Recently in Global economy Category

In my keynote speeches over the last couple of years I have often talked about how there is an increasing divergence in business performance. This theme was particularly pertinent at the height of the global financial crisis, when it was important to make people understand that there were still some companies and sectors that were doing very well. However arguably this issue of divergence is even more important now that many companies and economies have a more buoyant outlook.

As I wrote last year about the Big Shift in economic structure, some great research from Deloitte's Center for the Edge supports my views on divergence, as illustrated below.

This shows that Return on Assets for the top quartile performers has stayed consistent at 11-13%, and in fact recently has been close to its all-time highs. In contrast, more recently the bottom quartile is consistently destroying value, sometimes in a spectacular fashion. The only possible outcomes for these lesser-performing companies is that they get their act together, are acquired, or go out of business.

Micro-messaging processing company Semiocast has just released research showing that Asia has overtaken North America as the biggest user of Twitter, with 37% of total tweets.

Source: Semiocast

In June 2009 the US still accounted for 55% of tweets, in February 2010 statistics showed that half of tweets were in languages other than English, and by April 2010 US tweets accounted for 37% of tweets. The rise of "international" (as Americans describe the planet excluding USA) and corresponding decline of the US share is shown in the chart below. Today's study shows that US tweets have in the three months since then fallen to just 25% of the total. This is not because the US is slowing, it is because the rest of the world and particularly Asia is taking up Twitter at an enormous pace.

At the end of every year media call on futurists to ask them what to expect in coming years, reflecting the appetite from their audiences for future thinking. One of the best ways to feed this desire is with infographics, distilling ideas into an accessible visual representation.

For the last four years a Trend Blend has been produced to close out the year. Each year this has been driven by Richard Watson of NowandNext, with myself and Future Exploration Network participating in the creation of the first three of these.

Below is a compilation of the four Trend Blends. You will see some themes recurring, and other fresh trends emerging over the years. All are intended to be fun and provocative, used both for general entertainment and sometimes for stimulating new thinking in the course of more serious futures and strategy work.

Click on the maps to see the detailed versions.

Trend Blend 2007+ map

One of the topics that interests me the most is the variety with how different countries and cultures engage with social media, so I was very please to see in the current issue of Harvard Business Review a great spread on Mapping the Social Internet. Click on the image below to see the central visualization of how countries engage differently on the web.

Source: Harvard Business Review

The axes of the chart are the portion of internet users who manage a social-network profile, and the portion of internet users who write a blog, a choice of dimensions which yields a few very interesting perspectives:

A couple of weeks ago I flew to Perth to participate in a scenario planning project for a mining company. As I struck up conversation with the person next to me, it turned out we would both be presenting and contributing to the same workshop. I was kicking off the two-day workshop with a broad presentation on the future of business, while Damien Giurco, Research Director at University of Technology Sydney's Institute for Sustainable Futures, would speak later on 'Cities as the mines of the future'.

Damien showed me their excellent report Peak Minerals in Australia, which provides an in-depth analysis of the state and implications of peak minerals. One of the data points quoted in the report was fascinating: used mobile phones yield 1000 times as much gold as gold ore. I thought it was worth creating an infographic to bring the point home - click on the image to download a large version of the infographic.

In short: make sure you recycle your mobile phone!

In January I looked at the just-released Nielsen data on global social media usage, and wrote Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?.

New data from Nielsen shows an updated picture from April 2010, including the proportion of people online in each country who are using social networks.

Today I spoke at the Critical Horizons Regional Futures conference held in Bunbury, Western Australia,which "examines emerging global trends and how they might affect regional communities in the South West Region of Western Australia". It is fantastic that a non-urban region runs a regular event to examine its future. It is clear that the attendees from across business and government had a keen appetite to explore the future and what they need to do to create a prosperous region in years to come.

The regional economy is still largely driven by mining and to a lesser extent agriculture (including the delightful Margaret River wines). It is experiencing many issues common to regional areas, including the loss of younger people to cities. However it has a particular context in its location. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and Perth is the most isolated city in the world. Bunbury is over 2 hours drive away from Perth. It took me 10 hours door-to-door to get here from Sydney – by far the longest it has taken me to get to a speaking gig in Australia.

