchain technologies.
This will drive a whole new sense of worth, identification, and privacy and completely re-structure what assets we own, trade, and borrow against. Watch out Crypto world. If cryptocurrency is one of the first deployments for blockchain, it could be less significant in ten years’ time. Blockchain will allow us to take our own agency back.
Tim Tully is the CEO of Zelcore, the world’s first gateway for Web3. Offering the easiest way to navigate all major exchanges and blockchain protocols, Zelcore empowers people to find quickly, manage, trade, and truly own their digital assets and information. Tim has over three decades of experience working in senior leadership roles at some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including T. Rowe Price, BNY Mellon Wealth Management, and State Street.
What have Drew Brees and Kim Kardashian got in common? Both have had social posts about them either playing Pickleball or maybe coming back as a professional Pickleball players (in the case of Drew Brees). These are two very powerful names in the world of sports and celebrity entertainment. Sports are a vital part of our social fabric and it would be foolish to assume that the sports we play and or watch now will be identical in ten years’ time. On one hand, it would be a sad idea that we cannot evolve new tastes or variants. On the other hand, understanding the triggers that drive these new sports and experiences tells us a lot about the potential world we will live in, ten years from now.
Change is often misread as purely a moment of fashion. When a close colleague told me he was recently driving his boys past a set of tennis courts his boys called them, pickleball courts. That is the subtle shift in language that often tells or shows us more about the future than just a passing comment. Pickleball is part of a wider Zeitgeist for inclusiveness in sports.
If you have neither heard nor seen Pickleball in action just go to this URL and watch the US doubles champions playing. Invented in Washington State in the mid-1960s the sport is both highly skilled, very watchable, and open to all ages, from 10 to maybe 90 and beyond. Our guests today, Riley and Lindsey Newman walk us through the genesis of the sport and why it is becoming so popular (devoid of Kim Kardashian and or Drew Brees).
Imagine the idea of the soldier software coder? It might sound odd now, but the combination of world events, technology, and future needs on the battlefield makes this an inevitability. The ability to learn, and adjust in the moment of combat with the capacity to bring all forces to bear, where and when they are needed could be the future of defense. This is the software-centric world, on the edge and in real-time, possibly through the cloud. The ability to bring all forces to bear together on the earth, in the sea, and through the sky in a joint command sits at the heart of this idea that the US DOD hopes to make a reality by 2030. This in many ways might be the best representation of the power of software to change the world around us in the most complex and volatile of situations.
Globalization has for all its great virtues exposed certain vulnerabilities to us. Jobs get lost, supply chains can be pinched and more importantly the capacity to respond to these pressures become increasingly difficult in the timelines we now expect. JobsOhio’s recent success in attracting Intel to build the largest microprocessor plant in the world, right in the heartland of America is maybe the first and most programmatic process for bringing jobs back to the United States and also protecting industries increasingly reliant on sourcing key technology components in the markets they sell to.
In 2018 Ohio was last in all states for the availability of investment capital.
The idea of re-shoring is tougher to put into practice than we think, but it is part of a new map for globalization for the year 2032 and beyond that, we will need to navigate.
Transforming America’s diverse industrial base to handle future supply chain shocks as well as a stronger presence for innovation and future-ready jobs is the dream of any state development body in the USA. JobsOhio has constructed a very integrated process that could be copied elsewhere and this podcast with J.P. Nauseef the CEO JobsOhio maps out that integrated process.
Go to Google and type in the term, social investing. 400 million references will come up but the RISE fund is the largest ($6bn) in the world. Founded by Bono (that one) and TPG the fund is an early explorer in finding the balance between investing for profit, investing to change markets, and investing where social impact really needs the help of businesses in order to get traction. This might be one of the key pathways forward for capitalism to make, or enable direct action but supporting entrepreneurs' ideas that can change the world and thrive financially.
The podcast with the managing partner for the Rise fund, Maya Chorengel walks through real-life companies looking to triangulate between social impact, entrepreneurial ideas, and economic opportunity. As social challenges become increasingly more complex and the ability of government to handle them all becomes less viable, social investing may be the key to bringing, assets, ideas, and capital together to solve these on the ground.
In a post-Covid world, where physical and virtual become increasingly synthesized the way we express ourselves, the way we work, and how we are going to organize our personal and work lives are going to evolve. This is the best manifestation of the idea of the Metaverse.
The podcast talks to the leader, CEO of the largest carrier in the US (CEO Verizon business) with a workforce in the hundreds of thousands about how their 5G and edge services will change to match this world, but also how they have evolved the way they think about the working world for their employees. Tami Erwin talks about the human component of the world we are experiencing and how home and work are intertwined responsibilities for her and the company going forward.
Every business will leave Covid having to re-imagine a full range of practices for its people, customers, and markets. This is the trigger 5G had needed and the ripple effect on 6G will become increasingly clear as we adjust to the new world of the evolving Metaverse.
Ukraine has been the sleeping development partner for software companies based in the US for decades. The invasion by Russia presents an existential threat to the continuing food chain of talent, ideas, and productivity from a market that today’s guest a Ukrainian investment banker is from. Vitaly Golomb is an investment banker at Drake Star, and he believes that this is the moment where we re-examine the role of Ukraine as the potential new version of Israel’s technology hotbed, but in Europe. A vast array of technology companies from Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, and LG, have significant IP and technical resources in Ukraine to build new products and technologies because Ukraine is one of the most science-based educated companies in the world.
Eric W. Sanderson is a landscape ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, director of the Mannahatta Project, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. In 2013 his book Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs was published and set the stall for how we should be thinking about building a new world around us.
Sanderson’s argument is that the world we live in now is very much an artifact of decisions our grandparents and great, grandparents made about how we build cities, transport ourselves, and how we used the land around us. We still live with those decisions and our children, and their children will live with the decisions we make now, ten-twenty, and one hundred years into the future.
We cannot keep kicking the can down the road for 2032 and beyond. We cannot change the laws of physics, but we can change human laws.
He argues for three shifts:
· We adjust taxes around the costs (for example what the land has given us) so that we are more respectful of the environmental consequences of using the land. A sort of land value tax.
· A shift back to multi transportation models as our forefathers had in order to reduce crazy commuting times
· A different way to think about the inter-relationships of our natural resources (oil, land, geohistory) and how we make investment decisions moving forward.
Recent research by Cambia Information shows only 7% of Americans are fully in on the idea of EVs. Now imagine an EV with no driver, that looks completely different than any other form factor than ever before and is backed by Amazon breaks the mold for transportation ideas for the next ten years and beyond. As we move to accept new vehicle form factors
Imagine how this changes how we interact with the cities and towns we live in, not just getting from the office to a client meeting or even how we might commute from home, but also how we experience going to a restaurant, a late-night jazz club or even shopping. A completely autonomous experience for human passengers, basically re-inventing human transportation. Jesse Levinson is the Co-Founder and CTO for Zoox, The Amazon autonomous vehicle company based in Foster City, California.
