Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

Here’s an article that just ran that offers some of my thoughts on what’s up with the global meeting and events industry.

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Convene Magazine, January 2010
by Maureen Littlejohn

During 2009, many organizations battened down the hatches and waited for the recession to pass. As we enter the new year – and a new decade – the time for waiting is over. It’s the organizations that keep their eyes peeled for budding opportunities – and are prepared to pounce on them – that will succeed. Convene asked futurist and trends and innovation expert Jim Carroll to identify five emerging megatrends of particular interest to the meetings industry.

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I had quite a few financial oriented keynotes through the last year, for banks, mortgage groups, credit unions and others. If there was a key theme as to the insight my clients were seeking, it was this: what are the BIG trends that are going to impact us (I’m a futurist), and what do we need to do about it (I specialize in insight on what global leaders are doing in the area of innovation.)

The scope of some of these engagements is pretty significant; Diners’ Club featured me as the opening speaker for their global franchise conference; my focus was on the big trends that would impact the organization into the future.

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Here’s a quick quote from a year end article that ran in Computer Dealer News:

CDN: How is the recession changing the way we do business?

Jim Carroll: “There’s a realization that we need to get to market faster, because consumer trends are happening faster, and IT plays a big role. If we don’t have a solid infrastructure, if we can’t collaborate, then we can’t push ideas through the organization faster.

And if you think about the rollout of IT, it’s becoming more critical than ever before – it’s the lifeblood by which we develop this ability to act fast.

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ENTREPENEURS: Recessions provide ‘tremendous opportunities,’ trends expert says

London Free Press, May 28, 2009

Recession or not, the future belongs to companies willing to adapt to rapid change, Jim Carroll, a trends and innovation expert, said in London yesterday.

Jim Carroll, speaking at the TechAlliance annual meeting yesterday, says smart businesses must look past the recession.

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I was interviewed some time last month by FoodProcessing.com – this was related to their discovery of the keynote I did for the Readers Digest / EveryDay with Rachel Ray team food industry summit in New York last fall.

They ran a short article, “March of the New Machines: The Future of Food Processing” — and ran my comment on what I’ve seen in terms of CEO’s who have relentless focus on growth. Many of my recent keynotes — several in Las Vegas, Austin, Miami and New York — have been focused on how to maintain  growth strategies during an economic contraction.

Here’s an extract from the interview. Some good food for thought on the need to be RELENTLESS on the future and opportunities.

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I’m quoted in a Reuters article that has run in the Washington Post, Globe and Mail, and the Sydney MX among a few, that comments on the recent woes of Starbuck’s.

Titled “Not everyone’s crying in their lattes for Starbucks; There’s a schadenfreude among some coffee drinkers who think the java giant got too big too fast,” the article looks at how some people seem to be enjoying Starbucks in its Icarus moment.

My comments?

The schadenfreude of coffee drinkers drawing satisfaction from another’s misfortune is part of the popular culture that enjoys the downfall of companies or celebrities, said Jim Carroll, a Mississauga-based trends and innovation expert.

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The April issue of the Advertiser magazine (“The Voice of the Marketing Community”) from the Association of National Advertisers features an article, “Five Secrets for Creating a Culture of Innovation.”

I’m quoted in the article with two key observations, on the issue of “taking risks and learning from them.” My concerns?

• “…he sees too much ‘bandwagon innovation” in marketing these days. Consider the rush by brands to launch viral videos on YouTube. ‘That’s not what innovation is … it’s admitting that everything we do — how we are marketing to the customer, what the brand means to the customer, and what we do to update uniqueness and freshness of brand — has to constantly change because everything around us is constantly changing.”
• I also talk to the importance of taking risks: “CMO’s who aren’t afraid to focus on ‘experiential capital’, as Carroll calls it, or encourage innovative thinking by taking calculated risks, regardless of the outcome, stand a better chance of being successful over the long run.

It’s a good article: there’s no doubt that the high velocity economy results in rapid change of consumer brand perceptions. Leading edge marketers work hard to beef up their innovation capabilities simply in order to keep up with consumers who are charging forward at a furious pace!

More information

• Read What a great idea!
• Why bandwagon innovation doesn’t work
• Is your brand from the olden days?

Career issues are hot! And one of my favorite ways to open a keynote or executive session is by quoting from an Australian study, which indicated that sixty-five percent of the kids who are in preschool today will work in jobs or careers that don’t yet exist.

I passionately believe this to be true: and I’ve seen the trend occurring in countless professions and industries.

This week, I keynoted a Career Day event at Capitol One in Richmond, Virginia ; the focus was on the rapid emergence of new careers, and the rapid evolution of existing skills. My message, in looking at the future career opportunities, was that there’s nothing but upside, as long as people keep reinventing their skill set.