The region’s geographic isolation means the topic of my keynote here, Power to the People: Thriving in a Hyperconnected Society, is immensely relevant. I discussed the overwhelming trend of how a connected world is shifting power from institutions to individuals. However I also covered the implications for regions of the emerging global talent economy. Crowdsourcing tools on one level provide access to extraordinary talent that can be harnessed in ways limited only by imagination. Yet a connected world also provides opportunities to provide services, both in existing domains, and especially in managing projects.

To the extent that they are useful (usual disclaimer: my slides are created to accompany my speeches, not to be viewed on their own) here are my slides for my keynote (minus the Flash animations).

I recently spent three days in Kuala Lumpur, running a two-day workshop for a client and meeting a number of very interesting people. I hadn’t been to Malaysia for six years, so it was great to get back. I thought it was worth sharing a few top-of-mind impressions and thoughts from my brief time there.

The first impression is how rapidly KL has developed in the last years. The glamorous new airport, wide highways everywhere, and the extraordinary Putrajaya area, which houses the federal government, are testament to the massive investment in infrastructure over the last years.

However traffic in KL remains abominable at rush hour. People sometimes choose to wait a couple of hours before driving home, and expect to get home at the same time anyway.

Pic: CEO and PA of Malaysia Industry-Government Group for High Technology, Ross Dawson, Nik Hasyudeen, with Putrajaya landmarks in the background

I was very fortunate to have Nik Hasyudeen, the former president of the Malaysian Institute of Accountants and recently announced executive chairman of the Audit Oversight Board, as my guide for part of the trip. Nik is a connector extraordinaire, and adds to his broad experience in business strategy a great appetite for innovation.

A commenter on my last blog post The latest country comparisons in that key economic driver: broadband speed questioned whether bandwidth does drive economic growth.

While it is easy to take that for granted, there are in fact many studies that have demonstrated this fact. One of the more interesting is a Booz & Co study that compared labor productivity growth over 5 years with bandwidth, titled Digital Highways: The Role of Government in 21st-Century Infrastructure.

I am just back from Phuket in Thailand where I facilitated the offsite session of the top 120 executives of a major professional services firm in Asia. This is staple work for me. My role at these kind of events ranges from delivering a keynote presentation that brings forcibly home the key themes of the event, for example change or innovation, to in some cases designing and facilitating the entire event, particularly when it is focused on strategy development.

While executive offsite sessions are common to business around the world, there are a few specific dynamics to take into account for organizers of retreats in Asia.

Diversity
Asian countries, economies, and cultures are far more diverse than those, for example, in Europe. There are often different priority strategic issues across country operations, and management structures need to vary between operations. Offsite objectives and structure should reflect that.

Last year I kicked off a strategy session of a major infrastructure company with a presentation to the executive team on the world in 2030. This used a set of four scenarios to provoke new thinking about the world moving forward.

I wrote about these in The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy, providing some of the background to the scenarios and presentation.

We've now created a flash piece to make it easier to navigate and interact with the scenarios. Please play with the interactive piece.

Last week the ABC's 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.

It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC's website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.

The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.

Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.

Well there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!

To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.

Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.

Some very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.

However the data point that struck my interest most is that...

Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media

This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.

Software firm Sysomos has provided some more interesting research on Twitter usage.

Using this data, we have analyzed which countries use Twitter the most on a per capita basis, shown below.

I did the same analysis from Sysomos' report in June, showing the most prominent Twitter nations on a per capita basis at the time, according to the data provided.

While the results are fairly consistent between the June 2009 and January 2010, it seems that neither set of results is complete. Norway, which ranked as the third highest per capita Twitter nation last June, had no data provided on it in this survey, while Singapore - now the second highest ranked nation - and Ireland - now ranked fourth - were not included in the June survey.

On a relative basis New Zealand has gained ground, catching up with Australia and the UK, while Germany appears to have moved ahead considerably compared to other countries such as France.

Sysomos doesn't give details on its "proprietary" methodology for identifying the location of Twitterers, however it very interestingly says that only 0.23% of tweets are tagged with location through Twitter's geo-location API tool. I may have a play with getting some of this data directly at some point.