Charlene Li is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership, and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her latest book is the bestseller The Disruption Mindset. She is the Founder of Altimeter, a disruptive analyst firm that was acquired in 2015 by Prophet. Charlene is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School and was named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company. The podcast covers a variety of contriversial topics for 2032 on the shape of things to come.
Our guest for this podcast, Lawrence Shindell, is a world-renowned expert in the verification and trustworthiness of methods designed to verify the authenticity of art. His ideas on the potential power of NFT’s, nanotechnology, machine learning and AI to solve the challenges of authenticity in artwork by 2030 are a rare glimpse into the world 99.99% of us will never be involved in. Yet the progressive application of technologies may open up a sense of comfort to us who go to art museums and have a doubt that maybe not all the collections are fully authentic. Crazy things still happen in a modern, technology-centered world. For example, a gallery bought and then sold on a Jackson Pollack with misspellings in the signature for $2M less than ten years ago. An inflation-adjusted $127M now.
The network effect is the essence of the power of the internet. It adds exponential power and opportunities the more and more people get to use it. Ideas like internet-scale mean we can exponentially expand usage and interconnectedness without major investments. Digital opportunities mean we can seamlessly move from one environment to another and across any device type, almost no matter where we are. The economic opportunities created by these seamless experiences are all around us. Access to this seamless internet is seen as a human right no matter who you are (economically, disability-wise).
Now imagine a transportation system (planes, trains, cars) that could deliver such a seamless, interconnected experience for everyone. Our guest, Matt Jones the director of technology at Ford talks about how software factory thinking across all forms of transportation could deliver the same scale and experiences to those less able and less financially advantaged than now. The world of transportation and the auto industries in 2032 and beyond could be fundamentally transformed.
This conversation occurred before Covid-19 in the US. Its ideas and messages feel even more appropriate than before with Anne’s focus on inclusion and diversity at its core. One thing that especially makes Anne stand out is the description of herself in her LinkedIn profile: Transformation executive, servant leader, diversity & inclusion champion, culture expert, and blogger.
AT&T’s construct of rotating executives is not unheard of elsewhere, but it is still very common in most global leading brands. While AT&T is significantly ahead of its peer competitors there is still some way to go to have women and women of color properly represented in the halls of executive leadership. Anne’s own journey to be the CEO of a unit that would in itself be a Fortune 50 company should serve as a shining example of what is possible with some key variables.
Think of these four facts and how they are going to affect our futures and our, future leaders.
In 2019 29% of management roles were held by women even although 50% of the workforce is female.
Only 1 in 5 people on boards are female. For multicultural women, this statistic plummets to just 1 in 25. Yet by 2060 (a little out of the range of this podcast but one many of us will be around for) 50% of the US population will be women of diverse color.
Anne’s journey and advice should serve as a beacon to all of us.
We live in a converging world of physical and virtual opportunities. Sometimes these converge with interesting positive upsides like Amazon, or Uber Eats, or Airbnb. AI is at the center of these digital companies as they scale massively to deliver near-instant value through data, from physical data to the virtual world and from the virtual world to the physical world. Those able to combine physical and virtual have been able to dominate traditional thinking and established norms in transformative ways, This is the new world order, the new way business will happen. Data-driven, near-instant, AI instructed, and near-instantly agile and effective.
Now apply that thinking to the world of intelligence and national defense. Converging virtual and physical threats and opportunities and the realization that a digital-led, data model is where we are going. The US Airforce’s first chief software officer talks to us about that future and our choices in the 2030s.
Much of the challenge with the next great technology is the ability to connect the innovation or the technology directly to the idea of changing the world. A faster cell phone, a more powerful processor, a smaller footprint all feel good, but they don’t shift the power in the world to do better for all. Our guest today, Cristina Rodriguez is Vice President in Intel Corporation’s Network and Edge Group and general manager of the Wireless Access Network Division see this as the moment that the traditional model should be stepped over for how ideas like the edge, latency-free and 5G all connect together and will vastly stretch technologies in this new world to directly open up opportunities for underserved communities across the globe, first and foremost. It’s a unique view about how technology companies can change the velocity for their effect on the whole world by 2031.
This week’s guest is an important indicator of a future world where doing the right things will directly correlate with getting the financial results. As the ex-Chief Ethics Officer of Airbnb, Robert Chesnut. Robert has lived the journey of doing the right things actually driving better results. What was once a paradox of trying to achieve profits (for shareholders) versus doing the right things for employees, customers and the environment is no longer the case now and he argues will need to be the norm for operating practices and leadership by 2031. It’s a lesson in the choices we no longer need to make to be successful.
Leadership often takes outsiders to redefine highly established industries. Five chocolate vendors own the vast majority of the global chocolate market’s delivery and production. Our guest Nate Saal, the founder of CocoTerra believes that this should not be the case by 2031 when creating highly personalized versions of chocolate should be as easy as baking at home or making wine.
He is a technologist from the software industry bringing a whole new way of thinking to an industry dominated by traditional thinking and methods for production. Innovation invariably has to come from way outside the industry to change the very traditions that have dominated its shape and form over time. Five companies make the vast majority of the world’s chocolate product and their techniques prevent easy home construction. His promise is an indicator of how we as consumers are changing the lens for how companies will need to innovate and deliver in order for them to keep ahead of the curve as old production monopolies are questioned and challenged
Amy Webb is a rare breed of industry-respected thinker (Thinkers 50 Radar award winner in 2018), author (The Big Nine and The Signals Are Talking), and somebody prepared to look at signals in the world now and draw out what possible challenges, opportunities, and discussions we need to have that are new in order for humankind to thrive by 2030
The control and ownership of AI patents, development of IP, and people are very much centered on the Big Nine (it includes Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Facebook). In effect, the capital base for an AI or data-centered global economy sits in the hands of just nine organizations. This could be very scary as it throws up new ideas, debates, and even lexicography that is not very present in the way we think today.
For example, should person A be presented with a different price for the same product as person B depending on their profile or online data? This could range from the price of toilet paper to even maybe healthcare.
In January 2020 the US theater industry was a very solid 9% up on revenue and screen viewings compared to 2019. Various blockbusters, romantic comedies, and the normal array of independent moves were part of a very traditional mix of post-Christmas release programs, increasingly seeing near parallel releases around the world. Nothing was in the pipeline that would have changed this perception or even projection that the industry was literally about to fall off a cliff and drop 80%+ in the next few months because of Covid-19.
We live in a world of exponential change. It affects all of us. However, it has its greatest effect on leadership as we increasingly have to make conscious decisions about the world we want to create in a world of exponential change. To put it in a simple metaphor. We all live in a world of Moore’s law. That underlying challenge sits at the heart of the discussion today with Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach the authors of the forthcoming book, Provoke. Do you choose to lead a wind-down or choose to provoke change?
