Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

This is a long post.

Way back in 1997, I wrote a book called “Surviving the Information Age.” It’s now out of print, but a few copies are still at Amazon.

The book took a long look at the trends that would impact our future. I dug it out again today when CNN ran an article, “Say goodbye to full time jobs without benefits“, decrying the fact that with the recession coming to an end, we were seeing more jobs that were contract oriented rather than full time. Reading the article, it seems they see this as a shocking new trend.

D’uh! What planet are these people on. Countless people have been talking and writing about the significant structural change occurring in hiring practices. I’ve been speaking about it since 1987 when the New York Times wrote an editorial entitled “Tomorrow’s company won’t have walls.”

So in the spirit of going back in time, I offer up an extract from my Surviving the Information Age book, in which I wrote at length about the trend.

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I’ve been doing a tremendous number of small, intimate CEO level leadership meetings; I’ll work with the CEO or other senior management team member to pull together a talk that will highlight the key opportunities for growth through innovation within an industry.

I often point out that there are significant innovation and revenue growth opportunities when an organization concentrates on mastering the rapid emergence of new knowledge within a specific sector.

Take the world of construction; I’ve recently spoken at quite a few building management, construction and real estate conferences, and have focused on the fact that we are now witnessing very fast knowledge exponentiation with “green” design concepts.

What’s happening is that we are seeing:

• the rapid emergence of new building methodologies, design concepts, materials, eco-design principles, all of which have the goal of reducing the overall energy footprint of the building, or reducing its environmental impact
• the result is that green building methodology is continuing to evolve at a furious pace
• there is so much new knowledge emerging that a new profession of “energy engineers” is beginning to emerge
• their skill and role is simply to keep on top of furious rates of change in terms of new energy management solutions within the building and construction sector
• developments are occurring so quickly that these individuals possess three key skills: how to rapidly ingest new knowledge and new ideas; awareness of where this new knowledge is emerging; and the ability to tap into other specialized skill sets and form rapid skills partnerships in order to tackle growth opportunities

The result is the emergence of a new career of “green engineers” who simply know where to find all the new knowledge and expertise that is appearing out there!

This is pretty significant stuff: after all, some 40% of total US energy consumption can be attributed to operating buildings: the heat, light, cooling, hot water and other systems. Another 8% of energy use is related to the materials used. All the SUV’s in North America? Three percent!

Clearly, there are BIG opportunities for growth through innovation, through the mastery of fast knowledge.

That’s why I always challenge a CEO and senior management team to challenge themselves with workforce innovation.

That involves innovation with different workplace policies, career paths, workforce structure, experiential oriented job descriptions, skills banks for specialized skills, and a rapid focus on growth through the rapid emergence of new knowledge within that workforce.

Early in December, I was contacted by an AP reporter who was doing a story on the key trends that would impact the economy into the future.

A brief part of my comments appeared in an article, “Crystal ball for 2010 sees changes in work, home“, that appears to have run in several hundred newspapers and Web sites over the last few weeks.

The key trend they used in this article was this:

Further adding to a nomadic work force: Many companies will look to hire employees on a contract basis, avoiding the risks and costs of full-time staff, said Jim Carroll, futurist, trends and innovations expert and author of “Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast “.

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A brief video clip on just how different our workforce is set to become ; from a keynote in Salt Lake City in the autumn.

I’ve been speaking about the new challenges of the new workforce for some time; some previous blog posts and articles are below.

• Blog post: Here We are Now, Entertain Us
• Related article: Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude!
• Keynote topic: What’s Happening with Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills Agility
• Critical Trends Analysis: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills

The feedback on my Salt Lake City keynote for the National Recreation and Parks Association continues; earlier in this story, I had a blog entry from a message from someone at the event thanking me for “changing lives.”

The Past President of the NRPA has weighed in with an editorial in Perspectives, the NRPA’s national magazine. Headlined “Anticipating the Future,” Jodie Adams has this to say (excerpted).

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Way back in 1987, I was immersed in many of the early networking technologies which would one day form the Internet. I was convinced that we were at the edge of a transformative time, and that the emerging global network would have a profound impact on our world — politics, the structure of organizations and jobs.

I remember being stunned when I read an editorial in the New York Times that October, which forever shaped my view of the future.

The article essentially predicted a future in which organizations would become smaller, grow and contract as needs arise, and become something fundamentally different.

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I’m in Vancouver, about to deliver a keynote to a global professional services firm, with the working title, “Extreme Skills Specialization: What Comes Next with Global Talent, Global Organizations?”

The working description goes like this: “The future of every career is either extremely specialized, or
massively general. Most professions are fragmenting into dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of specialities. Someone needs to understand all this, and help organizations tap into narrow bands of knowledge.”

