What's happening with our workforce?

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!

CNBC : The Business of Innovation

The air date for the five part CNBC series, "The Business of Innovation," hosted by Maria Bartiromo, has finally been set: it will air March 4, at 9PM EST, and again at midnight. It will air in Europe and Asia subsequent to that.

I'm a featured guest expert on the show, chatting about what companies must do to instill a culture of innovation.

I've posted a brief video clip from the upcoming show that you can watch here.

Innovation and the future of education

What's happening with our worforce? That is increasingly the focus of many of my recent talks.
Yesterday I spoke to the staff and faculty of the University of Oklahoma College of Continuing Education / College of Liberal Studies.

The overall theme was "innovation in the world of high velocity education."

Broadly, my talk was based around one of my favorite quotes: that of educator Lewis Perelman: "Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century."

There's a lot of opportunity for innovation in any educational institution: innovating with the methodology of education upgrading, new knowledge opportunities, and innovation in the overall administration and delivery of education. Beyond that, there's the overall issue of ensuring that in a high-velocity world, educators are delivering the right knowledge at the right time for the right purpose.

To that end, I outlined what I believe to be the primary areas for innovation:

• the rapid emergence of new educational opportunities, with foundation knowledge, and with knowledge refreshment
  
• a need for constant change and upgrading of core skills
  
• more partnership opportunities due to complexity – as organizations offload knowledge refreshing / upgrading requirements
  
• greater specialization of knowledge topics – and bigger opportunities for academic centres to focus as world class leader in specific niches
  
• instant, just in time knowledge takes on a unique role and opportunity
  

There's more to be found in my list of "10 big trends for educators," and many of my assumptions as to where we are going in the world of education is based upon my listing of "10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills."

Instilling innovation with the "trends and innovation feedback loop"

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 to you immerse your-self in the developments occurring in the global innovation feedback loop, and provide for relent-less, 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 in-novation. 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.

Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility......

I'm doing a private conference call today with more than a hundred executives in the life sciences industry, on behalf of my client, SAP.

The theme, "Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage," drives directly from the key theme in my trends overview: Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care.

Together, the panel will discuss the challenges they face every business day in the high-velocity pharmaceutical industry, and how innovation plays a core role in how they approach to tackling the challenges and opportunities that exist. In the call, we'll talk to these executives as to what they have been doing within the pharmaceutical and health care industry to:

• Increase their agility and flexibility
  
• Forge innovative partnerships
  
• Achieve improved business visibility
  
• Pursue relentless customer-oriented innovation
  
• Establish forward-oriented leadership
  
• Leverage technology to meet your business objectives
  

Over the last few years, I've spent time with dozens of these types of panels with companies in every industry sector, and there is a huge amount of innovative insight that I've studied. In the case of today's panelists, they've discovered such unique areas for innovation in manufacturing/planning; streamlining the "chain of custody" process in manufacturing, and how they have provided for innovation in how they manage volume discounts. As one panelist noted, "we get a few big wins and a lot of small wins, but the small wins really add up!"

That's a key point about innovation: it isn't just about hitting home runs. You can be innovative as heck by hitting doubles, singles, and triples, and getting the runs in.

For further background, read Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care

What happens when light stops?

Well, for one thing, when light stops, velocity picks up!

A few weeks ago, I keynoted a crowd of 3,000 telecom professionals in Florida. One of the comments I made was this: when it comes to the velocity of change in the "big media universe," we can only expect that the bandwidth and computing power in our lives will become ever more plentiful, and ever faster, because scientists are figuring out how to slow light to a crawl.

That's important, because it migrates us from a world of "electronics based computing" to "photonics computing." The difference in speed, capacity, processing power and everything else will be simply staggering. Think optical-chips based on light, not today's model-T's based on electrons.

This trend will make the electronic computers of today look like Cro-Magnon tools compared to the optical computers of tomorrow.

Last week, I caught an article in which the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predicted that optical chips will be here within 5 years.