As we have all experienced the first year and half of Covid-19, it is clear that working from home has un-even rules. Some of us have the space at home, some of us can do work remotely. It's assumed most of us have access to a powerful enough internet to work with colleagues and customers. Yet, in reality, and especially in the United States, many do not have that privilege. Yet their work and working habits could be seen on the same level as their peers with the right type of internet access. With the onset of Covid-19, we have transformed from a world where 3% of us worked from home to one where maybe 30% or more work from home; (as of publication, the number is 26%) this rural access divide will become an increasing disadvantage for a sizeable under-served swath of society. Twenty-five percent of the US live in a rural environment. As we all work in a digital world, why would we want to stunt opportunities for one in four of us?
A more intelligent systems approach for energy lies ahead of us as we shift the power generation from boomers to generation X and younger. Ideas like mini power grids that deliver and receive energy might be foreign to most us, but they are inevitable parts of a future that is unfolding in-front of us globally. By 2030 these systems might be normal, and we might reflect on a world where their lack of presence was seen as archaic.
The mass adoption of industrial robots has yet to take place. Automation has been supporting human efforts on manufacturing floors in warehouses for years. However, that shift is going to change by 2030 exponentially. The relationship between robots and humanity will get increasingly attractive as PwC estimates that 70% of global GDP growth by 2030 will come from what we could call the machine economy.
Daniel Theobald is the CEO and Founder of Vecna Robotics. Daniel has decades of experience leading research scientists and teams of engineers in developing cutting-edge technology. He has 67 issued patents and more than 30 patents pending. Daniel has also been at the forefront of robotics for more than 20 years, working closely with DARPA, DOD, NASA, NIH, USDA, and others to advance the use of robots and AI software to improve warehouse automation.
The journey will be incredibly complex for humanity and robotics, and it has sometimes been damaged by the way Hollywood portrays complex interactions in overly simple ways.
John Kotter’s book; Leading Change is still a seminal management handbook decades after it was initially published. The questions for its’ author are about its continued relevance in a world that could be radically different in ten years’ time let alone different compared to twenty or thirty years ago. Kotter talks about what it is going to take to win in the 21st Century as leaders. He talks about the balance of traditional and new world thinking and design that needs permeate our daily thinking.
Dr. Kotter’s view is that the core DNA for change management and leadership is more important than ever as organizations are living in a state of near constant change. The DNA of that leader is increasingly tested on a higher frequency basis than ever before so strengths are amplified and weakness become more damaging in near real time. Listen as he talks through examples at IBM, Boeing and HMS.
Cadillac is a very unique and old US brand. The term Cadillac has transcended the English language as both a measure of pure US quality and also as a symbol of traditional worldwide automotive quality. The brand has a history of innovation, first electric starter, the first with airbags, and first with actual hands’ free driving. Innovation does not always get rewarded with market share as part of the DNA for innovation has driven internal rewards to keep pushing it forward from design to engineering. The brand has a DNA around innovation, so questions like what does an EV car experience look like should be s key focus for Cadillac?
Imagine drones being able to get to an emergency destination before the emergency teams arrive in a small town like Paris, Texas. Imagine school-teachers being able to use drones to collect data for a live class trying to learn geometry. Imagine a drone being able to deliver fire retardant to a specific destination in a fire. Imagine being a mid-western lumber company able to use drones to see when timber should be harvested and then transported in autonomous vehicles to a facility.
Ben Marcus is the Chairman of Airmap, a company that aims to deliver a four-dimensional version of Google and Ways maps for the sky that will be filled with drones by 2030. Unlike Google/Ways the platform will be an autonomous air control system that helps orchestrate in very safe ways how drones of various sizes and with very different purposes navigate the sky’s above us. There is probably nobody better suited to ask about drones of the future and what we should hope for, expect and think about as consumers and leaders for the world of 2030.
Ben’s view is that drones will help solve urban over-crowding, bring services and products to rural areas in ways only big cities dwellers have experiences and also widen or perspectives on personal transportation. Drones in 2030 will be as common as seeing cars around you on the road.
This is part two of a two part interview - A world where investing in you might be your best personal financial plan. The world of personal finance in 2030 is going to change in many ways. We are going to work longer and differently and for many of us will have the burden of paying for those that have not managed their own personal finances to accommodate for an extra five, or ten years’ work presents whole range of challenges for us as a society? The podcast with Joel Deitch the founder of the Commonwealth fund ($160bn in assets) is a window into how we can re balance ourselves towards a future where enormous leaps in bio-technology as well as more traditional technologies like 3D printing of organs will become daily realities. AI and the Internet of things, Quantum computing, the cloudification of near everything will change our lives. We should expect both of these technology engines to change how we think about our own personal financial management models for 2030 and beyond. We will be tracked by healthcare company, rewarded for the right behaviors we have to manage and will live longer because of it.
See this podcast as a guide to what we should be doing as leaders in organizations to help our people best prepare for a financial future that will need to be managed differently.
This is part one of a two-part interview - A world where investing in you might be your best personal financial plan. The world of personal finance in 2030 is going to change in many ways. We are going to work longer and differently and for many of us will have the burden of paying for those that have not managed their own personal finances to accommodate for an extra five, or ten years’ work presents a whole range of challenges for us as a society? The podcast with Joel Deitch the founder of the Commonwealth fund ($160bn in assets) is a window into how we can rebalance ourselves towards a future where enormous leaps in biotechnology, as well as more traditional technologies like 3D printing of organs, will become daily realities. AI and the Internet of things, Quantum computing, the cloudification of near everything will change our lives. We should expect both of these technology engines to change how we think about our own personal financial management models for 2030 and beyond. We will be tracked by healthcare companies, rewarded for the right behaviors we have to manage, and will live longer because of it.
See this podcast as a guide to what we should be doing as leaders in organizations to help our people best prepare for a financial future that will need to be managed differently.
The networking world has been one of the last cloud holdouts in an age where we expect everything to be on the cloud. Moving to the cloud makes anything appear and behave in an exponentially larger and more valuable way. Think about the idea of the touchless stadium in the NFL or MLN, or NHL. You turn up, and you don’t need cash or a ticket. Your concierge knows who you are and exactly where you need to go for your favorite refreshment from a stand.
Touchless needs cloud. But more importantly, touchless will also make us feel more hygienic, safer, and more comfortable in crowded places in a post-Covid-19 world.
Today’s discussion with Wes Durow, the CMO of Extreme Networks, isn’t about the idea of touchless entry and experiences inside a sports stadium. The conversation goes far deeper into the new value models being created by networks based on how the telemetry data which has always been available can now put towards far more value in a world. A world where exactly where you are and where you are going, and how long you spend there can define a whole range of experiences in hospitals, schools, and other large campus environments.
Climate change and its implications have been the third rail for much of the world for a long time. No one economy and no one government has ever locked into a sustainable model between government and business. Now might be the moment where that third rail concept is solved. Today’s discussion on a personal and scientific level with one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Dr. Jeff Arnold who is the chief climate researcher for the US army core of engineers is a unique insight into how the moment may now have transpired to make a change.
There are four factors colliding here for real change: Raw processing power, a new generational focus, commercial interests, and pure evidence.