The topic of the future of careers is a big one these days; I’m being called into many organizations and events to talk about the issue, particularly in the context of recent economic trends. Some of these events have been local economic development conferences. In one talk in January, I spoke to an audience of executives and educators in an auto-sector city ; a group of people caught up in the throes of economic restructuring and turmoil.

Talk about an audience in the midst of challenge! Yet when you are in that type of economic bubble, it can be hard to see the future career opportunities that do exist. That’s why I didn’t focus on the short term economic turmoil, but instead, on the real, practical trends that are defining the careers of tomorrow.

Many sectors of the global economy: and in particular, the manufacturing and financial sectors, are being hit hardest by the US recession, the sub-prime meltdown, and global competition.

The auto-town event got covered in the local paper: and the story ended up being reprinted throughout the Canadian press, including in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal. One of the key observations I made in the article: “We have to figure out how we can continue to move up the knowledge ladder because there’s going to be a massive shortfall in specialized skills because of the rapid growth of knowledge.”

That’s an important issue to think about, and the article is well worth a read.

More information:

• Read Knowledge Explosion Key to the Future
• Read Global Economic Trends: An Interview with Jim Carroll
• The reality of future trends: grab the What Comes Next trends overview

Credit Suisse, headquartered in Zurich, is global financial powerhouse operating in 50 countries; 48,000+ employees, assets of $75 billion US, and net assets under management of $1.345 trillion.

They’ve just released their 2008 Bulletin magazine, a publication provided to key investment banking, private banking and asset management clients worldwide.

They’ve include a fairly lengthy Q&A with me, in an article titled Success Comes to Those Who Evolve, in which they wanted wide-ranging views on the word “growth.” It came out well: my key message has always been that we must always link the concept of innovation to rapidly emerging trends in order to constantly change what we do — often simply to keep up, or attain competitive advantage.

Here’s the key point: So what’s the recipe to kick-start innovative thinking? I think it’s about having your entire organization understand everybody is responsible for constantly figuring out how they need to change to keep up with the rapidly changing world. They need leadership that supports and encourages them to be open and share ideas, and that leadership needs to hammer home that message on a regular basis.“

More information

• Read: Success Comes to Those Who Evolve

Jim Carroll is frequently approached by global news organizations to comment on economic issues. He was recently interviewed by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) for his perspective on how the Canadian economy will be impacted by recent global events. This document summarizes key components of the interview.

The interview includes a variety of topics, including this one: How can an economic region discover opportunity? From Jim’s perspective, it’s through skills transformation. He recently keynoted a community economic development summit in an auto-industry dependent city. He comments about the challenges that exist in the manufacturing sector: and how some regions are turning challenge into opportunity.

You’ll also find a news report that ran in newspapers across Canada after this economic development conference; you’ll find some unique views on the types of careers that are emerging in the future.

More information

• Read: Which Way Forward: An Economic Interview with Jim Carroll
• Read the news cover: “Knowledge Explosion Key to the Future”

The business of speaking has evolved dramatically in the last five years — have you noticed?

It used to be event planners would spend quite a bit of time planning for next years annual conference. A committee would begin a slow, careful, and routine process of planning a program agenda, which would include finding a celebrity speaker or two to fill the agenda. Year in, year out, they’d carefully follow the same old process. Often, they’d end up with the same old conference.

Today, of course, faster is the new fast, and we’re witnessing a different role for both the speakers and the bureaus who represent them. Let’s call it “strategic knowledge delivery” — we’re helping organizations to get the right knowledge in the right place, at the right time, for the right purpose. Events have evolved from, well, events, to critical get-togethers that help a company, association or organization adapt to sudden new realities.

Today, a company might find itself in the midst of a rapid product launch — after all, product lifecycles are collapsing. (Just look at your iPod, and think of the rapid changes occurring in the consumer electronics industry!) There’s now a new requirement for fast knowledge — they need to pull together their sales force quickly, update them on the forthcoming marketing plans and sales strategy, and give them a strong motivational push out the door. They call a speakers bureau, and quickly line up a retail expert, an expert on selling strategies, and a top motivational speaker to boot.

Oh — and they need these people in two weeks!

That’s the new reality of the speaking business today. It has now evolved into a highly specialized industry, in which knowledge-brokers (formerly known as “speakers bureaus”) provide their highly specialized insight into who-knows-what, to provide their clients with the key knowledge-experts that they need. By doing so, they’re helping the client to quickly solve new business challenges, adapt to new markets, stay competitive, and deal with the reality of all the circumstances that come with our fast-paced world of today.

