Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

Here’s a video clip from a recent keynote in Las Vegas.

I was on stage in front of an audience of 4,000, speaking for a global organization.

In this clip, I’m speaking about the challenges that organizations face with innovation — and in particular, the fact that every organization has people who wake up each day and ask themselves, “what can I do today to kill innovation?”

Do such people exist? Are there really attitudes like this out there with such high-velocity change in the economy out there? You’ll realize the answer to this question is yes, as soon as you hear the list of the “innovation killers.”

Think about what they say:

• “We’ve always done it this way”
• “It won’t work”
• “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard”
• “That’s not my problem”
• “You can’t do that”
• “I don’t know how”
• “I don’t think I can”
• “I didn’t know that”
• “The boss won’t go for it”
• “Why should I care?”

I challenge the audience with this issue, and get them thinking about the need to innovate — faster — to keep up with rapidly evolving trends.

When my friend Scott Kress summited Mount Everest last year, he used a little bit of oxygen for the final push. Many climbers do — sometimes you need the extra energy to accomplish something massive!

So it is with innovation — sometimes you need some help to accomplish great things. I’ve written an article this morning, “Time for a little oxygen?” that offers some thoughts on how you can kick up your innovation efforts a bit more.
Here’s an extract:

To get into a frame of mind of acting fast, everyone needs to be able to learn a lot, very quickly. One way of doing that is by encouraging people to “waste” time. That’s right – I really recommend that as a business strategy.

How can people understand the high velocity change in markets, business models, competitive challenges, the emergence of new means of marketing and branding, and all kinds of other issues, if they are restricted to formal education programs? How can they learn about the new products that they need to sell when those products are coming to market so quickly? How can they learn new methods of dealing with a customer by taking an in-house course that was developed over a year ago, when the market was completely different from today?

That’s where frivolous education comes in, as a complement to traditional, formal corporate education programs.

Why not establish some “playtime” with your sales force, with the purpose being to try out a multitude of new technologies: encourage browsing through industry magazines, surfing the Web for market research, etc… Such activities may help bring understanding to how the customer is changing. So in fact, what may appear to be “wasting time,” really is not so

.
As for Scott, his time spent summiting Everest certainly wasn’t a waste of time. He’s an Executive MBA teacher, consultant and speaker, and the experience has given him a unique message on leadership, teams, and effective strategic planning!

More information

• Read the article Time for a little innovation oxygen?
• Learn more about Scott Kress

One of the events I have coming up is in May in Las Vegas. I’ll be the opening keynote speaker for a global organization, with about 3,500 people in the room.

It’s interesting to learn that one of the things that caught the attention of this group was my “Change: Deal with It” video.

It’s kind of a cute video, and since I’m on March break this week skiing and not thinking too much, I thought it would make for a great blog post!

Enjoy!

Well, it seems that EVERYBODY is now talking about change. Given that, it’s time to resurrect my original “change” video!

Need more on change? Read my 10 Great Words — get inspired!

Want to share the video? Do it now — it’s on YouTube.

Can change happen? It can — but it takes a lot of work! I spend my time on stage with audiences of 2,000 people — or with CEO meetings — focusing on how to get things to change. Even so, this video clip is inspiring — when confronted with change — JUST DEAL WITH IT!

Here’s the story about the video. Outside my home office, I’ve got what my family has come to call the “squirrel highway.” All day long, they scurry back and forth along the top of the fence, busy collecting and hiding food.

A few years ago, my sons and I wondered what would happen if we put up some highway signs for them to obey.

We set up a video camera — taped for six hours running — and edited out the best bits. It’s a project we’re still working on.

This clip was the funniest one — and seems to tell a bit of a story as to the right way to deal with change. I spend a huge amount of my time in keynotes and workshops helping organizations adapt to the rapid rates of change that surround us. And it’s certainly clear that lots of people just aren’t good with change. This little fellow is!

A few weeks ago, I arrived in my hotel room, and connected back to my home office via Skype. I found my sons using my Mac (long story!), and proceeded to have a one-hour video conference with them.