This is a major trend, and perhaps one of the defining trends of the next 10 years. Here’s how I’m presenting the challenges to my audience today:

• the ability to assist your clients with high-velocity change will be a key success factor

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My June is shaping up to be a tremendously busy month. Based on the bookings that are in, it’s clear that innovation continues to be at the top of the CEO agenda, despite some economic challenges.

In most of my upcoming keynotes, I’ll be spending time putting into perspective how executives should be thinking about future trends within their industry, and will take a look at the innovative strategies they might pursue.

Each of these talks is pretty tightly focused; I’ll be zipping from the insurance industry to optometry; from the future of global wealth management to high-velocity innovation in the banking sector; from opportunities in dealing with the new consumer 2.0 mindset, to how massive skills specialization will affect the world economy in the future. There’s been a tremendous amount of research underway as I prepare for each session; most of these talks get pretty darned specific in terms of industry issues.

Some of the unique topics that are unfolding include:

• “the new risk” : a keynote for the US Association of Actuaries that will take a look at how the insurance industry will the rapid emergence of new risk, and the impact of the “new analytics” on the global economy.
• “the new market” : how can a leading manufacturer transition to a market where it is not competing on price, but on brand, quality, image and value : in other words, “what do they do after the world is flat?”
• “the new customer” — how do we sell to the new 2.0 consumer, in this era of the wired-up-no-attention-span Gen-Connect demographic? The average consumer scans 12 feet of shelf space per second. What innovations do we need to think about when it comes to selling today?
• “the new investor“: Dubai and Singapore have “money-velocity.” Where is the investment world going, and how does a wealth management firm innovate to stay at the leading edge?
• “the new workforce” : how does a major global professional services firm transition into a new world of micro-skills and knowledge niches?
• “the new agent” : what comes next for the insurance industry? This one is a a keynote and a workshop for about 200 senior executives from the insurance industry, on behalf of LOMA, a major global insurance group.
• “the new collaborative team“: how can a leading bank outpace, outlast and outperform the competition?

I’ll be posting observations from the road, as there are powerful innovation lessons to be learned and shared from each situation.

At a particular keynote last week, I met a number of senior executives who certainly agreed with my message – we need to constantly realign our company to the reality of change that surrounds it. That’s where innovation comes from. But they also also indicated that they found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapid change occurring all around them.

There’s been an increasing number of these individuals, and I’ve come to call them the Led Zeppelin refugees: they’re simply dazed by the changes occuring in the high velocty economy, and are confused about what to do next.

That’s why there’s such a good question that flows from this: just how do you become an organization that is focused on innovation?

One of the easiest methods is simply by identifying the obvious and the not-so-obvious trends that will impact your business or organization — and then taking the time to figure out what actions you must undertake to deal with those trends.

Ask yourself this question: are you prepared for what comes next in terms of your business? The likely answer is no: my experience is that many organizations still have a very short-term minded outlook. They’re caught in an innovation rut, simply doing day by day the same old things they’ve always been doing, day in day out. And they don’t really think about how their world is going to change.

That’s why you should undertake a “trend-and-innovation” audit of your organization: quite simply, figuring out what comes next, and what you need to do about it.

How can you do this? By asking yourself a series of questions:

• How quickly is our marketplace changing? How quickly might it change in the future? What’s the impact on what I sell, and how I sell it?
• How are our products changing? Willl they change faster in terms of features? Will support become easier, or more complex? Can we manage to operate in a faster market?
• Are our products moving upscale, or are they becoming commodities,such that you’ll be forced to compete on price? Can we do something so that there is more of a service element to our product?
• What new competitors are appearing, or might emerge in the future? Is the basic business model threatened? Is there more likelihood of direct outreach to the consumer rather than through an existing distributor/wholesaler network?
• What moves could we make to make sure we can remain competitive? You really must ask yourself some probing questions as you go through this process. You need to challenge yourself and think what might really be different in five years, in terms of what you sell, who you sell to, how you sell it, and who you are selling against.

What you need to do is ask yourself these tough questions, so that you’re thinking about where there might be new problems and new opportunities that will impact your business in the future, not just in terms of what you sell, but in terms of the structure that you use to get things done.

And therein lies the rub: I think a lot of organizations fail to do this type of simple analysis. There are too many who sit back and react to change instead of thinking: “ok we know some big change is coming what the heck are we going to do about it?” Think of it as forward-oriented innovation: it’s a simple concept, and one of the most important things you should be doing.

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

One of my latest columns focuses on what will likely be the corporate issue of 2008 – managing generational challenges in the workplace.