Dr. Arnold talks as a scientist in the global community of climate change professionals about a refreshing view to what could be very possible by 2030 with three driving factors, connecting together in a positive and effective manner.
Manufacturing has historically been a laggard in the adoption of digital technologies and even the idea of digital transformation. In 2018 the percent of manufacturing corporations successfully transforming was less than the 28% average for companies in other industries (15%). Revathi Advaithi is the CEO of Flex was named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business for two consecutive years (2020, 2019) and one of Business Today’s Most Powerful Women in India (2020).
Revathi’s views on how complete supply chains can go from 90 days to instant moments by 2030 is a whole new perspective on the power of localized manufacturing, robotics, digital feedback loops, and maybe more importantly the fundamental re-skilling of workers inside today's manufacturing and not out of manufacturing.
A cloud based future world is one thing. It’s something we all probably experience most moments of every day. However, that is like the very out layer of the changes we are experiencing with technology in the world. A cloud world needs a radically different infrastructure too in order to deliver near latency free services to companies, people and machines.
Our guest today is building that infrastructure now around 5G for the second largest carrier in the world. Gartner estimates that 75% of the world will compute on that intelligent edge, cloud-based infrastructure by 2025 and Srini Kalapala talks about the future of these networks as being man and machine orientated in a way we have never seen before
It’s not rocket science to say that American malls are dying on the vine right now. Covid-19 has amplified a trend to the point that of the current 1,000 Malls in the US we might lose over 300 within the next year or so. Covid-19 is a great accelerator of a trend we are already seeing. Yet retail is going to be an essential part of what communities still need after the pandemic. Places to meet, create community, go on dates and much more.
What got us here where retail is in crisis in itself a great lesson to learn from and our guest today. Courtney Hawkins is leading practitioner from clothing retail having managed over $1.5bn worth of retail activities in her career. This is a moment to talk to an insider about what has gone wrong and what needs to change because companies often find it difficult to reflect on their pasts and project a future.
The Seattle Aquarium is a microcosm of the battle we collectively face to protect the incredibly complex marine environments around us. Unlike many of the visionary stories we have talked about on this podcast that talk about new forms of technology, governance and society by 2030, the marine environment is rarely if even seen by each us unless you go to an Aquarium.
My guest is Steve Raucher, the CEO of RapidDeploy a company looking to change the legacy dynamics so that by 2030 first responders could be remote at home, put information in the hands of first responders that will be as digital, if not more so than consumers. AI and multiple sources of information will be analyzed in real time for the most efficient in the moment experience.
We also talk about the thesis of speed of the dog that prevents rapid change to occur, the story that led him from being banker to a man on a social mission that might affect each of us at least once in our lives.
This interview was done prior to the global pandemic. The ideas about how cities will be re-built for environmental beauty and experience are even more relevant than before as we look to re-engineer our world and living experiences going forward.
Zauben is one of the few companies dedicated to the specific integration of green living spaces inside, outside and around buildings. The ideas are practical now and will likely present themselves even more so in the world of 2030 where these ideas of integrated space and green environments should be common-place. The generation that just became the largest portion of the world’s workforce (Millennial) and already have a different view of the world around living in green aware environments. By 2030 many of these Millennials will be leading corporations, designing communities and having their families live in these cities.
· There is clear evidence that green office environments reduce absenteeism by 15%
· 3% of the world is covered by cities but 70% of the energy is consumed in cities plus 75% of all the carbon footprint
The interview with Zachary Smith is a view into that future. He believes that the number one barrier is not technology but collective vision about what can be possible.
Audrey Henson Founder and CEO, College to Congress ,Congress should represent its’ people, not just the elite in order to work. A discussion around the right way to align people and representation by 2030.
This conversation occurred before Covid-19 in the US. Its ideas and messages feel even more appropriate than before with Anne’s focus on inclusion and diversity at its core. One thing that especially makes Anne stand out is the description of herself in her LinkedIn profile: Transformation executive, servant leader, diversity & inclusion champion, culture expert, and blogger.
AT&T’s construct of rotating executives is not unheard of elsewhere, but it is still very common in most global leading brands. While AT&T is significantly ahead of its peer competitors there is still some way to go to have women and women of color properly represented in the halls of executive leadership. Anne’s own journey to be the CEO of a unit that would in itself be a Fortune 50 company should serve as a shining example of what is possible with some key variables.
Think of these four facts and how they are going to affect our futures and our, future leaders.
In 2019 29% of management roles were held by women even although 50% of the workforce is female.
Only 1 in 5 people on boards are female. For multicultural women, this statistic plummets to just 1 in 25. Yet by 2060 (a little out of the range of this podcast but one many of us will be around for) 50% of the US population will be women of diverse color.
Anne’s journey and advice should serve as a beacon to all of us.
Support services have never truly been the center of attention for companies in complex business to business segments. Historically getting high satisfaction (CSAT) or even sold Net Promoter (NPS) were great measure for how companies resolved challenge or serviced a customer in their moments of need. Our guest today from a forty-year old technology company focused on real time mission critical products might seem like and odd place to look to the future of customer success. However, the future of customer success in complex B to B worlds is going to be radically different by the year 2030 not because of the personal relationships we have but it will come from the intimacy around sharing data and amplifying value with Ai based tools. Real time living customer success is a long way from filled out surveys or three click NPS. Listen to Amit’s key life lessons from his national service in the Israeli military and his experiences with Operation Solomon evacuating 14,000 Ethiopian Jews on just 35 planes.
We don’t buy music we subscribe to Pandora, Spotify or iTunes. We buy less and less cars because we use Uber. We rarely if ever buy software anymore as we use it on the cloud with brands like Salesforce. Maybe one day we might not even buy our house but subscribe to the idea.
Tien Tzuo is one of the founding parents of the subscription economy and was employee number eleven at Salesforce. His New York TImes and Amazon bestselling book Subscribed is as much a management strategy book as it is a future history perspective on the future of the global economies. In a wide-ranging conversation from Arbnb to Caterpillar he talks about the underlying dynamics that are driving the idea of subscription to the forefront of customer’s demands and the strategy for companies in banking, media and beyond. If your business does not embrace the ideas behind the subscription economy, then it might not be embracing the digital currency of the future.
Valerie Granoff, Psychotherapist – Managing life in the new norm of Covid-19 as we transition into new un-discovered worlds. Four strategies to apply right now as this evolves. Going back to the office will not be the same.
We are about to move into new sets of normal. As leaders we will need to be very careful not to make assumptions about the new partially open work worlds. Shifting to a best practices model in leadership that could better help us thrive in this new world will change or maybe accelerate what management and leadership will look like for us all by 2030. We have bought back a three-decade experienced psychotherapist to walk us through new ways to think, feel and strategize around this new set of worlds. World’s where are partially in lock down and away from the office building or partially in the office in very new physical ways presents very different challenges.
These EQ and AQ skills are going to be vital as adapt to uncertain and changing environments.