During this time, I ordered room service, my dinner arrived, and I ate it. All this time they played a variety of video games, worked on homework, and I unpacked my suitcase and organized my stuff.

All the while, we chatted back and forth. My youngest son made a comment at one point: “it’s just like you’re at home.”

That’s the thing about this next generation and their concept of “where is “there”.” To date, few organizations have really taken to videoconferencing and other forms of virtuality ; yet as today’s 15 year old enters the workforce in the next decade, that is all set to change.

One of the most significant trends I cover in my “What Comes Next” trends perspective is this one: “Resistance retires.” It’s worth a read — simply put, within 10 years, much of the workforce will have grown up with technology, and the pace of how different the workplace, workforce, structure of the organization, structure of the working day, and everything else, is just going to be torn apart and rebuilt.

You can see the signs of the aging of Gen-Connect with today’s new “wired soccer mom.” Alabama’s Times Daily just ran an article examining the phenomena, and I’m quoted liberally thorughout the article:

Jim Carroll, a futurist, trends and innovations expert, said moms between 25 and 32 grew up right along with the technology that enables them to communicate via text. Edmonton, who lives in Ford City, is 31.

“It’s technology that’s been around for between 10 and 12 years, so they probably started texting when they were kids in nightclubs, and now they’re the parents with little ones,” he said.

For those who didn’t grow up with it, texting might not ever catch on, Carroll said, and e-mail will remain the way to communicate electronically.

Already, text messaging, which is known in the wireless world as SMS, or short message service, has been adapted for weather and safety alerts on college campuses in the U.S. as well as a violence prevention tool in Kenya, Africa.

So much of this, Carroll contends, is a result of people such as his 12- and 14-year-old sons growing up using the technology and finding ways to apply it in the real world.

“We’re seeing this come into the work force and influence the way we think, act and communicate, and you’ll see that these younger users won’t think a thing about sending a text to a peer in the business community or even a young doctor preferring to send a text to a patient,” he said.

The key point is, anything is on the table, and were in for massive changes in the workplace because of simple demographic change.

More information:

• The reality of future trends: grab the What Comes Next trends overview
• Times Daily artilce Submit it in writing: Popularity of text messaging on rise

My blog post of a few weeks ago caught the attention of the folks at the Canadian Society of Association Executives — and so I quickly rewrote it to challenge their members to think about the role of “associations in the future.”

As we end the year and start a new one, it’s a good time to be thinking about some of the trends and issues which will impact us in the future.

Take a look at my newly released quick-report, What Comes Next: A Trends Perspective for 2008 and Beyond.

My message for my clients throughout the year – whether it was 2,000 executives at the World Congress for Quality, or the senior management team of one of the largest commercial construction companies in the US — was consistent. The high-velocity economy demands that we think, react, plan and manage differently.

Some of the guidance I shared with global clients concerning future trends is found in the report; I highlight what I think are some of the most important ones that we need to be thinking about, broadly defined as:

• revenge of the math geeks
• small is the new R&D
• attitude and amusement is the new motivation
• time disappears
• resistance to change retires
• careers end
• knowledge & skills banks dominate
• interactivity redefines markets

It’s an Adobe Acrobat document; feel free to grab it, share it, and distribute it!

I prepared the document on a MacBook Pro — I made the switch from Windows this year! — using the TokyoRPG Style Template for iWork 2007 Pages from KeynotePro. They have awesome styles for Pages and Keynote; if you’re an OS/X and iWork user, take a look.

• Grab the What Comes Next PDF now
• Learn more about iWork Themes from KeynotePro

Can you innovate across the generations? If you can’t — then you’ve got a big problem to fix!

I do a tremendous number of keynotes that focus on the issue of “managing millenials,” and the complexities of change occurring in the workplace. See, for example, my blog post, “Don’t Mess with my Powder, Dude.” (below)

Yet organizations need to move beyond the staffing issues that come with new generations: they must also ensure that they can innovate at the rapid rates demanded in our new world, and they need to do that by keeping up with the new ideas and innovations occuring with younger staff.