A year ago, at another telecom event in Florida, I made the then bold prediction that as scientists learn to stop light, we'll see bandwidth improvements of a huge degree. Some industry folks in the room were taken aback: it's kind of interesting to read the article that was printed at the time (found below.)

It's awful nice to see predictions of the past become mainstream quicker than you might have expected!

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Optical Futures: Another ET Look at Light
24 January 2006
CT's Pipeline

Among the many intriguing observations and reports shared by the SCTE Conference on Emerging Technologies keynoter Jim Carroll in Tampa two weeks ago was the progress that optical researchers were making on the question of how to slow down light.

In our ET report in last week's Pipeline, we'd written on how it might have been interesting to have one of the industry's many optical experts comment on "when, where and how this could happen." Since then, we've heard back from the futurist Carroll and checked in with one of those experts.

"The slowing of light is nothing new," Carroll wrote, referring to New York Times article from last November that cited Harvard researchers who in 1999 who were able to slow light drastically and two years later were able to bring light to a stop.

Of most interest to Carroll about this science project, which already was well under way six years ago, is its new scale. Whereas the Harvard researchers required a roomful of equipment, according to the Times, IBM scientists now have created a tiny silicon device to slow down light from its usual 186,000 miles per second to 600 miles per second--or to about 0.3 percent of ordinary light speed.

"Heck, I could have a little light-stop-chip in my laptop some time in the future, plug into my optical-wall-plug, and access the yottabit universe," Carroll wrote.

There's no quibbling with ability of a wide-ranging, connect-the-dots futurist such as Carroll in getting those (trade journalists included) who may be stuck in a particular niche to drop the blinders and look around, and ahead. His talk certainly was an effective way to jolt ET attendees into a forward- leaning frame of mind.

New optical thinking

For input from one of the industry's optical experts, we turned to OpVista CTO Dr. Winston Way, who noted up front how thinking about optical networking already is undergoing a shift.

"Before, people only thought that you could manage packets, frames or bytes, but I think right now people have just started to think about the fact that light, or colors, can be managed also," Way said. One of OpVista's calling cards is its novel approach to reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs).

As for not simply managing, but arresting lightwaves, Way said: "I think that is really out-of-the-box thinking. It's interesting. Slow it down so you can see what's inside, then let it go again."

Way said this project reminded him of work done at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s and early 1990s on optical signal processing, which sidestepped the physical limitations of the electronics domain. "I'm not sure it's practical today," he said.

What Carroll was talking about, of course, was not today but tomorrow, or rather the day or year (or decade?) after. "I don't make my stuff up," Carroll wrote. "The future surrounds us, is being developed all around us and all the (technologies) that people work on eventually come into our lives. I just think...that it is going to come into our lives quicker than we might think."

Are you watching the major transformations, or just the piddly stuff?

I spoke in November in Iowa to a group of energy cooperatives, providing some different insight into the future of energy supply in terms of not what's happening today, but in terms of "what comes later" -- say, five, ten or fifteen years out.

Likewise, I'll be speaking to the Healthcare Industry Distributors Association at the end of the month. Many of the folks in the room will be focused on the short term trends that surround them; they won't be thinking about the massive transformation that is really going to impact their industry over the longer term.

That's the problem that people usually have when they try to figure out the future. They tend to focus on the the small, incidental, day-to-day, one-to-two-to-five year trends that they can see around them.

I take my time looking for the “big transformations” – the sweeping, massive, significant types of change that causes everyone to sit back twenty years later and ask, “Wow! Where did that come from?”

And in the world of health care and energy, that involves phrases such "preventative medince" and "bio-refineries:" that's where you'll really find the future.

Consider, for example, the world of health care and life sciences. Certainly everyone is aware that current trends indicate that the challenges are vast and the opportunities are significant. There’s a looming shortage of skilled workers, dramatic rates of discovery of new knowledge, the rapid emergence of new medical methodologies, and other forms of significant change.

