Recently in Keynote speaker Category

This morning I did the opening keynote at IBM's Collective Intelligence BusinessSphere conference in Melbourne. It was designed as a brief and punchy opener to provide a big-picture context to what collective intelligence means for organizations and the key success factors.

Below are the slides. As always the slides are intended to provide visual support to my presentation, not to be useful by themselves. However there are a few visuals there that may be of interest even to those who didn't attend.

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future

Fourth in my series of summary blog posts from 2009 is selected presentations and videos from keynote speeches I've delivered this year (plus, at the end, my list of speaking topics for 2010).

My usual disclaimer: My presentation slides are highly visual and designed to accompany my speeches, and are NOT intended to be meaningful by themselves. The main reason I provide them on my blog is for the audience at my keynotes who want to look at the slides later. However it seems that others find the slides useful - in fact some have been viewed over 10,000 times on Slideshare.

I should also note that this list just includes a selection of the more interesting public keynotes I have given. I do not post slides for the presentations I frequently make for company in-house events such as divisional conferences and strategy off-sites.

Below are the links to the original blog posts which have the context and background for each presentation, with the embedded presentations below.

1. Video excerpts of keynote speech for Sun Microsystems Partner Executive Forum: The Future of the Network Economy

In my work as a keynote speaker - which despite all my other ventures still takes up a significant chunk of my time, attention, and frequent flyer points clocking - I always customize the presentation and topic to the client and audience. As such, on my keynote speaker website I have in the past posted just a half dozen speech titles with one-sentence descriptions, considering this is enough to provide an idea of what I can speak about.

However I have found that people seem to think that these are the only topics I speak on, so I have created a longer list of speaking topics to provide a better idea of the scope of what I can cover. This includes 10 topics for a general audience and 8 for specific industries. There are of course many other topics I cover not listed here, but these provide a reasonable overview of what I've spoken about.

You can see the full list of speaking topics on my speaker website, or below.

On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote at the 38th annual global conference of international accounting network Kreston International.

Kreston are a very interesting organization. With revenues across the network of over $2 billion, they are the 13th largest accounting network in the world. The day of the conference they made the final step in becoming a network according to the IFAC (International Federation of Accountants) definition of a network. One of the critical issues in determining whether a group of firms is deemed a network is whether they have common quality controls. The appointment of a Global Quality and Professional Standards Director is a key step Kreston has taken.

I have long been fascinated by professional services networks. I wrote about them in my first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, and in detail in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.

I am actively continuing to explore the nature of networks in professional services. How well they network very simply determines their success.

As such I was delighted to be invited to do the opening keynote on the conference's theme of Network to Win. It took the format of a participatory workshop run over two 45 minute sessions, getting the attendees to reflect on and discuss how they can best enhance the cross-firm networks that drive results.

Below are my slides for my presentation, provided primarily for event attendees. Note that they are intended to accompany my speech, not to be meaningful in themselves.

I first met Mark McCrindle when we were both part of a small team of futures thinkers engaged by a major bank for its innovation program. His company McCrindle Research provides a variety of research services focused on generational change. They also organize the Future Forum, an annual event run in several Australia cities which pulls together insights on key trends across all domains into a compact one-day session.

I will be speaking at the Sydney event on November 6, talking about Enterprise 2.0 and how to create the future of the enterprise, including how organizations can leverage social media for competitive advantage. A video overview of the event is below, full information and agenda here, and you can register here.

Future Forum Australia 2009 from David Birley on Vimeo.

In addition to my rossdawson.com website, which focuses on my work as a keynote speaker and strategy leader, we have created a brief document which provides an overview of what I do in this space.

The document needs a few small updates, such as an additional book published, however it is essentially current.

Ross Dawson - Keynote Speaker and Strategy Leader

A CNN blog titled its story Is the iPhone really the Paris Hilton of mobile phones?, referring to a recent report saying that iPhone's are not profitable for telecom firms.

It says that the term first appeared on December 5, 2008 in a newsletter from Strand Consult, referred to in an ITWire story titled iPhone - the Paris Hilton of mobile phones?

Well, for what it's worth, I said it in September 2008. Following is an excerpt from my opening keynote for a five-city national roadshow for Optus Business, just after the iPhone was launched.

I don't think I was making quite the same point though - the iPhone was enormously glamorized, feted on all sides for a couple of months, truly the center of attention, just over a year ago. However the difference with Paris Hilton is that the iPhone has great social value.

BTW I haven't managed to track down the author of the photo in the movie - please get in touch if you want attribution or for me not to use it.

One of the best parts of my work as a keynote speaker is visiting places I have never been before. As such I'm delighted to be doing the opening keynote at IPZ2009, the digital marketing summit in Istanbul, on October 21. I haven't yet had the opportunity to visit Turkey so I'm very much looking forward to it.

In the lead-up to the event the prominent Turkish online site Buzla is running a virtual interview with me. People can ask questions in Turkish and vote on the questions, with the most popular questions asked to me in a video interview. The deadline for questions is September 11, and the interview will be up on September 14. Click here to ask questions (in Turkish only) and for more information.