In this video clip, I take a look at the story of the “plasma people” and the “carboard people.” Innovation occurs when different generations — with different attitudes to change — can cooperate and see eye to eye, and take advantage of different strengths. In this clip, I tell tjhe story where this clearly wasn’t the case!

This is a video clip from a recent keynote that I gave for hundreds of executives from the grocery and consumer products industries, titled Faster is the New Fast: Innovating for the New. High Velocity Customer . This story also became the opening chapter in my book, Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast.

Related postings:

read Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude!

Can you run your business at video game intensity?

High velocity retail innovation

Creativity, trends and innovation in retail, packaging & consumer goods

Earlier this year, I wrote the Foreword for the book, The Rise of the Project Workforce: Managing People and Projects in a Flat World.

It was titled, “Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude“, and tells the unique attitude towards work and life of a snowboarder.

The foreword, now available online, puts in perspective the unique and often challenging workplace changes now underway, which are often driven by unique and different attitudes towards careers and work with the younger generation.

It’s worth a read; you can grab a copy below. You might also want to look at Rudolf’s book.

• read Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude!
• Book: The Rise of the Project Workforce

My new book, Ready, Set, Done: How To Innovate When Faster is the New Fast, is now available in print.

You can purchase it directly through this site, with immediate shipping. In addition, the book is available worldwide via Amazon.com.

• purchase direct
• purchase via Amazon.com

Ready, Set, Done : How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast is a timely book – it captures the rapidity that is found in our world today, whether it be rapidly shifting business models, technological change, the rapid advancement of science, the emergence of new competitors, and rapidly evolving professional skills and knowledge.

The book takes a look at the concept of innovation in a new, and well, innovative way, in that it helps you understand how to link your innovation efforts to the high velocity change that surrounds you. It examines the concept of agility: how organizations can ensure they structure themselves to take advantage of and resopond to fast-changing circumstances. It builds upon that message, by examining some of the key innovation success strategies that you should be thinking about.

Sprinkled throughout the book are various observations that I have made, of some of the innovative practices I’ve seen wtih various organizations, large and small. When you’ve been looking for innovative stories for close to a decade, you discover quite a bit of wonderful insight.

The book will provide you the inspiration to adapt and change in order to keep up with high velocity change. It will also open up the minds of your staff as to the need for day to day transformation in what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

And it will frame the issue of innovation for you in a new and critical way. As I noted in the opening chapter, “Forget about the concept of innovation as simply involving the design of cool new products. In the high-velocity economy, where faster is the new fast, it’s your ability to adapt, change, and evolve, through a constant flood of new ideas, that will define your potential for success.”

I’m off today to Montreal, to keynote the 2007 International Financial Leaders Forum. This is a gathering of several hundred senior financial leaders from throughout the private and government sector.

One of my key messages in my opening keynote today is that as CFO’s and CEO’s, they must ensure that they are putting in place a culture of agility and flexibility, such that their staff are able to deal with rapid change that comes with the high-velocity economy.

Enter the new boarding pass bar code, as seen on the right: I’m using this Blackberry enabled boarding pass on my flight to Montreal. This is an initiative set-up by Air Canada — you check in online with your mobile device. You are then sent a text message/SMS that contains a 2-dimensional barcode. At the airport, ostensibly, it will be wanded at security, at the gate, and I’ll be on the plane. (The bar code shown will have expired by the time you read this.)

The reaction of my 14 year old when he saw it? “It will never work dad! I don’t have good feelings about this.”

His reaction, he explained, comes from his belief that the security people won’t know what to do with it; that I will get some cranky gate agent who wasn’t aware of the new technology; that simply, from what he has learned while travelling with us, is that this simply represents too much change, too fast.

I promised to text him along the way with any updates!

He does have a valid point though : today, we live in a world in which change management is a big issue. I’ve run (and continue to do) workshops or keynotes where I am addressing issues of how to cope with change. It’s a big issue that I cover off in my new Ready, Set, Done: How to Innnovate When Faster is the New Fast book.