In the column, “Here we are now, entertain us,” I take a look at the unique attitudes that Gen-Connect is now starting to bring in to the workplace. There are several key observations from the article that are critical to understanding the future of the workforce:

• What is clear is that we are witnessing the death of the long-term career and corporate loyalty, which will soon be but a quaint memory from the previous century.
• I often tell the story of a young engineering graduate who turned down a job with an architectural firm because its 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work hours conflicted with the time he expected to be carving arcs into deep powder in the mountains. It’s a real attitude, and it’s already happening around us. The challenge, when such trends are so patently obvious, is trying to figure out what to do about it. And a good part of the solution will come through the transformation of rewards and remuneration.
• Gen-connect has very little patience, particularly when it comes to being rewarded for good work or significant effort. These youngsters are used to instant rewards: their Xbox/Wii video-game-oriented world has them accomplishing a goal, moving up a level, and earning some points or other valuable form of currency that helps them accumulate additional armour, weapons or whatever else is needed to accomplish the game’s next challenge.
• That’s why, at a recent conference, I framed the issue of rewards transformation to an audience of financial professionals this way: “Organizations that can attract, engage, retain and amuse an increasingly complex workforce will be the ones who find success in the rapidly evolving global economy.”
• Put the emphasis on the word amuse. Today’s Gen Y doesn’t, and tomorrow’s Gen-connect certainly won’t, have any patience whatsoever for slow and steady career paths.

Related postings:

Article: Here We are Now, Entertain Us

Related article: Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude!

Keynote topic: What’s Happening with Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills Agility

Critical Trends Analysis: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills

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

Take a look at this kid.

He’s your next employee. How are you going to recruit, retain, manage, interest and amuse this fellow? What’s your workforce going to look like in 2012, 2020, or beyond?

There’s quite a bit of focus on trends relating to the future of the organization — and organizations are seeing innovative strategies to cope with the world of high velocity change that we find ourselves in.

Last week I was the opening keynote speaker, and a panelist later in the day, for an offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firms. Tomorrow, I keynote a get-together of key clients of a multi-billion insurance/financial services company. A few months ago, I ran a Board of Directors/CEO level meeting on the issue for a major industrial company.

If you don’t have this issue figured out yet, you’d better start thinking about it in a hurry.

There are certain things we know for a fact that relate to the future of the organization.

• there is a huge amount of expertise walking out of the economy. In 2010, 3 people will leave the economy for every person that enters it; by 2012, 4. By 2016, 6 people will leave for every new worker that joins. Those are staggering realities.
• the current generation entering the workforce is completely rejecting the concept of a traditional career. More than 50% of young people in a US survey indicated they believe self-employment to be more secure than a full time job. They don’t want to work for big organizations. They’ll be nomadic, contingent workers, entrepreneurial and global.
• skills are fragmenting and specializing at a furious pace. Knowledge half-lives in most industries are compressing to a matter of just a few years. Knowledge extinction is real, and massive skills fragmentation is occurring at an extreme velocity. The result is that most organizations will find future failure will come from an inability to get specialized skills. A strategy that is focused on global access to extremely specialized skills will be a transformative factor for winning.

The whole issue is massive, and is one of the areas in which innovative thinking is needed now. It’s a CEO / Board level issue. It’s transformative. It’s urgent.

More information

• What’s Happening with Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills

• Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills

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.

I’m keynoting the annual IHRIM (International Human Resource Information Management) professional association in about an hour here in Houston, TX; I’ll have an audience of about 1,000 or so.

My talk today broadly revolves around the issue of “what’s happening with our workforce.” I’m taking the audience on a tour of the key drivers which impact organizations today, whether business or government,

• velocity: business is just plain fast, and our workforce must cope with that
• change capacity: there’s a big disconnect in how quickly some people can deal with rapid change compared to others
• idea instantaneity: we’re in a new world in which ideas or issues can quickly speed out of control, or work to our advantage
• knowledgeability: in which global insight is increasing at a furious pace, leading to ever larger pools of knowledge
• innovation opportunity: such rates of discovery lead to massive new opportunities with bringing new products and services to market
• idea discovery: our interconnected world now allows unique ideas to gain a global audience in a flash
• consumer spontaneity: the low attention span consumer is fleeting when it comes to loyalty to brand
• business intensity: operational excellence is the name of the game, given an economy which simply runs “fast”
• skills availability: all these trends that it is going to be more difficult to access skills

My key point for the audience: When we are thinking about deployment of skills , we must be thinking about:

• Attracting the right skills …… at the right time … for the right purpose
• Providing for business flexibility in a time of rapid change
• Establishing a constantly shifting, evolving “workforce on demand”
• Enabling this with sophisticated tools, infrastructure and skills access capabilities – managed by folks such as the IHRIM

These are issues I’ve covered extensively in my analysis, Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here

My latest CAMagazine column is out ; in it, I focus on the role that financial executives should be thinking about in the context of the massive rates of change occuring in the global financial economy.