This is part two of a two part interview. IKEA as we know it (the Ingka group now) is one of the most iconic global brands. It is in essence and extremely physical experience, but nowadays 70% of their customers kick off their shopping experience with the brand online. Our guest today is Barbara Martin Coppola, Chief Digital Officer for Ingka group, the former IKEA group. She is going to tackle some very interesting subjects with us as her company navigates a data centric, highly digital future, while at the same time expanding its vision about what it can do for communities and society overall:
· How companies with a long history and legacy can stay relevant in this digital age
· Making IKEA a digital brand for ten years’ time will involve a way to transition traditional values to a wider digital and community
· How AI is going to be used and how will it look like going forward for IKEA
· How IKEA will go beyond the idea of customer centricity to personal centricity
· How does IKEA’s model for gender equality work and what can others learn from the power of interviewing to values and not just the job specification they might be interviewing for.
Covid-19 has been a wake-up call for a $100bn industry that has been locked into physicality, a few minutes or an hour of engagement with a trainer and or a group in a building. The CEO of Les Mills Media, Jean Michel Fournier talks to me about a radical idea that has been amplified by Covid-19 in China and the US where they service 7M users and deliver content to over 20,000 clubs. Les Mills has been in business over 50 years and they have seen many periods of transformative change but this Covid-19 moment is very different.
The interview is extraordinary view into the mind of one of the world’s leading fitness brands and how Covid-19 has elevated a deeper strategy for a deeper plant.
The world is different 5.1%, used to work at home full time and 25% of us spent a day or two at home each working week. Now 93% are working from home. Assumptions have been questioned. The role of leaders (home and work) have needed to evolve. Skills for success are transforming in unfamiliar territories. This is a lot to absorb in one go.
Valerie talks about three core principles for a revised lens for leaders to serve their people now and into a very different future by 2030.
This is part one of a two part interview. IKEA as we know it (the Ingka group now) is one of the most iconic global brands. It is in essence and extremely physical experience, but nowadays 70% of their customers kick off their shopping experience with the brand online. Our guest today is Barbara Martin Coppola, Chief Digital Officer for Ingka group, the former IKEA group. She is going to tackle some very interesting subjects with us as her company navigates a data centric, highly digital future, while at the same time expanding its vision about what it can do for communities and society overall:
· How companies with a long history and legacy can stay relevant in this digital age
· Making IKEA a digital brand for ten years’ time will involve a way to transition traditional values to a wider digital and community
· How AI is going to be used and how will it look like going forward for IKEA
· How IKEA will go beyond the idea of customer centricity to personal centricity
· How does IKEA’s model for gender equality work and what can others learn from the power of interviewing to values and not just the job specification they might be interviewing for.
Citizenship always used to be all in and on one country. As people are more and more fluid in the services they get and where they get them from it is inevitable there is going to be a separation of digital, physical, healthcare and even government services. Imagine living in Fiji and getting services from Estonia with an e residency. A global fluidity in business and consumer freedom could become the norm. While the idea may not be completely new, the scale and scope of what our speaker today, the CIO of Estonia is suggesting is radical. This idea could make e-residency as much as 1%+ of the Estonian economy. It is a vital recognition of the shift in how we think about the world in a digital way.
Opening up a digital economy to global citizens re shapes the nature of government, economies and the ideas of citizenship.
Do not dismiss the crazy and celebrate failures like it’s your birthday. Keep a pipeline of ideas flowing
How do we overcome stasis in government thinking about the environment and at the same time give businesses real action plans or playbooks for handling the climate crisis? We are all equally responsible for actions on the planet (we all breath the same air) so waiting for somebody else to take a first step is not logical. The podcast today with Nigel Topping the CEO of Wemeanbusiness coalition is exactly about trying to break that Gordian know of thinking.
Building a coalition for action sits at the core as Nigel gets to see the boards of major companies truly understand the need for reimagining capitalism and our roles in making it happen.
Nigel covers everything from what will kick the zero emissions economy into play to the questions we need to answer for Gen XYZ and A when they interview with us for jobs about the environment.
The technology revolution has changed everything around us. In a world full of many levels of disruption we cannot apply old ways to think and feel and operate at work. We need new mindsets and frameworks to work together. The idea came up from working with Bono (U2) when building the Red products with Motorola and Bono.
It is a great framework for thinking about the new world we are facing with a population hoping, expecting and open to very new ways of working. This mentality exudes self-confidence and curiosity because a great deal of the knowledge we need is available online. The Punk rock mentality best illustrates this as the movement called into questions assumptions around how music should be created.
Through a set of stories from Bono and the Red program for solving AIDS in Africa Jeremy talks about parts of the eight principles of Punk Rock that are needed in today and tomorrows world.
It’s very difficult for this industry without a financial backbone. Even moving to a backbone requires an industry that is still being pigeon-holed into a cash 0 based industry when the world is becoming digital. Compliance issues still dominate industries like the alcohol industry, so these challenges are not new. Over 85% of cannabis transactions are still cash based Even in California that illicit market is over $10bn a year where the legal is just $2bn.
Eric Kaufman is the CRO for one of the only financial backbone companies focusing on this industry, Dama Financial.
The guest for this discussion is a very rare mix as the offspring of an Eritrean revolutionary who received political asylum in the United States, a former appointee inside President Obama’s administration, a self-admitted recovering financial services lawyer and a technologist who is now a Principal Program Manager in Microsoft’s Mixed Reality & Artificial Intelligence engineering group. This experience (it’s way more than a product) is at the forefront of bringing AI and combined digital and physical worlds together.
Nate Yohannes’ discussion with us is not only about HoloLens or the embedded technologies behind AI but, the art of balancing financial returns while addressing the wider social issues of how we drive AI to be unquestionably beneficial to all of mankind.
Basically, how do we democratize AI to the hands of everybody on the planet to empower their potential to achieve more and discover the unknown.
If 20% of the land of the agricultural land went to regenerative model we would stop new carbon creation. Nothing in all our choices has such a dramatic effect.
Current farming now is very mono crop driven. Same crops, many years on the same land using fertilizers to boost mass production. In many cases experts are telling us that this is turning our land into barren, highly eroding land. In some areas there is a belief that there may only be 60 harvests or less available on some of this land. With over 30 soccer fields of agricultural land being lost every minute on a global basis. Big Ag is not responding yet, but consumers are driving changes in ways than ever before. This may be the best start place for where consumers can radically change the shape of things we buy, consume and produce.
The CEO of Milkadamia has a unique and incredibly insightful view about what is evolving (with real speed) how we think, design and act as powerful consumers to change the food systems in the world. Jim lays out a simple set of basic choices that will get that speed to change happen far faster than before.
The idea of no code programing is so exciting because code is the epicenter of the digital age. Most of us are not equipped or even skilled to do this but we will live more and more in a code -based world. Lego let people play at building and imagining everything from spaces-hips to cars and even Lego football games. Imagine a world where code could be as easy and accessible as Lego and what we could with this in healthcare, automotive and even government segments.
This model is going to change the very nature of how we think about software and development costs. Chris’s example of how old industries like the legal industry has grabbed this to become more of a technology-based platform.
