Recently in Future of business Category
In my recent keynotes I have frequently used variations on my Transformation of Business framework, which looks at how Technology Drivers and Social Drivers lead to a changed Business Landscape, and in turn New Drivers of Success.
I recently ran a workshop on the future of business at the strategy offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firm. During the evening I had a very interesting conversation with one of the regional directors about how professional service firms are tapping external networks. For over a decade I have written and
My friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard, who runs The Futures Agency (which I am part of), was recently in Sydney for a speaking engagement. We took the opportunity to record a series of conversations on the future. Here is our conversation on the future of money. The key points we make are:
Below is an excerpt from my book Living Networks that describes how to develop effective strategies in what I call the “flow economy” of information of ideas, where today almost all value resides. You can also download the complete Chapter 7 on The Flow Economy from the book website. While the examples I used in
Continue reading Strategic positioning in the flow economy: 3 action steps
Last night I flew into Sanya, at the southernmost tip of China, to give the keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference tomorrow. When I walked up to give my passport to the immigration official, on the counter in front of me was a box with 4 large buttons. There were green 2 smiley faces
Continue reading China leads the world in customer service, starting at its borders
Crowdsourcing is rapidly gaining visibility as a mainstream business topic. The current issue of Outsource magazine has a good article titled The Road of the Crowd. It was written by Steve Bynghall, who produced the recent IBF24 event run by Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and who is collaborating with me on some projects. It’s a good
Continue reading Crowdsourcing goes mainstream, shaping organizations and the future of work
This morning I gave the keynote at the MyBiz Expo 2011, on Business Opportunities of the Future. I had been interviewed for the cover story of February edition of MyBusiness magazine on which industries will prosper and shrink in the decade ahead. I shared some thoughts on the blurring boundaries of industries, and some specific
Continue reading Keynote: The Business Opportunities of the Future
Yesterday I was interviewed by fellow futurist Eric Garland for a podcast series which was also featured on the World Future Society website. You can listen to the podcast on those sites or below (note that I have had some problems with the plug-in). Our discussion ranged across global demographics, shifts in manufacturing, robotics, and
Continue reading The role of a futurist is to help people gain perspective and transcend boundaries
I gave my keynote on How Technology is Transforming Business for Australian Institute of Company Directors this morning here in Beijing. Based on the responses of the 500+ company directors in the audience, they absolutely understand the need for change. Here are their answers on audience response units to questions I posed during my presentation.
I am always trying to get better at using visuals to support my keynotes and presentations. I use many videos, and we have created quite a few Flash animations that I embed into Powerpoint to make them more dynamic. I have been aware of Prezi as a dynamic presentation tool for some time now, though
Our latest visual framework is The Transformation of Business. Many of my keynotes and client workshops at the moment are to high-level business audiences such as boards of directors and top executive teams who need to understand the essence of how the business landscape is changing and the implications. While you can never capture the
Continue reading New Framework: The Transformation of Business
A little while ago I co-authored a White Paper for SAP titled Service Delivery Innovation: Creating Client Value and Enhancing Profitability, focused on large professional services organisations. Later today I’m running a strategy workshop for a large technology vendor with a significant professional services arm. In the course of preparing for the session I looked
Continue reading 5 Driving Forces of Global Professional Services
While the subtitle of my book Living Networks referred to the ‘hyperconnected’ economy, the reality is that living networks are built primarily on human relationships based on mutual knowledge and trust. Here is a brief excerpt from the book about what is changing in the world of trust. Trust is a business perennial—from the days
Continue reading 3 major shifts in the nature of trust in business relationships
In a few weeks I will be in Beijing to give a keynote to the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) annual Company Directors conference. AICD has usually held its annual conference in Australian cities, but when in 2007 it held it in Shanghai they actually had far more attendees than usual. This is now
Continue reading Keynote speech in Beijing on How Technology is Transforming Business
Serendipity is for me a deeply meaningful word. The more than dozen posts discussing serendipity on my blog include how we created “enhanced serendipity” at an event I ran in 2003 in New York, more details on the story of the word serendipity and how to enhance it, the importance of the “serendipity dial” and
Continue reading Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society
I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think
Continue reading Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control
I have just come across this – an excellent resource from PSFK on the Future of Retail. PSFK presents Future of Retail report View more presentations from PSFK The report covers 10 major trends:
This is significant. While talk doesn’t necessarily lead to action, a significant shift in capitalism could be coming. On Wednesday US SEC Chairman Mary Shapiro sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee. The letter is embedded at the bottom of this post. Many have focused on the potential from
Continue reading SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism
Chapter 5 from Living Networks, on Distributed Innovation – Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World, is still immensely relevant today. We are still relatively early on in working out the implications for innovation of distributed value creation. Here is a section towards the end of the chapter which provides 5 recommendations on managing innovation in
I am writing this in the air over the Rockies, flying back from a scenario planning workshop I ran for a client yesterday. Over the last dozen years that I have been running scenario planning projects I have observed that corporate interest in scenario planning is cyclical. The time horizons that executives think in tend
Continue reading 4 reasons why an increased pace of change means greater unpredictability
I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly. I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study.