Every organization on the planet today is working hard to ensure that it can “keep-up.” I’ve certainly witnessed the trend first hand through the last five years, doing exactly this type of thing with some of the largest organizations in the world.

When you end up advising companies like Disney as to how to be creative, you get a different perspective of the world. Disney, for all of its vaunted reputation as a cauldron of creative genius, is like every other organization out there: it finds itself immersed in a whirlwind of rapid change, whether with its’ business model, product line, or rapidly changing consumer demand. (Anyone with pre-teen kids has seen the huge and sudden take-off of the hit High School Musical, or the explosive growth of the Hanna Montanna franchise, knows what I am talking about!)

Like any organization, Disney is constantly working to ensure that they can remain on top, by understanding the trends that will continue to impact them, and by ensuring they keep their creative spark fresh by seeking to learn what other innovative organizations are doing. For Disney, it’s almost as if they are beyond faster-is-the-new-fast : they’re in an industry in which tomorrow is simply today’s urgent problem. And that’s why they call in outside experts — someone like me.

The changes in the speaking industry — and the role that bureaus and speakers play — mirror the changes occurring in the fast paced world of business today. It’s all about just-in-time knowledge delivery. Understand that, and you’ll understand the context of the solutions that this industry and speakers bureaus can provide you.

We’ve got a cover, and have the first draft of my newest book in for design/edit.

Titled Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast takes a look at

• the factors that place us in a high-velocity economy
• the core innovative capabilties that we must put in place to turn rapid change into opportunity
• the key issue of how skills access and talent access will be critical to future success
• concrete ideas for becoming a more innovative, agile organization.

We’re targetting late fall for release.

The week before last, I taped an appearance with CNBC on an upcoming prime time five part show, “The Business of Innovation,” hosted by Maria Bartiromo.

The show is set to aiir, as I understand it, March 4, at 9PM EST, and again at midnight. It will air in Europe and Asia subsequent to that.  I was part of a three person “panel of innovation experts” for the third part of the show. The first segments featured the insight of such folks as Vinod Khosla co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Cathleen Black, President of Hearst Magazines, and Arkadi Kuhlmann, CEO of ING Direct.

After thinking about it for a a while, my thoughts that have resulted from doing the show are this:

• when it comes to innovation, there too many people limit their thinking to innovation as being ‘all about new product’
• some people think that only ‘special people’ with ‘special skills’ can “do innovation.”
• worse yet, some people who are “innovators” actually have attitudes that would, from my humble perspective, dissuade any common folk from even thinking about innovation
• the high velocity economy demands that every person in every organization be as innovative as heck

There’s sort of a disconnect here, isn’t there?

I told my wife after the taping that I’ll either end up looking like a complete idiot, or a genius, or perhaps an idiotic genius. It will be interesting to watch.

The phrase that formed in my mind, both during and after the show, are that there are too many “innovation elitists” out there. And that’s just quite wrong: I’ve often explained that innovation of any sort is set to fail, as soon as we make it special.

In any event, I’m sure that I’ll be posting more on my thoughts on this closer to air date.

An article on my perspectives on the future of the career has run in a wide variety of papers across the country.

The full article can be found here in Adobe Acrobat format.

Some of my key observations, as quoted within the article:

• Recognizing the disappearance of a one-job career, workers will need to be flexible, capable of instantly adapting to new processes and able to absorb stunning amounts of new information and knowledge…..
• the next generation of workers will be far different than any which has gone before. They will be far more entrepreneurial because many already think self-employment is more secure than a corporate job.
• one segment of the workforce will be expected to be far more specialized to deal with this explosion of new information
• others will be expected to be flexible enough to shift between careers and jobs
• there will also be those who help people deal with the complexities of everyday life and their workplace.

The latter point links to the trend I’ve identified of the emergence of complexity partners, brand new careers (or entire organizations) which simply involve the management of complexity. [ watch the video ]

The article caught my comments on this particular trend:

• “One of the hot new jobs created by the fact that medical knowledge is doubling every eight years is the “hospitalist” — someone who not only helps patients navigate their way through the medical system ……
• While the term didn’t exist before 1996, there are now more than 10,000 hospitalists in the United States.”

All of these observations tie into my Trends Analysis, “10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills,” posted a few weeks back, and also available here. There are massive changes underway within the global workforce, which makes talent, not money, the new corporate battlefront.

This press release came out mid-August while I was off busy building sandcastles….

Trend Expert Will Keynote SGMA Conference; (3:15) Today’s teens and pre-teens live, breathe, learn, teach, talk, listen, create, and innovate through a widely networked world that facilitates feedback so quickly that it’s rapidly changing how this generation will expect results and satisfaction from new products. Those are the preliminary thoughts of futurist and trends expert Jim Carroll who refers to today’s teens and pre-teens as “GenConnect.”