And yet, with everyone focused on these issues, most people are missing the big, long range transformation that is underway: we are in the midst of a fundamental and significant shift in healthcare philosophy and medical research that makes every other trend within this industry pale in comparison. We’re rapidly moving from a world in which we “react” to disease and illness after it has happened, to one in which we will be doing far more in advance to “prevent” specific health care problems from occurring in the first place.

That's one of the trends I've covered in my FUTURE MEDICINE Prescriptions for 21st Century Healthcare trends summary.

The driver for this massive change is the emergence of extremely specialized and highly personalized medical treatments based upon your own particular DNA. Preventative medicine has already become a part of the health care system: for example, a simple pap smear test has resulted in a 70% reduction in the date rate from this disease. Yet, it is estimated that clinical diagnostic spending of this type makes up only 1% of global health expenditures.

DNA “sequencing” is set to change that, as it allows researchers to examine an individuals DNA, and determine their risk for developing particular diseases or medical problems. Already, a test has been developed that examines a few hundred strands of DNA, from which a prediction can be made of your risk of developing cystic fibrosis. The test accurately identifies the unique DNA strand in 88% of Caucasian CF and 69% of African Americans. Expect the degree of accuracy to only continue to improve in coming years.

That’s but one example of a “deep transformation change” that gets little attention. Consider another critical industry: energy supplies.

In the last few years, we have certainly seen a lot of price volatility as a result of the unexpected, such as Hurricane Katrina, rapid new demand growth from Asia, and commodity market fluctuations often driven by speculation. One result of volatility has been a renewed interest in bio-fuels, and in particular, the opportunity that exists from the creation of ethanol from corn and other crops. Ethanol has grown quickly to become a rather significant industry; and yet, what we are seeing today involves only baby steps.

The big transformation that is occurring involves a rapid changeover from “first stage” bio-energy companies to “second stage” bio-refinery companies.

The first stage consists primarily of agricultural companies, using their insight into the science of agriculture to develop production systems that convert grain to ethanol. The second group are the big oil companies, who are bringing to the industry their insight into how to build big, production oriented, cracking and distillery methodologies to the world of ethanol. In doing so, they will be transforming a high velocity industry into an faster and more complex industry involving “bio-refineries.”

The transition is both massive and seeping in scope. Royal Dutch Shell Europe, for example is involved with a “2nd generation” project that involves a capital investment of $2,000 per ton to construct, compared to $190 ton for a first generation bio-fuel plant.

The switch to bio-refineries will be significant, with some estimates suggesting that the oil major will be able to grab upwards to 17% of the global biofuel market within a few short years.

It’s by watching for and identifying such massive shifts : a switch from reactive to preventative medicine, or the emergence of a bio-refinery industry, that you can spot real areas for innovation and creativity.

That’s why, when looking at the big picture, you should always step back and look for an even bigger picture.

Innovation and insight in manufacturing

"Do you want to be focusing on the problems of the past, or do you want to outfit your organization so that everyone has the insight they need to deal with all the challenges that are being thrown at you in the future?"

That's my opening comment in an article I wrote --- the IndustryWeek Manufacturing Challenge -- that has appeared online.

The article presents a ficticious company struggling with multiple disparate information networks; they're wondering if they should bite the bullet and invest in a more sophisticated system, or whether they should struggle to make things work.

I opt for the former; from my perspective, innovative manufacturing companies should focus on these key traits, to deal with the unique challenges of the high velocity economy:

• Concentrate on rapid replenishment
  
• Go maximum on flexibility
  
• Transition single-source labor to multisource skills
  
• Implement flexible, just-in-time processes
  
• Develop better bid or service costing
  
• Have deep insight into rapidity
  
• Work to become the supplier of choice
  
• Be relentless on operational excellence
  

Innovation comes from focusing on the future; if you've got a mishmash of information tools that you can't operate in the high velocity economy at low cost, and not even understand what is happening around you, then you're like a deer in the headlights.

As I note in the article, "I’ve long been convinced that spending time on trying to rationalize disparate, uncoordinated, inflexible and unconnected systems is quite simply a waste of time, and I’ve seen dozens of organizations who have realized this and have moved on.