Continue reading Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations
The current edition of Fast Thinking magazine has a feature article titled ‘Know Future’ on “the future of futurists”. It looks at the history and background of the profession and goes on to interview a number of prominent futurists. It quotes me: Ross Dawson says becoming a futurist is pretty straightforward. “You can claim you
The very dynamic Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins of Bluewire Media recently did a video interview of me, asking me about the trends driving how the web will shape business. Here is the video, with a summary of my headline points below. (Also see Bluewire Media’soriginal post of the video , which has my comments
Continue reading Six trends for 2011 and beyond on how businesses can tap the power of the web
I’ve just finished a teleconference on The Future of Customer Relationships (follow the link for an overview), hosted by Focus.com and Brian Vellmure. The panellists were: Ross Dawson Dr. Graham Hill Dr. Michael Wu Denis Pombriant Our discussion will be available shortly as an mp3. For now, here are a few quick notes I took
Continue reading The Future of Customer Relationships: notes on where they are going
The cover story on the current issue of MyBusiness magazine is on The Future of Business: Businesses to seek – or flee – in the next decade. It features ideas from three futurists: myself, Bernard Salt of KPMG, and Christine Christian of Dun & Bradstreet. Here are a few of the quotes from me they
Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s: HAVES AND HAVE NOTS Across communities, nations, and the world, there is a keen risk of increasing separation between those who have access to technology, tools, and basic needs, and those who do not. This is not inevitable. However it will require concerted action around the
As you no doubt know, the delightful word “Zeitgeist” comes from the German, meaning ‘spirit of the times’. And in these extraordinary times it is useful to distill the spirits of the day. As such we have re-created our Zeitgeist for 2011 as a slideshow, as it’s an easier way to digest the 11 themes
I just did an interview on the industries that will grow and shrink this decade – I’ll provide a link to the story when it comes out if the magazine puts it online, or if not write it up as a blog post later. It made me remember an interview I did a couple of
Our recently launch Map of the Decade triptych comprised three parts: the Map of the Decade, details on the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011. I think may have been a mistake to put the Map of the Decade and Zeitgeist themes in the one document, as many
Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s: DEMOGRAPHIC CRUNCH Many developed nations will start hitting the wall in their ability to support their elderly. The contrast with the rapid growth of developing nations will bring into focus the turn in economic fortunes. The inevitable result is mass migration, licit or illicit. See the
I’ll try to fit in a few summary posts from the year before I head off for holidays. To kick off here are our favorite infographics that we’ve launched this year, in chronological order. Click on the images for the original posts. Quite a few of these got a lot of attention! Crowdsourcing Landscape
Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s: COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE In a world of infinite information and diversity of opinion we will not drown, but harness our dormant potential to be more together than we are individually. Crowdsourcing platforms and aggregators of insight will be part of the planks that create the reality of
Continue reading ExaTrend of the 2010s: Collective Intelligence
It is traditional at the turn of the year to look forward at what is to come. We have crystallized our thinking on the year ahead and the decade of the 2010s in a new 3-page visual landscape. Note on ExaTrends: Given the exponential pace of change of today we are far beyond a world
Continue reading Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the Zeitgeist for 2011
One of the most surprising things about Wikileaks is that it took this long for the massive shift to transparency to have an impact on this scale. The trend to transparency has long been evident, and sites to facilitate leaks have been around for many years now. The inevitability of a transparent world has long
Continue reading Transparency has long been driving business and society… but it’s only just begun
SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets. I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogs. Here are a few further thoughts on social shopping. I have written another post on the rise
Continue reading The rise of social shopping in 2011: 7 examples of where it is going
AHT GROUP VENTURES & FEATURED CONTENT
About the Blog author
Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of AHT Group, which consists of 3 companies: consulting, publishing, and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy firm Future Exploration Network, and events company The Insight Exchange.
Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.
Books By Ross Dawson (Incl. Free Chapters)
Articles and Reports
Future of Media Report 2008
Future of Media Report 2007
Future of Media Report 2006
Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy
Future of the Media Lifecycle
Future of Media: Strategy Tools
Executive Insights into Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 Framework
Trend map 2007+
Extinction Timeline
SAP White Paper: Service Delivery Innovation
White Paper: The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services
CNET/ University of Virginia White Paper: How Technology Purchasing Decisions Are Really Made
PM Network magazine's lead article on virtual teamwork (440KB), featuring Ross Dawson on the cover
Microsoft Strategic White Paper: How To Lock-in Your Clients (1.1MB)
Go to main blog page
Ranking
AHT GROUP BUSINESS MODEL
Visualization of our activities and model
Our priorities for 2012Upcoming event
Latest book
Recent Media Appearances
- Apr 27, 2012 – 20 minutos April 27, 2012
- Apr 26, 2012 – TheNextWeb April 26, 2012
- Apr 18, 2012 – Le Monde April 18, 2012
- Apr 7, 2012 – The Age April 6, 2012
- Apr 5, 2012 – Sky Business April 5, 2012
RECENT MOST DISCUSSED