Carroll will focus on “GenConnect” when he delivers a keynote speech, “The Velocity of Change,” at SGMA’s Sports + Technology Convergence this fall (October 24-26; Estancia Resort & Spa; La Jolla, CA).
Carroll estimates, partly from research and partly from the sociological observations of his own two young techies at home, that “GenConnect” is so wired and multi-tasked that it’s rapidly lowering their attention spans and dramatically raising their expectations for product performance.

For “GenConnect,” return on investment is all about the customer experience. As they become more technologically involved, their expectations for product innovations revolve around interactivity and connectivity. And as technology advances, their patience diminishes.

“GenConnect” is the beneficiary of super-fast, on-demand technology – and companies building products would do well to remember this. With this principle in mind, Carroll finds sporting goods a great place to capture the attention of this young consumer. According to Carroll, “every sport thing we know has become wired.”

It’s apparent that the sporting goods industry seems to have found many applications of technology in building a new user experience. From the integration of monitoring devices and athletic shoes comes smart feedback for fitness buffs. For a real thrill, Carroll points to the snowboard and ski industry. From Burton’s deal with Motorola for BlueTooth integration to on-board motion analysis to smart-goggles for maps/trail conditions to on-hill marketing opportunities through ski and snowboard connectivity, there’s “a lot going on with sticks and planks,” noted Carroll.

Jim will address The Velocity of Change and the keys to more agile innovation in the product lifecycle process.

Wow! Where did May go?

I had keynotes for a huge number of different companies and associations, ranging from appraisers to broadcasters to motor vehicle dealers ….

Somewhere along the way, I did an interview on the national news for Denmarks’s TV2 on the issue of how companies might survive the global low cost economy.

There’s a short snippet of the interview you can watch online.

More coverage, from Communications Engineering magazine, on my SCTE keynote last month.

“If you think your customers are a challenge now, wait until 2010, said futurist and ET keynoter Jim Carroll at Wednesday’s opening session.

Tomorrow’s customers will be “far more demanding, will expect more from you, will be constantly pushing you, and will have far less loyalty to you as a brand,” Carroll predicted.

That’s because the customers of 2010 are today’s youth – many of whom don’t remember film cameras, and who view “television” as video that comes to them in the car, on the laptop, or on the back of the airplane seat.

“By 2020, we’ll be witnessing the retirement of the change-averse,” Carroll said, referring to baby-boomer and older generations. “What will emerge into purchasing power, and into your customer base, is this generation that thinks differently, is wired differently.”

As for products and services, Carroll frequently referenced last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as an example of “furiously rapid rates of change.” Product lifecycles, such as those traditionally taught in marketing courses,” are fundamentally disappearing,” he said.

To compete, cable needs to focus on being agile. “Re-skilling the folks who are instrumental in your architecture is just critical,” he said.

I don’t think the current corporate structure will last 20 years; it might be difficult to see it lasting even 10 years. In the meantime, companies are trying all kinds of band-aid solutions to try to attract and retain the first Internet-generation. Over at The Repository of Canton, Ohio, in an article about unique workplaces, I’m quoted as saying: “Companies are struggling to figure out: OK, what do we need to do to attract and retain and create a work environment for this generation who is just so totally unique and different and rejects 9-to-5 and rejects the concept of a cubicle office and completely rejects all the traditional corporate structure that we’ve had in place for so long.”

Read the full article Is Your Work Like This?

Yet more coverage of my keynote for the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers in Tampa last month:

“In his breathless keynote address kicking off the conference, Carroll warned cable officials against making the same kinds of mistakes that the music industry made when it fought tooth-and-nail against unauthorized MP3 downloads from the Internet. Instead, Carroll called on cable executives to embrace such new products and services as portable media players, peer-to-peer file-sharing and Internet-delivered telephony. Contending that “the geeks will always win because they can always rewrite the code,” he urged cable officials to view the new technologies as market opportunities to be exploited rather than competitive threats to be squashed.

Read the full article over at the Cable Digital News site

Based on the email response and media coverage, my keynote at the SCTE in Tampa yesterday caused a bit of a buzz. There’s an article from MultiChannel News (see below) that takes a look at my remarks.

A key message seems to be sticking: cable companies should not go to war with their customers.

Recently, exectives in some cable companies have suggested that they should be able to put a speed cap on emerging Internet services such as VoIP. Dumb: those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it. Look at what this strategy did for music companies.

No industry, including any company in telecom, entertainment, broadcast or tech, should choose to do battle with their customers. It’s a losing strategy. Plain and simple.

Read the MultiChannel report :

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