Yet a big question looming on my mind these days is this: what happens when the need for change management goes away? Twenty years out, we will have a generation in charge which has embraced technological change from their birth. They are attracted to new ideas, innovation, and new ways of thinking, like bugs drawn to a light. Their world will continue to involve a flood of new technologies, new ways of working, constantly shifting work structures, rapid micro-careers, and all kinds of other things that involve what we would consider to be rapid change.

What happens when change management disappears, and change occurs even faster than it happens today?

The airline involved in today’s flight is quite focused on innovation. The big issue to watch is whether they are keeping the change-process up-to-date with their innovation process. Or whether the issue of change-management is starting to disappear and go away….

Nov 5 update

• the security people knew about it, but
• the first gate agent freaked out, muttered about management and new technology, and printed me a paper boarding pass
• the flight attendant didn’t like it, and wanted the paper pass
• returning, it took 3 minutes for them to get the security line guy who had the bar code wand
• the gate agent flatly refused to accept it. She complained, complained…

Just about what I expected!

Tenrox, a company that provides companies an intgelligent infrastructure for rapid workforce management, has invited me to keynote their September 2007 user group conference in Bloomingdale, Illinois.

The title we’ve worked out, based on a story I often tell on stage: “Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude: Managing People and Projects in the Flat World.” It’s related to the number of talks I’ve been doing within the overall theme of “What’s Happening with Our Workforce.”

• read the Tenrox press release
• previous blog post, “What’s happening with our workforce?”
• Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here

Organizations are coming to realize that talent management is going to be a critical issue, and I have a wonderful track record in positioning this on stage.

In the world of high velocity change, how could you go about actually keeping on top of all the trends that might impact your business models, customers, distribution channels, competitors and markets?

How do you develop a forward oriented culture that allows you to immerse yourself in the developments occurring in the global innovation feedback loop, and provide for relentless, effective innovation in everything that you do?

With many of my clients, I walk through the “trends and innovation loop” : it’s a model that I developed a number of years ago. It’s a methodology, and a way of thinking, that can help engender an ongoing culture of innovation. There are several elements to the loop, all of which are always operating full-speed, flat-out:

• Trends Radar: Innovation comes from the ability to see the obvious, and so the first step in the loop is to establish a form of “trends radar” that keeps you attuned to the future. Everyone throughout the organization should be prepared to keep a constant eye out for new developments and opportunities that might impact your business or market, and that might provide opportunity for innovation. They should also be watching for trends, issues or signs that might indicate a potential threat or looming challenge. Everyone needs to understanding that having good radar can help the organization spot future opportunities and act upon them, as well as do what is necessary to ward off and deal with potential threats.
• Trends Receiver: Having your people watch for trends, developments, all issues all around them is the first step in the loop; the second is to instill in them the confidence to share these observations with everyone in the organization. You can call this a collaborative capability: a cultural willingness to share information,
• Trends Transmitter: A good trends receiver is critical to gathering all of the observations that your people have, but without a transmitter the ideas will go nowhere. The trends transmitter is the process of taking the observations and ideas generated from the receiver, sifting through them and finding the ones that might be important. This is a project and strategic oriented role, as well as an embedded cultural insight.
• Innovation Trap: Many of the ideas that your trends radar might spot and share won’t make sense, and might be meaningless in the grand context of things. But on occasion, critical information will emerge that might spell a brilliant opportunity or a significant threat. When that happens, you must be able to turn those observations into actionable plans. The trap is a formalized or informal process that takes the best potential observations from the trends transmitter and turns them into concrete ideas and plans.
• Innovation Factory: Your innovation trap can come up with a lot of great ideas, but if you are like many organizations, you’ll fail to see them turn into something that is real and sustainable. Most experts agree that new innovative ideas fail in many organizations, not because of a lack of imagination but due to a basic inability to turn ideas into actionable items. The innovation factory is a cultural willingness to embrace change; it is also the methodology by which new ideas are translated into real business processes, products, activities and initiatives.
• Innovation Runway: once the ideas have been translated into concrete, actionable plans, you’ll need a method to ensure that they are properly launched and integrated into the organization – that’s your innovation runway. Your actionable plans might involve experts at implementation, project management and other individuals who can effect change within the organization.
• Innovation Rear-view Mirror: To complete the process, place yourself in a position of continuous re-examination of your innovation success. You must constantly re-evaluate what you’ve learned, what you’ve implemented, and how well it has worked. Use this process to enhance your understanding of how to be innovative, by changing your approach for the next round of the innovation loop.

