Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

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.

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 :

Futurist: Cable Needs ‘Agility’
MultiChannel News
——————————————————————————–

By Matt Stump 1/11/2006 5:27:00 PM, Tampa, Fla. –

Author and futurist Jim Carroll urged engineers at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ Emerging Technologies conference here to watch consumer behavior in order to determine the future direction of cable-technology implementation.

Whether telcos or cable will win market share in the future, he said, is the wrong question. Rather: How well will cable adapt and deliver platforms and services consumer want?

“You need to develop agility,” Carroll — author of What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward-Thinking Innovation (Oblio Press, 2004) — told an audience. “Innovation and invention has moved from the labs to the collective,” he added, citing consumer usage of portable music, video players and digital cameras.

He urged cable companies not to make the mistake the music industry did and go to war with their own consumers over how they obtain content.

“Customers will be pushing you for more choice,” he said, adding that future generations will want access to their video and audio content on many different devices. “TV is not a single-source medium,” he said. “There are multiple ubiquitous devices.”

Cable can provide those connections and help consumers to move content from one device to another, he added. At the same time, “the complexity of what you’re dealing with is increasing. No one cable engineer can know everything,” he said.

Carroll urged cable companies to develop partners for new and different technologies, as several top operators have with their recent joint venture with Sprint Nextel Corp. for wireless services.

Here’s a quickl list of what I think were some of the best posts to this often sporadic blog through the year.

1. Change: Deal with it: this little fellow still cracks me up.
   
2. The infinite idea loop: the future is faster. Even Fortune covered this posting. A compelling 3 minute watch, if you really want to understand how the future is evolving.
   
3. The Masters of Business Imagination Manifesto: FastCompany picked up on my MBI Manifesto found in this post. It got so much attention, it has become the focus of my next book, due out in 2006.
   
4. It’s in to be out!”: Too much fun earlier this year when I met with the editors of O (Oprah Magazine), Elle, Family Circle, Parenting, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Working Mother, American Baby, Soap Opera Weekly, Woman’s Day, Glamor, Teen Vogue, Seventeen, Good Housekeeing, Family Circle and about 40 other national trade magazines, in New York City! Covering off my list of outdoor trends…..on behalf of a major client.
   
5. Frogs in Texas reviews: After all that work in bringing out a new book, it gets some great reviews and momentum throughout 2005.
   
6. The Tiniest Warrior of All: My wife and I published, through out publishing company Oblio Press, a very important, powerful and emotional book.
   
7. 10 Signs You’ve Got an Innovation Dysfunction: How can you tell if you’ve got problems? Read the list …. Fortune covered this one.
   
8. Creativity, trends and innovation in retail, packaging and consumer goods …: I’ve done a huge number of talks in almost every industry and profession in the last decade, talking as a futurist about future trends. I’ve got a huge number of trends floating around in my head and in my materials, and I’m trying to use the blog to capture alot of them after a major keynote. This post is a good example.
   
9. “The concept of going to school for knowledge is kind of quaint…”: A quick article that stirred up a fair bit of controversy. I don’t believe anything I said here to be untrue.
   
10. 10 More Ways to Instill Innovation: A followup to the innovation dysfunction post above.

Fortune Magazine’s Business Innovation blog linked to my “infinite idea loop” video clip, and the traffic has been pretty heavy from right around the world.

They had this to say of my clip on how innovation has forever changed in the context of what I call “the infinite idea loop: “It’s hard to discuss all of these trends succinctly within a brief 3-minute period, but Jim does a great job – it was like watching a motivational speaker up on stage exhorting companies to embrace open collaboration and global connectivity.”

Cool — and thank you for the compliment!

The Globe & Mail published my article on “innovation killers” today — “ …in a world of rapid and constant change, many people still manage to think that they can get away with routine. That’s why I’d suggest you undertake an “attitude inventory” during your next staff, board or executive meeting.”[ Read the article ]

At 6:15am this morning, I finally started writing my book, “What I Learned From Frogs in Texas: Simple Steps to Thrive in a World of Constant Change and Innovation.” I’m mostly off for the summer; I have a keynote at Meetings World in New York next week, but will devote the rest of my time to both downtime, and to getting this book written.

In today’s Globe: “Jim Carroll was stunned when Rogers Cable told him it had received a complaint that a hacker was using his Internet address.” (PDF)

I wrote about this situation earlier here. And a year ago, my Profit magazine column noted that there were some big board/insurance issues emerging.

An upcoming column of mine notes that infrastructure issues are probably the next corporate Sarbanes-Oxley

A year ago this month, my Profit article noted that “unfortunately, most entrepreneurs continue to ignore computer security shortfalls that leave them vulnerable to system crashes, hacker attacks, virus outbreaks and even internal sabotage. My point? Companies better pay attention to security issues, or they’ll find things getting increasingly ugly.