For those who don't read Turkish, you might enjoy the fairly psychedelic promotional video on the site, which seems to associate me with teddy bears drinking hard liquor (though I might be mistaken :-) ).

For the last years I have only got to Europe irregularly - my intent has been to focus on USA and Australia, however I have been getting fairly frequent speaking and consulting work in Asia and the Middle East as well.

I will be in Istanbul on 21 October to do the opening keynote at Marketing&Management Institute's Digital Marketing Summit, and am exploring some possibilities to do public workshops or in-house strategy sessions in Brussels and Helsinki before or after then.

Let me know if there are other possible opportunities we should discuss for when I'm in that quadrant of the globe :-).

We finally have video of my presentation on Future of the Enterprise at the TEDx event in San Francisco on May 5. The video is a nice production, very kindly done by Denis Mars to pull in the slides and Flash that supported my presentation.

Read more about the TEDxAdvance event, organized by Advance San Francisco. The best description is Andrew Mager's excellent review of the evening.

The TEDx presentation format is strictly 20 minutes, so my presentation fits into two 9 minute YouTube videos below. Feel free to start at Part 2 if you want a sampler of the content - the story pretty much hangs together from there too.

In the presentation I discuss:
* Origins of organizations, from pre-agricultural through pyramid building, the guild, and modern companies
* Enterprise vs. Corporation. The critical distinction that means the "enterprise" will be more important than the "corporation" moving forward
* My personal work journey, through distributed computing, financial markets, Japan, information broking and NLP formed my thinking on organizations
* Knowledge and relationships are the only resources that matter in today's economy
* Living networks of people, organizations and industry emerge
* Organizations are media entities - the flow of information defines its functioning
* Three driving forces today: Connectivity, Expectations and Commoditization
* Enterprise 2.0 is about creating the next phase of organizations - it is done by creating parameters for experimentation
* In the Heuristic Age structured trial and error is the only viable path to responsiveness
* Five questions: I end with five key questions we must answer to create the future of the enterprise:

What structures will emerge for allocating capital to enterprise?

What models will best turn participation into value creation?

How do we best tap the global talent economy in a virtual world?

What role will reputation play?

How will we make work meaningful?

Below are my slides for my keynote at the MegaTrends conference at Abu Dhabi.

As for all my presentations, note that these slides are designed to accompany my speech and not to be viewed on their own, though may still be useful to people who didn't attend.

For some more detail on the Driving Forces section, see my post on The MegaTrends of Technology, Business, and Society.

Next Monday I do the closing keynote at the MegaTrends conference in Abu Dhabi. The opening keynote will be by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, while I will close speaking on ‘Profiting from Accelerating Change in a Downturn’.

While I will be speaking from a global perspective, I will also be addressing some of the specific issues of the Gulf region and particularly United Arab Emirates

These issues include:
* Reinvesting oil wealth with a limited lifetime into the long-term growth sectors
* A very strong construction component in the Dubai and Abu Dhabi economies among a global real-estate and credit downturn
* Strong divergence in the last six months between the Dubai economy which has slumped dramatically and the Abu Dhabi economy which is still strong
* A highly polarized labor force, with a large very low-cost employment sector populated from the region, and also many global professionals
* Taking advantage of the location between Europe and Asia

Yesterday’s Dubai Chronicle did an article titled GCC Economy could reflect strong over-performance in next economic boom, based on a pre-conference interview with me, as below.

Tomorrow morning I am doing the second day opening keynote at ITAC09 – Information Technology in Aged Care conference.

Here is my presentation – as always these are intended to accompany my speech, not as stand-alone slides.

I hope to write some more on this blog on this topic before long, though it depends what I can fit in…

Tomorrow I am doing the closing keynote for the CPA Week Conference in Perth, on the topic of The Future of Global Business: Implications and Opportunities.

The slides from my presentation are here - as always these are intended for people who are attending my session as they are not designed to be meaningful on their own.

I'll write a few additional thoughts on my speech topic soon - on the run right now.

An overview of my keynote is here .

May is going to be a very busy month for me – lots of interesting things on. In a few hours I fly to San Francisco where among other things I will be presenting at the Future of the Enterprise TEDxAdvance event and generating momentum for our Future of Influence Summit to be held August 31.

Next week I will be in Perth to do the keynote at CPA Week on The Future of Global Business: Implications and Opportunities, a speaking topic which I am experiencing a lot of demand for at the moment.

The following week is a packed week in Sydney, including launching The Insight Exchange Lunch Series with The Power of Influence on 19 May, which promises to be a very exciting event, and the keynote at Information Technology in Aged Care conference.

At the end of that week I fly to Abu Dhabi to do the closing keynote at the MegaTrends conference, with Paul Krugman doing the honors for the opening keynote. My speech will take similar themes on opportunities in the global economy in the next months and years, tailored to a Gulf States audience.

A lot happening in between all this – announcements coming soon.

And my second child is due on 13 June (!), so there will be a slowdown from travel for a bit, though we’re planning to all go to Fiji or somewhere equally nice for a bit of a relax a few weeks after… It’s quite a year!