A LAST WORD
The key to the trends and innovation loop is that it is an ongoing, regular process. It must become part of the very fabric of the organization. A key point to the loop – to make it work, there must be a clear understanding that everyone in the organization is responsible for observing important trends that might impact the organization, for generating innovative ideas, and for helping to put those ideas into practice. Without that type of understanding throughout the organization, most efforts at innovation and dealing with the future will be doomed to fail.

Here’s a reality that you need to think about: 2007 is the year in which almost every organization and individual will begin to focus all their energies on innovation.

As someone who spends a lot of time helping some of the world’s largest organizations adapt to and understand the new high-velocity economy, I’ve long realized that there are big, creative-stumbling-blocks that have restricted the type of thinking that is necessary to “doing-things-differently.”

Yet, I am encountering a new group of leaders who know that the emergence of the high-velocity economy means that they must have a team that can constantly adapt and evolve, coming up with a regular stream of new ideas on how to better run the business, grow the business and transform the business.

There are several reasons why innovation will be the word, and the primary area of focus for every business, throughout 2007:

• people are finally “getting it”: They are realizing that innovation isn’t just about new products ; it’s about looking at what you do, how you do it, and how you can do it better.
• people are realizing that innovation isn’t optional: They have come to realize that in the fast paced world in which we find ourselves, with multiple competitive threats and unprecedented new opportunities, those who can think differently and who can do things differently will be those that make the leap from potential failure to massive success
• people are realizing they can “do” innovation: they’re realizing that innovation isn’t some dark, mysterious ancient ritual: they’re realizing that it simply a mindset that involves constant probing to see how we can fix things, find new things, or transform things: whether those things be business processes, customer service methods, new products, marketing and distribution channel concepts, or just about anything else.
• people know that innovation is driven by extreme velocity: In every industry, the certain minimum expectations which have long existed are now constantly rising. Whether it issues of cost/price, customer service/support, logistics/delivery, brand coolness or new products, the rule is simple: to compete today, you have to keep up with high-velocity change. If you don’t innovate to maintain the same velocity as everyone else, you get left behind. It’s that simple.
• people know it becomes easier to be innovative if you plug into the global innovation idea loop. Despite all the press foo-fah-rah about Web 2.0 and all that junk, what has happened in the last decade is quite simple: there is now a huge and massive global discussion underway. If you can learn how to tap it, you can discover a wealth of innovative ideas and thinking, new knowledge, wonderful insight and creativity.
• people know that demographic change brings about more innovative thinking: quite simply, as change adverse baby-boomers begin to retire, they are being replaced by change-adept Gen-Connects: individuals who view innovative opportunities in the context of connectivity. They are always asking themselves, how can I do something cool with this business problem if I layer connectivity on top of it? Whether it’s supply chain reorganization, collaborative tools or something else, they bring a whole new innovative perspective to the game.
• People are learning that innovation is not a one time thing: when it comes to innovation, the idea of a “suggestion box” is just so “20′th century.” There is now an understanding that a company must live a culture of innovation: everyone must be completely and fundamentally focused on the new things we need to do to stay in the game, and excel at what we do.
• People know that innovation has gone mainstream: Everyday people are starting to use the i-word in conversation, and it’s becoming natural. Innovation has left the realm of the esoteric, and has become the next natural area of focus in business.
• Management is now focusing on the attributes of an innovation team: agility, insight and execution have become their guiding principles. They know that they must have agility to respond to the rapid change that constant innovation demands; they know they need depth of insight to discover where innovative ideas can work; they know that it isn’t just coming up with the ideas, but making them work, that is so critical to their innovation success.
• People are seeking a head start on how to make the leap to innovation: A guy like me, who makes his living helping organizations understand innovation, now finds that 07 is already heavily booked. Management everywhere has put innovation on the agenda for 2007, and they’re doing what it takes to get a kick-start on the process.