Fast forward a year. Wow! Today I got an e-mail from Rogers Communications — they’re my high speed provider — notifying me that an attempt had been made to break into a computer — and that the attempt came from my Internet address.

Whoah! Obviously, I don’t spend my time hanging around trying to hack into systems; indeed, I’ve long been warning companies about the risks of neglecting security.

Not only that, but through the years, I’ve taken the time to understand security from both a high-level and very-technical level. Given the complexity of my home system, I don’ take security lightly.

Needless to say, the message struck my immediate interest … and so I sent it on to the head of PR for Rogers, asking what’s up!

A short time later, the answer came back — it looked like my Web server on my inbound connection, which I use to access e-mail while on the road, had been compromised — it appeared on a list of “public proxy servers” on several Russian sites. Sure enough — I’ve been hacked…..

I’m digging into it further, and I’m really none too amused. What this involves is less any type of sophisticated “hacking’ and more simple negligence on my part – it looks like someone took advantage of what is known as an “open proxy server” on a Web server I run here. That allowed people to travel to other Web sites anonymously, using my Web server as the launch point. I could have sworn I took the time to ensure that all such features were turned off … but somehow did not.

Needless to say, there was all kinds of nefarious activity underway, I’m red in the face, and there are some big lessons learned.

I imagine I’ll have quite a bit to say about this — quite a bit more to learn — quite a few articles to write — and quite a bit of guidance for those who might be overly confident about their own security!

Harrumphh!

I’m featured on the cover of this month’s Small Market Meetings magazine, reporting on my comments in my keynote at the MPI MidAmerica session last March in Cincinatti. My belief? Based on the rapid rate of change and innovation in the economy, “there’s an even greater need than ever to bring people together, to share the passion, and build relationships.” You can read the article online. (PDF, 800k)

I’ve been added as a panelist for the opening general session for Meeting World 2004 one of the world’s premiere meeting industry events — in July in New York City. I’m honored to participate on a panel with the well-known experts Joan Eisenstodt, Laila Rach and one other panelist to be named, focusing on the theme of “Creating meetings in a changing world.”

The session description: “The way meetings are present is a reflection of a society we live in. In this highly facilitated discussion, we’ll explore how shifting demographic, generational, multicultural and gender trends, as well as an aging population, are influencing the needs and wants of meeting attendees.”

I’ve long been a proponent of the view that a world of changing complexity, rapid innovation and change, new business models, and everything else, is leading to an increase in the need for just-in-time-knowledge, just-in-time-training, and just-in-time-strategy application — and that corporate and association meetings and events are a key cornerstone by which organizations can prepare themselves for the future.

Should be a fun, and fascinating panel!

Check out the conference site and learn more. [ details ]

In several keynotes last week, I noted how everyone is now faced with a life of constant and regular career change. Today I’m writing an article about why many people need to ensure they make a transition with their job and career from one that is tactical to one that is strategic — in order to survive the current transformation of the global workforce.

Career change today is a reality — in my case, I’m probably on my 4th or 5th career, and likely have a few more to go!

The funny thing: when I spoke to the BBC in London Friday, I noted that in high school, my plan was to become a DJ! I was the station manager for CKWR, our high school radio station. That plan went no where once the idealism of being a teenager was replaced with the reality of university life and a looming career.

At the opening of my talk, I showed a scan from my high school year book of the radio station team. And that’s me — the long haired fellow above!

I’m quoted in a ComputerWorld artilce this week, Blogs Bubble Into Business. The points I raise were discussed in an earlier article I wrote about the topic. As I comment in ComputerWorld, “….everyone out there is too darned terrified to try anything new right now…” which is a shame, because weblog software can have a big impact in terms of marketing, sales and customer support and loyalty. [ link ]

You can catch a clip with me on the CBC National Business show talking about Voice-over-IP and what it means. Interestingly enough, this call was done through an Internet phone, using the Vonage service. here, in RealAudio format. [ link ]

I’m quoted in the Edmonton Journal today in an article about an innovative, new, cooperative office space. No link to the full article yet, but I’m working on it.

Jim Carroll, a futurist, agrees that workplace co-operatives like Digital North are a trend likely to continue. “Young people in particular don’t want to work in the big, standard, cubicle-based world. They had their taste of cool office spaces during the dot-com years and they don’t want to go back.”

While executive suites, mobile offices and rent-an-office have been around for years, they are “boring as sin,” says Carroll. These spaces lack character and the ability to individualize to your needs and tastes.

Of course, my situation is unique, having worked in a home office for 14 years.

See also my 10 Rules for Working at Home.