By 2029 we will still have a similar feel to aviation, but the technologies that support it all from 5G in the sky and AI in the cockpit will be common. Self-flying planes and helicopters for short distances with no pilots and more than likely just one pilot on major transatlantic routes with AI in the co-pilot's seat will be common. Our guest today Craig Picken is rare in that as a pilot he has done over 2,000 hours in US Military jets. He has sold billions of dollars in value in aircraft and is an industry commentator and visionary.
We are going to see a fascinating convergence of technologies, ideas, consumer trends, and new transportation possibilities that will help re-shape aviation changes around us. Imagine looking out of an office block and seeing tens of self-piloting heli jets taking people from a building or even the road to a downtown destination.
Clusters of innovation have become a modern magic for cities and countries looking to bring together the best ideas, the best places to work and also be able to generate a magic for investors. The US. The UK, India, France, Israel, Africa and China are living examples of one of the fathers of this idea in practice. Joel Marcus is the Executive Chairman of Alexandria who kicked off the cluster process with Michael Porters cluster model for the bio tech industry on the east and the west coasts based. Porter’s model is based on four key variables: [1] the best centers of knowledge, [2] their closeness to great education centers, [3] a depth of relevant human capital and [4] deep risk capital capabilities.
Tom Siebel is one of the fathers of the software industry in silicon-valley with Siebel software and now as chairman of C3.ai. Having made a CRM a reality for sales and marketing nearly 20 years ago he now is looking to make AI a practical reality for driving digital transformation success in the next decade. His new book, Digital Transformation, Survive and thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction is a direct call to action for leaders looking to plot a successful pathway through these potentially complex waters.
The promise that AI offers is both clearly understood but also vastly misrepresented. AI is not the man behind the curtain according to our guest today, Kymberly Storin, the VP of Marketing for IBM’s cognitive systems group. She believes that the inherent complexity of AI means we can’t just buy into the idea and expect extraordinary results to occur. In fact, if AI is to be the great aid to society it also needs to represent all the components of society too, gender, age, ethnicity, etc. Otherwise it will try and use precepts from our past to try build solutions for a vastly different set of futures by 2030.
If AI is going to be the future for corporations, government and consumers by 2030, then getting it to work cannot be an act of random chance but it needs a clear architecture for design, thinking and delivery that means success is not an act of random chance.
Our guest today sits at the heart of many of the current best practices in real world AI deployments so she can walk us through why the secret DNA is for success but more importantly where we should be taking AI to help solve the underlying challenges with bias in AI. In the second part of the podcast we talk about deeper challenges for a future world of AI where if the technology is meant to help the whole of mankind we need to make sure that the inputs (gender, age, and ethnicity) are properly invested in.
If you are an AI vendor, looking to become a data scientist, running major AI programs inside your organization this is a podcast you should invest 20+ minutes in.
This is part two of our interview with Sarah Fay. Context is going to be a critical conversation in ten years’ time. Your personal data, the value of that date to you and others will matter in millions of different ways. This means we need to be aware of how and what the value will look like as personal becomes both digital and physical. Context will be everything. If Cambridge Analytics taught us one thing is that there is magic (good and dark) that comes from seeing deep meaning in new combinations of data to show feelings and openness. It can be used for good or evil, but it is going to be used. Personal data will be at least a trillion-dollar annual industry (bigger than 150+ of each of the world’s economies).
Personal data awareness is vital for the future, our futures. What personal data is going to mean going forward as we cross this chasm, ten years from now for everyone (protection and getting in on the action and getting payback from it) is going to be something we each have to think about.
Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer founders of Thinkers 50 the definitive database and award for the best thinking and thinkers in the world talk to us about the future of break through thinking. This is the first of series of these podcasts about the top fifty Thinkers in the 2019 list as well as interviews directly with a number of these people about their ideas and how they are being applied to the developing world around us.
Context is going to be a critical conversation in ten years’ time. Your personal data, the value of that date to you and others will matter in millions of different ways. This means we need to be aware of how and what the value will look like as personal becomes both digital and physical. Context will be everything. If Cambridge Analytics taught us one thing is that there is magic (good and dark) that comes from seeing deep meaning in new combinations of data to show feelings and openness. It can be used for good or evil, but it is going to be used. Personal data will be at least a trillion-dollar annual industry (bigger than 150+ of each of the world’s economies).
Personal data awareness is vital for the future, our futures. What personal data is going to mean going forward as we cross this chasm, ten years from now for everyone (protection and getting in on the action and getting payback from it) is going to be something we each have to think about.
Everything needs to change in the way that we design and build bras. Ideas like rear hooks, underwire and clearly articulated pain and discomfort from compression bras have been a consistent design failure. They do not last long, yet the materials used in them have very long biological breakdown periods. There are some exciting ideas around printed inks, sensors and new printed materials. The industry argues that the challenge is that women choose the wrong size. Yet the reality appears to be around different design and medical issues.
Our expert talks with us about how women do not want to wear their mothers’ bra design. Our expert believes that this a wicked problem worth solving.
This is part two of our conversation with Melanie Matheu. We talk to the CEO of a company that is looking to laser print human organs. Put the incredible or technologies aside this could give us all a second, third, fourth or fifth act in life. It will radically evolve the healthcare industry, what we monitor, how the focus of Dr’s radically change and much, much, more.
In this two-part podcast we talk to the CEO of a company that is looking to laser print human organs. Put the incredible or technologies aside this could give us all a second, third, fourth or fifth act in life. It will radically evolve the healthcare industry, what we monitor, how the focus of Dr’s radically change and much, much, more.
This is part two of a two part interview. It is sometimes easier to see what the future can look and feel like through the eyes of a huge product portfolio that most of us touch and use every day. Our guest today is the Chief Product Officer for AT&T business, so he gets to see hundreds and thousands of possible ways the portfolio of products and services are changing people’s lives
Enjoy both part one and part two of this interview with a wide range of areas that should help you shape not just what your network needs to be built to do, but how we should be thinking about new versions of the cloud by 2029.
This is part one of a two part interview. It is sometimes easier to see what the future can look and feel like through the eyes of a huge product portfolio that most of us touch and use every day. Our guest today is the Chief Product Officer for AT&T business, so he gets to see hundreds and thousands of possible ways the portfolio of products and services are changing people’s lives
Enjoy both part one and part two of this interview with a wide range of areas that should help you shape not just what your network needs to be built to do, but how we should be thinking about new versions of the cloud by 2029.
The world of food (what we eat, how we produce it, what it all means) is in a more rapid state of transformation than maybe in the preceding three hundred plus years. This sounds dramatic, but our guest today Miyoko Schinner, the CEO of Miyoko’s Creamery, a non-dairy cheese and vegan butter company is as much at the forefront of a movement to vegan eating as companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger.