The most important thing? People are discovering that if you focus on innovation, you can break away from the dull, restrictive, boring routine activities that shackle you to the past. Instead, by focusing your energies on ideas, creativity, challenging the status quo, constantly seekling how you can do things better, grow things, or transform things, you ended up having a lot more fun — and see a lot more benefits.

People have come to realize that being innovative is just plain fun.

That fact, more than anything else, signals that innovation is the word of 2007.

I woke up this morning with a pretty big sty on my eye; I could feel it coming on last night. Big, puffy, and sore : I couldn’t get my contact lenses in, which is kind of a drag since I do a talk for SAP today (Theme: Velocity, Agility, Complexity and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage: more on that to come.)

At 6:45am this morning, I went down to the home office, and e-mailed my eye doctor asking what I should do. At 6:47AM, he emailed me back with a few suggestions, and advised me to come in at 9:30am. Talk about customer service!

My eye-doc is a bit younger than me — and he’s grown up with technology. In terms of his medical practice, he has always been at the leading edge of the curve in terms of adoption of new equipment and technology. He has had quite a consultative approach with me through the years, taking a cumulative series of hi-resolution digital pictures of my retina for example, in order to be able to show me the slow and steady (and normal) impact of aging. (And, in effect, helping me get over the fact that I increasingly need to use reading glasses.)

So it is with his rapid response on e-mail; he commented in our exchange this morning that “instead of a Blackberry, I use an ultraportable Thinkpad. Wireless at home, wireless at work, wireless at Starbucks — the 3 places where I live 95% of my life. “

As a medical professional, he’s wired up, interactive, and providing a different type of medical service. To him, interactivity with the patient is a good thing, and all part of the service. That’s innovation right there.

The 21st century medical professional is:

• collaborative: the patient is a partner in the process: they know we are empowered with information, and they work with us to help us understand how to best use it given our medical circumstance
• responsive: yes, they have a life. They use technology to balance how they spend their professional and personal time, and in doing so, provide rapid customer service.
• interactive: the online world plays a key role in the service element; from e-mail appointments to a prescription that includes an online information source
• progressive: there’s a flood of new ideas and methodologies coming into the world of medicine. They adopt it, understand it, and utlize it to improve health care delivery

I wrote about this trend with my Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care overview, noting that one of the 10 biggest trends to impact health care in the future will be the impact of such interactivity on medical delivery: “ The entire medical system is set to be transformed with the entrance of GenConnect (those born after 1990) into the health care system. As they take on careers as medical professionals and administrators, they will bring with them a flood of new ideas, innovation and different ways of thinking. Health care institutions currently clogged with organizational sclerosis cannot keep pace with today’s demands. But GenConnect’s aggressive attitude towards change will quickly break down this sclerosis.”

As the Gen-Connect generation — the ultimately wired crowd — gets involved in health care delivery, we are going to witness a massive and significant transformation of the system. And that can only be a good thing!

Read Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care

EyeDoc: Port Credit Optometrists and Dr. Peter Rozanec

At the Swiss Innovation Forum in Zurich, I took a look at the attitudes, ideas and cultures which always manage to stifle — and kill — any hope for innovation within an organization.

Key point? “Organizations fail, because their have failure engrained in their corporate culture!”

This clip is based on an article I wrote a few years ago about the innovation killers. I often tell a joke on stage that it sometimes seems that there are groups of people who wake up every morning and ask themselves, “what I am going to do today to kill off new ideas?”

Take a look at the list of innovation killer phrases. Take it into your next meeting, and start to take score of how often these phrases are used. That will give you a sense as to whether you are slowly dying from organizational sclerosis, or if you do have a corporate culture that permits innovation to thrive.

Does your organization have the right stuff to deal with todays’ information-empowered, globally collaborative, we-know-better-than-you-do customer?

Maybe not.

Imagine that you are a big company.

Imagine that you roll out a new piece of software that was supposed to make things better for your customers.