My observations come from a talk and research I undertook for a global financial conference in Grand Cayman back in January.

In the article, I note that “….there is a subtle and distinct shift in the location of “global money,” due to oil wealth and the industrialization of Asia. A recent article in Barron’s suggested that there is now about $1 trillion in excess reserves in these two regions. The likely result is that while more of the world’s wealth moves away from North America and Europe and into these new economic centers, the skills will follow.”

I also go on to note that “a recent comment in Asian Banker in December 2006 is instructive of the impact of this trend, noting that in the future, “…outsourcing will become less about cost containment and more about accessing the best skills and expertise….”"

The issues are important, because it is all part of the increasingly complex war for talent occuring in every industry sector.

You can read the article

Last week, there was a common theme to my keynotes for the University of Oklahoma and for the national Blue Cross Blue Shield Association : “what’s happening with our workforce?”

There is an intense degree of interest amongst executives as to the extent of the looming skills shortage, how to retain and attract critical skill sets, and how to deal with the challenges of the next generation.

I’ve rolled this into an overall keynote topic: “What’s Happening With Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills Agility.” In these types of talks, I’ve been taking a look at a wide variety of trends:

• every organization is faced with an increasingly complex, restless, age-diverse disloyal, and highly specialized workforce — and a workforce that will have the longest life-span ever, from hyperactive 15 year olds to wizened, not-ready-to-quit 85 year olds.
• with the coming “end of retirement,” most companies will come to realize they’ll need a lot of telephones with big buttons for members the 70+ folks who are still a part of their workforce — and a lot of innovative workplace practices as well
• the arrival of “Gen-Connect” — the kids who have been wired with a mouse since birth — will lead to the question of whether “good luck” will be the only possible response to the question of “Managing Gen-Y.”
• this workplace weirdness will only be compounded by the ongoing rapid evolution of knowledge and skills, such that most organizations will find it impossible to find the highly specialized skills needed in the economy of the future
• The “War for Talent” will be the new competitive battleground, and organizations that can attract, engage, retain and amuse an increasingly complex workforce will be the ones who find success in the rapidly evolving global economy.
• in an era such as this, firms are faced with a future that requires a new form of human capital agility: the ability to deploy the right skills at the right time for the right purpose — regardless of where the skill might be required, or where the skill is sourced
• at the same time, organizations are faced with an increasingly global talent base, a reality that demands new forms of collaboration, insightful project management, and deep insight into the effective utilization of those skills. The way to the future is clear: the no longer about managing time: it’s about successful skills deployment

I’ve captured these thoughts on the workplace challenges of the future in a recent Trends Overview: 21st Unique Characteristics of 21st Centuries Skills, available here.

Given the number of calls that I receive, this is certainly one of the hottest topics for 2007!

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.

Here’s a trend to think about : Companies will soon be accessing needed skills from all generations: from bright, knowledge aggressive 15 year olds to active 80 year olds.

We are soon going to have the longest life-span economy that has ever existed. Preparing for that shift both culturally and organizationally will give companies a strong plan for dealing with the skills challenges of the future.

That’s but one trend I outline in my latest trends overview: “10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills.”

What people are witnessing right now in terms of the “skills crisis” is just the tip of the iceberg, and a key factor for future corporate success will come from how well the skills issue is managed. The war for talent in the 21st century is going multi-dimensional, because there are a variety of trends that are forever changing the nature, loyalty, accessibility, and half life of skills.

A big part of the battle will involve “human capital agility”: the ability to deploy the right skills at the right time for the right purpose — regardless of where the skill might be required, or where the skill is sourced.

As skills become more specialized, everyone will find that they need to draw upon an increasingly global talent base, a reality that will demand new forms of collaboration, rapid human capital and project management skills, and deep insight into the effective utilization of those skills.

That’s why skills management strategies that focus on agility, insight, and execution will be critical. I have a number of keynotes focusing on the issue of global skills, notably one high profile presentation in Grand Cayman in two weeks. More to come…..

Access the Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here

Everyone is talking about Gen-Y.

I’ve come to call the next generation, Gen-Connect. Their attitudes towards careers, which is very unique, is caught in this video clip.

As I posted previously in this blog, “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.”

Their attitudes are part of what is driving 10 very unique attributes of 21st century skills, which was captured in a blog post here.