Her design of the company with its’ compassion first philosophy may well be an example of what common forms of leadership should look like ten years from now as we increasingly recognize that what we make and sell and how we produce it has consequences far beyond traditional thinking. The two-part podcast talks about what we should expect on our food store shelves in ten years (or even less) time. We talk about the moral and ethical imperatives that are increasingly connecting all parts of the food eco-systems together and we talk about how food giants now are responding far more rapidly than we might think to becoming vegan produce companies as generations X,Y,Z and alpha are leading us towards a food future that is going to be dramatically different in ten years’ time.
In a culture obsessed with youthful excellence from spelling bees to sport, music and entertainment Rich Karlgaard’s latest book Late Bloomers puts a brake on the traditional assumptions that lie behind that obsession. We are impatient in a way that might be damaging our society and future leaders need to be smarter about understanding the underlying values late bloomers bring with them for complex problem solving.
This is the second episode of a two part interview. Every single one of us has some sort of Campbell Soup story because the brand has at some point been there for us as children through our adult lives. In a complex FMCG business the soup business is not what it has been for the preceding 100 plus years. How we grow the ingredients, handle packaging and tin, make the product, distribute and position it are radically changing. A stalwart like soup becomes a great illustrator of the challenges all product-based companies face in an increasingly extremely personalized consumer world with a greater focus on not just the product but the whole production and environmental factors behind it.
This is part one of a two part interview. Every single one of us has some sort of Campbell Soup story because the brand has at some point been there for us as children through our adult lives. In a complex FMCG business the soup business is not what it has been for the preceding 100 plus years. How we grow the ingredients, handle packaging and tin, make the product, distribute and position it are radically changing. A stalwart like soup becomes a great illustrator of the challenges all product-based companies face in an increasingly extremely personalized consumer world with a greater focus on not just the product but the whole production and environmental factors behind it. Stay tuned next week for part two of this interview.
How sports teams decide to make money as entertainment centers and not just sporting venues is a subtle but vital change in the way the economics of sports franchise ownership is being defined. Doug Bentz is the VP Marketing for the San Jose Sharks. They are one of the most innovative franchises in sports entertainments and what they are doing and thinking about.
The healthcare system is the largest single commercial industry in the USA. One every 6.5 dollars of GDP is invested in it. Are we happy though with what it is and what it could be and how much it costs? The answer is probably not. From drug prices to the incredible cost of procedures our guest today, Eric Langshur: CEO Abundant Partners says Millennial's would rather have a broken phone than a bone because of those fears. Eric and the company he is CEO of is investing in many different elements of the healthcare system to solve these challenges.
Over 10 billion plastic and other material packages are consumed every day in the planet, or trillions every year. We are all responsible for this, so we all have a responsibility for changing it all. In a world where we are increasingly becoming middle class the current consumption of packaging is unsustainable. Listen to Holly O’ Driscoll a 25 year P&G packaging designer and expert as she talks about future ideas on packaging we are seeing now. From packaging that goats to eat to rice based materials.
In Part Two
Holly O’Driscoll and I talk a lot more about leading examples of consumer packaging ideals that should dominate our world of ten years from now. As an executive with over 25 years CPG packaging design at P&G we also talk about how the increasingly flattening of middle class opportunities around the globe are rapidly re shaping our views of what packaging can and should look like.
Over 10 billion plastic and other material packages are consumed every day in the planet, or trillions every year. We are all responsible for this, so we all have a responsibility for changing it all. In a world where we are increasingly becoming middle class the current consumption of packaging is unsustainable. Listen to Holly O’ Driscoll a 25 year P&G packaging designer and expert as she talks about future ideas on packaging we are seeing now. From packaging that goats to eat to rice based materials.
A lot of mental-conditioning coaches focus on a positive mindset. Our guest today, Trevor Moawad, who cofounded Limitless Minds with Russell Wilson, quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, is truly unique in this field. He teaches to live in a state of neutral. These days, there is far more noise than signal -- and our environment will surely get louder. Knowing how to handle that situation is going to need a very different set of skills for all of us.
Part two of our conversation with Sonny Magana. Our current education was set up at the turn of the 20th century, and we still use it today to fully prepare ourselves for the near and distant future. Do you still have the wiring in your house from 1900 running all your appliances? The answer is hopefully no. Dr. Sonny Magana, award-winning author on technology in education argues that a radical shift in how we educate and what content is included in our education has to happen now.
Our current education was set up at the turn of the 20th century, and we still use it today to fully prepare ourselves for the near and distant future. Do you still have the wiring in your house from 1900 running all your appliances? The answer is hopefully no. Dr. Sonny Magana, award-winning author on technology in education argues that a radical shift in how we educate and what content is included in our education has to happen now.
Listen to the daily life a decade forward for a leading three-star Michelin chef in Spain. She cares so much about everything to do with food, her gardens and her kitchens.
There are only 15, three-star Michelin restaurants in the US and a total of 150 worldwide. They are rare indeed. Heloise Vilaseca is a food scientist and runs a rare breed of restaurants which includes a 3-star Michelin restaurant in Spain, El Celler de Can Roca. Though fine dining is experienced by fewer than 5% of humanity, Vilaseca’s vision peers into a future that applies to us all. The discussion today is about how we eat, prepare and think about the ecosystem that feeds us, as well as what our potential future food-fashion habits might look, smell and taste like in the near future.
Listen to one of the world’s leading cloning companies and its founders view of his personal world a decade into the future. You will be very surprised by how he expects commute to work.
Cloning is full of possibilities, both as an application of science and research, but also because it could lead to the preservation of rare and endangered species -- or beloved pets. It’s a subject and idea that may well be more than just an odd outlier in ten years’ time as costs come down and acceptance goes way up. Blake Russell, the CEO and president of Viagen is leading this movement in areas with the San Diego Zoo to work with cloning high-performance dogs for police, military and other services.
Hear more about the future of carbon footprint management, and how it is going to change future economies around us all. We also get a chance to hear about Bruno’s own future vision about what his future world might look like in a decade forward. This is second and final part of this episode.
We all breathe much of the same air, but certain groups are going to be far more responsible for the carbon footprints we all leave than others. The eco-system, economies and the responsibilities around carbon foot prints are going to affect us all. Listen to the US president of CDP, Bruno Sarda, as he is at the forefront of measuring, educating and helping every type of organization through this process so that we arrive in 2030 with a net positive position. This is maybe the most important conversation about the future we need to have.This is part one of a two-part episode.
Every one of us will use and need insurance in the future. Telisa Yancy is leading the innovation and marketing for one of the America’s leading insurance providers. Hear her thoughts on what here world might look like ten years from now.
The need for insurance is ubiquitous, now and into the future. As we look to purchase, lease and experience everything from new forms of transportation to new forms of travel, new products and services, insurance will have to innovate, as well. Telisa Yancy is the COO and CMO of American Family Insurance, and we talk about everything from piano’s to fractional insurance ideas.
In a fast, dynamic and near latency free globe we cannot use the same working or collaboration framework we have used before to be successful. It sounds utterly obvious, but less than 30% of major companies have embraced new ideas in how they plan. The CEO of Anaplan is going to walk us through the unique ideas that should be common practices ten years from now.