Imagine that it doesn’t do that — worse yet, a feature that existed for your best customers has now disappeared. Even worse — those very same customers now have to pay a fee to do what they could previously do for free.

In other words, imagine that you’ve broken a customer-system, and you are now penalizing those customers for your mistake.

Imagine this : you’ve tried to make things better, and you’ve only made them worse.

Does this happen in the real world? Alarmingly, often. I’m going through this exact type of experience right now with a billion-dollar company that I deal with regularly.

Out of respect — since I think their CEO is a smart guy — I won’t name names. I will, however, offer up my advice on how to respect, not mistreat, your customers.

If you are implementing any type of customer oriented system or inititiave, understand these truths:

1. Be open. Solicit feedback – get the customers on side.
   Don’t just rollout the new system and hope for the best. Know that there will be problems, bugs, and things that will go wrong. Start out on the right foot with the customers by admitting this, and seeking their input, guidance. The new business world is all a Beta — Google gets this, and you should get this too.
2. Fix things fast, because things break fast. As things go wrong, fix them fast. Have a communications plan. Be prepared to reassure the customer quickly. In this new era of hyper-information feedback, don’t let the customer sit and stew for a moment — proactive information and proactive action is the only weapon you have, and you have to use it.
3. Adopt customer-niceness as a core virtue during the pain period..
   There are rules and fees and structure that can exist in any customer relationship. But make everyone aware on the team that there are likely some things that are going to have to be waived during the rollout. The core virtue is, “we’re going to be nice to the customer, because we know it is not the customers fault that things have gone wrong.”
4. Admit that mistakes will happen . It’s ok. It’s the 21st century. Bad things go wrong all the time. Accept that, and use that as a go-forward strategy. “Things will go wrong and we will work to fix them fast” is a better strategy than “we plan on rolling it out and holding our breath that things don’t get messed up.”
5. Don’t hide from the customers. Customers today can turn on you in an instant. Rumors, stories, misinformation can abound. The customer has a lot of information, and might not always be reading it right — but they can certainly make it go wrong in a hurry. A clear, and open, and honest, reactive strategy with the customer is in your best interest. More communication is the best rule.
6. Turn customers into fixers. The customer is a new customer. They expect operational excellence, and if they don’t get it off the bat, they are prepared to help fix it. The complexity of a new customer software system can undergo all kinds of testing internally, but some things will never show up until it goes live. That’s why you want to recruit the customer as a problem solver. Turn it from a “bad rollout of new software” into something different, by letting the customer know that you want them to help stress test the system and find the things that aren’t working quite right.
7. Get everyone inside on the same page. Let everyone throughout the organization know that something new is going to be happening that could cause customer stress. Get them to understand that the new JOB #1 is Customer-Destressification.
8. Have an escalation plan. As things go wrong, be prepared to pump them up the chain in a hurry. Have a team ready to analyze what the customers are saying, do triage on the big ones, and work them quickly.
9. Empower people with niceness. Customer-centricity and the instant-age demands that the customer be made happy — quickly. Give staff who have not previously had the authority, the authority to do things to the customer that are nice. That will help to ease the early part of the “pain process.”
10. Learn from the experience. Learn from this rollout to figure out how to do it better the next time.

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, your customer relationship can be fleeting at best. They often know more about your market than your staff does. Act accordingly, or you look like a fool — and you end up losing customer loyalty.

At this point, I’ve been working at home for close to eighteen years. When you’ve been doing it that long, and you’ve built up a thriving global business, you gain some real insight into how the economy is shifting. Not only that, but you have a remarkable relationship with your family, with some unique visits into the home office through the years.

Business Edge magazine is now running a “20 questions” interview with me in which I’m talking about a variety of stuff.

Inevitably, talk turned to the next generation, the workplace, and the change occurring with careers. This is a topic that I’ve frequently been talking about on stage, under the title, “Hyper-boomers, Gen-Connect and Manure Managers: How the Heck Do We Manage the Workplace Challenges of the Future?”

The interview highlights some of my thoughts on what is happening with the future of the workplace.