In a fast, dynamic and near latency-free globe, we cannot use the same working or collaboration framework we have used before to be successful. It sounds utterly obvious, but less than 30% of major companies have embraced new ideas in how they plan. Frank Calderoni, CEO of Anaplan is cracking the code for delay-free collaborative planning.
More famous than the Beatles, inside and outside of Liverpool. 771 Million digital fans (one in seven humans on the planet). The current European Champion for a sixth time, and the CEO, Peter Moore is a gaming software executive who understands Millennials and younger X, Y, Z and Alpha in really unique ways. Today we talk about the future of fan experiences from biometrics to VR and more.
In this two-part podcast we talk about the future of warfare, cancer treatments, energy, society and much more with Safi Bahcall, author of Loonshots. In this second-part of the conversation, Michael and Bahcall discuss how businesses of any size can take their own crazy shots without the massive resources that supported NASA in the 1960s.
In this two-part podcast we talk about the future of warfare, cancer treatments, energy, society and much more with Safi Bahcall, author of Loonshots. Michael and Bahcall’s conversation about talks through countless examples of how “crazy” ideas needed to be nurtured in order to thrive. This is part one of a two-part episode.
Afdhel Aziz is the CEO of Conspiracy of Love and what you're about to hear might have you take a step back to ask yourself what your purpose and legacy is. He speaks with Michael about how Just making money is not a sign of success for tomorrow’s CEO. Deeper values are going to transcend typical economics because purpose at a personal and organizational level, is going to trump it all. Aziz has led the movement towards CEO’s creating a legacy around far deeper values than just economics. In this case the idea of love. Afdhel Aziz is a Forbes contributor in the CMO network channel.
High performance (cars, people, technology) anything is always interesting but being able to dig into the center of what drives high performance relationships in the NFL is even more interesting. The guest for this episode is Dan Quinn the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons and we are not going to talk X’s and O’s but how the player and coach relationship is still going to be vital ten years from now when we are deluged with data, AI and other social noise in the NFL.
3D printed houses or car parts are one thing, but 3D printed food is at the heart of this interview with leading European expert. He sees it as a solution for long distance space travel, precision medicine and for a near future shopping trip to Wholefoods. Listen to Giusesppe Scionti the CEO of Novameat as he navigates us through the future of 3D printed food. 3D printed food is far closer than you think and will be common place by 2030 in many parts of our lives.
This is the second and final part of our conversation with Vishy Gopalakrishnan, vice-president of eco-systems and innovation at AT&T Foundry. He shares what our future, immersive world will feel like and could impact the way companies are built.
Vishy Gopalkrishan, vice president of eco-systems and innovation at AT&T Foundry, who with his teams, is building completely new ecosystems for the future, connected universe in the world of 5G. Hear a wonderful range of topics about the digitally transformed world ten years from now. Everything from how we should think about educating our children to what true immersed experiences will feel like. It is part one of a two-part podcast. The second part is next week.
Sean Ellis is one of the fathers of the growth hacking and has a great view of his world ten years from now.
Sean Ellis, CEO Growth Hackers, discusses the future of growth (personal, organizational and government). Sean is one of the fathers of the growth hacking revolution. His well-researched views about how difficult this key DNA is for success is a wonderful exploration for any corporate leader looking to take some of that start-up magic and apply it as a core DNA to their corporation.
Here the CEO of one of the leading sleep applications and his view of his own world in ten year’s time. What will and won't have changed by then?
Mike Kisch, CEO Beddr, discusses the future of sleep management. We all sleep. We all at some points complain our sleep, the lack of it, the type of it. Sleep is something we do for at least one third of our lives, but we spend so little time thinking about how it should be measured and managed. Kisch is on a mission to eradicate all that is wrong about sleep ailments and poor sleep by bringing professional sleep experts to you.
Professor Shai Shen-Orr and David Harel of Cytoreason talk about what they will miss ten years from now including a great comment about silence.
Professor Shai Shen-Orr and David Harel of Cytoreason talk about the future of precision medicine. The idea of being able to go to your personal doctor and asking how your immune system is doing seems like science fiction, but is likely to be a reality soon. Hear from two leading experts using AI and cell-based research to reveal the future of medicine.
Bruce Rogers, CEO of the Sito Institute, has invested two decades at Forbes on the future of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). There's a current tension in the definition of CMO. One role is demand expertise (the dominant form now) and the other morphing role is the CMO as a culture compass. Rogers shares his insights on where he thinks the role of CMO is going.
Hear what fun stuff Bruce expects to experience ten years from now. From breakfast to work.
Mark Bunting, the entrepreneur behind Sky TV and the CMO of cloud pioneer Rackspace talks about the ideal CMO ten years from now and how AI is evolving.
Phil McKinney, former Head of Innovation at HP shares loads of ideas about the future of many things including the cable industry, how best to learn and healthcare for the elderly. Plus, Star Trek's wondrous holodecks might become real at last.
Doctor Bray, former CIO of the FCC and executive director of the People Centered Internet Coalition. Listen as Bray talks about major shifts in how we should be thinking about governance of ourselves, our companies, our governments, and our communities. He puts some ideas out there that are vastly different to what we think now but make amazing sense.
Guido Jouret, chief digital officer for ABB engineering, is right in the center of how we re-thing and re-engineer buildings and the power grid for the next decade. Neither will look or feel the same as now according to Jouret. Enjoy the idea of organistic buildings and rooms adjusting to you.
Mick Ebeling, founder of Not Impossible Labs, says technology should be far more focused on solving impossible challenges that will get only more challenging over time. Hear how tech can improve access, medical and social issues going forward.
Mo Katibeh, president and CMO of AT&T business talks about possibilities far closer than we might have thought possible. 5G is merely the tip of the iceberg for a latency-free world of cloud applications and experiences that feel as fast and as personal as our imaginations will allow.
Andrew Swinland, CEO of Leo Burnett USA, talks about changes in how marketing agencies have to think and design for success, as we enter an age where one big idea, one great piece of creative is not enough.
Anton Andrews, Head of Envisioning for Modern, Work and Life Microsoft Imagine an office where the walls are your laptop and your hands, voice and eyes are your new keyboards. Listen to Anton Andrews, Head of Envisioning for Modern, Work and Life Microsoft, as he talks about the possibilities of "the office" in ten years time.
Brad Barbera - Listen to the future of food ten years from now with Brad Barbera, the Director of Innovation at the Good Food Institute. Brad talks about a future where what we eat, as well as how it is manufactured, is going to be noticeably different.
In ten years time, work will be wherever you are all the time. How you do it on a mobile device, IOT or whatever we have that looks like a tablet or laptop should be utterly irrelevant. Rich McBee, CEO of Mitel, talks about small businesses leading the charge to this end.
Michael Schrage - MIT Media Labs and Imperial College visiting professor who sees the future of work and self in a very unique way.
Welcome to Forbes Insights Futures In Focus. Kick off your pathway to the next ten years with the co-author of the number one selling book on digital transformation, The Digital Helix.