• “This next generation is completely different in terms of how they think. Kids today 15 and under coming into the workforce are not going to want to have a job, they’re not going to want to have a career path, they’re not going to want to work for a company. They are the ultimate entrepreneurs. You’re not going to be able to hire them. You’re going to be able to contract them at best.”
• “Everybody’s talking about the retirement of (Baby) Boomers. That’s one aspect of it. Everybody’s talking about how difficult it is to attract the next generation. And you’ve got all these employers running around and asking, how do we become the employer of choice and how do we make people like us? But I don’t think that’s the issue. The big issue is that skills are becoming extremely specialized. There’s so much knowledge happening and so much stuff happening so fast. I’ve got a certain set of skills, but increasingly, those skills become narrower and narrower.”
• “…the concept of nine-to-five will have just absolutely disappeared. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to become a nation of home offices, but I think there will be a lot more choices that people will be making as to where and how and when they’re going to be doing the work and what constitutes the organization. You talk to senior managers and CEOs today and they talk about how they have to become more collaborative and team oriented. I think the generation of 15- to 20-year-olds just look at that talk and go, ‘duh.’ They say: ‘We do that, we’re on instant messaging, we’ve got webcams, we’re just collaborative by nature and we don’t give a heck whether we’re in the same room or not. We know how to work cross-country, around the world, globally and how to form instant teams. We come together to form some function, then disband and move on to the next thing because we’re the generation that gets bored so darned easily.’ I think they’re just going to shake up the concept of the workplace to a huge degree. The reason that hasn’t happened is because of simple Boomer resistance to change.”

You can read the full interview here.

From my most recent ProfitGuide article: “If your company culture doesn’t embrace agility, innovation and flawless execution, you could be headed for trouble.”

It’s interesting to see that BusinessWeek ran this theme as a cover story last week; I’ve had it as the main focus of much of what I’ve been advising my clients through the last five years!

You can read the full article here:

I recently keynoted the Furniture Today 2005 Leadership conference in Miami. This article reports on my talk.

Futurist: Changes will present new opportunities
Furniture Today, 12/14/2005 .

MIAMI — If you aren’t comfortable with change, you probably won’t like Jim Carroll’s vision of the future.

“Everything is changing so fast, you don’t know what is going to happen next,” he told the Furniture/Today Leadership Conference here. “Volatility is the new normal.”

Carroll should know. The “futurist” has observed trends for nearly 20 years. He can’t predict exactly what will happen, but understands how quickly things are changing and how that could affect business.

Technology and ease of communication are among the key factors influencing the spread of new ideas and products. For instance, there are now 19 million known chemical substances, he said. Thanks to online capabilities that allow scientists to share information quickly, this number is expected to grow to 80 million by 2025 and 5 billion by 2100.

Carroll cited a study that said 65% of today’s preschool children will work in jobs that don’t exist now. And half of what students learn in their freshman year about science and technology is obsolete by their senior year.

Such rapid change, he said, will have broad impact on the furniture industry. “The way ideas are generated has changed in a fundamental way,” he said. “All ideas are shared faster than ever before, and that is what is impacting your industry.”

Carroll wants people to embrace change, the future and the opportunities they present. “Most people approach the future as something to be feared,” he said. “To me, the future is full of opportunity.”

Aging baby boomers are one opportunity as they seek home health care service, a factor that will influence the type of furniture in peoples’ homes, he said.

“Dealing with the future with the right mindset is critical,” Carroll said. “When we are bemoaning the challenges, we need to think of the next waves of opportunity.”

He urged his audience to better understand customers in the context of a rapidly changing world. Customer expectations and needs are changing rapidly, and many are more demanding, he said, and brand or product loyalty “tends to go out the window with customer empowerment.” Also, customers view more and more products as commodities, which influences buying decisions.

He advised furniture companies to remain focused on core areas such as style, selection and service to best serve a demanding customer, and suggested they partner with industries such as electronics and health care to deliver in all three areas.

Most importantly, Carroll urged his listeners to keep an open mind to what is happening around them and the possibilities that presents for their businesses.

“You can become your own futurists,” he said. “You can discover your own trends simply by looking at what’s happening in the world.”