Shared by Erik

Excellent article by Winston identifying catalysts for the future and great trends/ opportunities that follow suit. I know I particularly have been focusing on the business analytics tools that can help exploit opportunities in the value chain. What about you?

Everything’s getting faster these days—you’ve heard it before. Two mega-trends in particular are merging: rapidly accelerating technological change and rapidly evolving environmental issues and pressures. Lucky for us, the first change is going to save our butts from the second. Fast-evolving, smart IT will play a critical role in helping us navigate and profit from environmental challenges. The two trends together are combining to make for enduring change in how business is done, a movement to a permanently higher plane of green and tech-driven activity.

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Ten-Year Century,” makes the well-known case that the pace of transformation in society is accelerating. More has changed, the authors say, in this decade than in the previous century. To be specific,

Changes that used to take generations—economic cycles, cultural shifts, mass migrations, changes in the structures of families and institutions—now unfurl in a span of years… Game-changing consumer products and services (iPod, smart phones, YouTube, Twitter, blogs) that historically might have appeared once every five or more years roll out within months.

The “Laws” of Technology that the authors highlight—Moore’s and Metcalfe’s—perfectly describe how quickly both computational power and networking capacity are growing (double the computing power on every chip every 18 months, for example). It’s a “law” in the world of technology that things are steadily getting faster.

But this op-ed and other “tech is changing the world so fast” stories—and I’m a sucker for them—miss the another big shift that’s moving just as fast: the degradation of the natural world and the resulting pressure to green society and business.

The forces driving the greening of business—from natural world pressures to business customers asking tough questions about your environmental impacts—are evolving incredibly quickly. First, we’re witnessing changes in the physical world that scientists and geologists normally expect to take decades, if not millennia.

Scientists are very surprised by the increasing pace of change in environmental deterioration, particularly in our climate. As science writer Sharon Begley points out in Newsweek, statements from experts such as, “that really shocked us,” “we had no idea how bad it was,” and “reality is well ahead of the climate models” keep coming up repeatedly. The scientific consensus on environmental issues has also moved quickly, from careful support for the thesis of human-induced climate change to vast, overwhelming, somewhat nervous agreement in less than 10 years. How sure will our scientific leaders be in 10 more?

Second—and this is the good news—the business world too is changing its ways at a remarkable pace, especially when you consider the size of the companies in motion. Leaders are drastically reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, innovating even in seemingly static parts of the business like fleet and distribution. We hear every day how much Wal-Mart is changing itself (taking an already lean company and improving fleet efficiency by 30% in three years) and forcing change on others (making somewhat-radical new demands on suppliers that will change how they do business).

We can be forgiven for finding the technological, environmental, and business changes awe-inspiring, daunting, and “deer-in-headlights”-freeze-inducing. During a time of fast change, it’s also tempting to go into ostrich mode, just chalk it all up to a temporary frenzy, and hope that if you shut your eyes tight it will all go away. But is today’s pressure on business and society to go green a “bubble,” just another rise in environmental interest like the ones we saw come and go in the early 90s and early 70s? You can guess where I come down on this.

Part of my reasoning is that the business opportunities in solving environmental challenges are so large, why would interest wane? We can already see that the technological changes of today will serve us well in the search for solutions to our biggest environmental challenges today and tomorrow. Imagine the scale of industry transformation and the profit-potential in just three areas:

• New energy-efficiency and generation technologies to save money and to power our lives
• Satellite imaging, “remote sensing,” nanotechnologies, and data collection methods to track environmental impacts from forests to factories
• Business analytics tools and software to identify risks and opportunities up and down the value chain.

And so, as with the certainty of the “Ten-Year Century” futurists about the increasing pace of technological change, I believe that the acceleration of the greening of business is real and its impact will be permanent, not transitory. The growing revolution in how business is done will likely dwarf the original industrial revolution in its impact on how we live. We’re moving quickly to a new way of designing, making, shipping, selling, using, and disposing of all goods and services. And given the pace of change, it’s a spectacularly bad idea to wait out the recession to take action (a case I make in my new book, Green Recovery).

Given the power of high-tech fixes to deal with the somewhat terrifying pace of environmental change, I say let’s not just cope with technological change or even embrace it, but let’s do everything we can to accelerate it. It may be our only hope.

He is one of, if not the most notable in the sports broadcasting and entertainment industry.

Enjoy!

Shared by Erik

Great macro breakdown of the world’s resources!

A country’s economic worth can be measured in more ways than just its GDP and national debt. It is also important to consider the economic potential that lies in the harvesting of the natural resources within its borders. This map shows the top producing countries of each resource, or the proved reserves in the case of oil and natural gas. Each circle represents the percentage of the world’s total that the country produced in the last two years. Though some of the resources are renewable and some are not, it is interesting to see which parts of the world are rich in resources that are essential to our way of life, and to consider what this map might look like 10 or 100 years from now.

Click to enlarge the map below:

Image Credit: Maistora

Everyone is theorizing new ways of integration; this is where the ubiquity of technology enters play.  Even in recent years, conventional business practice prevailed, and the majority of business marketing was push, not pull.  I find it ironic though, that the same companies that have spent thousands to millions in marketing dollars to gain the enterprise product level exposure they desire.  Yet, as trends of the nineties and current decade avail, we no longer live in a cookie cutter product/ solution society.  Individualism and the customer is always right supplanted over the baseline of businesses bringing products and services to market has created a whole new relationship between the customers and businesses.

Such great examples range across the board, Seth Godin’s  Tribes, but more importantly, his new approach with Flipping the Funnel, Chris Brogan’s Small Powerful Network, the rules and application of Jim Collins’ Built to Last, and so on.  These are recent and semi recent examples that address the historical evolution just as I described; universal concept, modern branding, better internal work processes and adaptation.  The result?  Social networking has now become the supernova of the marketing.  More recently Brogan wrote an article about getting back to the desk, I love it.

It’s now time to bring everything back in.  Synchronicity and synergy both inside and out.  2010 Web/ “Web 3.0” and so on…  Remember the good ol SWOT Analysis?  Well fast-forward to the 2010 web, and how brick and mortar busines is no longer brick and mortar business.  It’s time to get connected. Everywhere.

Susan Boyle video virality

We reside in an interesting times.  This has nothing to do with the economy or government, although these days any conversation seems to be tied to one of those two culprits.  This is about the unbelievably grey transition of technology in its most modern, potent form.

We have come a long way, and I often tout that the best technology is truly ubiquitous; it seamlessly and naturally blends in with our lives as if it were there all along.  Cell phones are certainly a fortuitous example.

But where are we now?  We are at a time where a never heard of British phenomenon has received more attention and awareness than what Superbowl ads strive for at millions a pop.  Yet… YET, YouTube has still yet to find a way to monetize this monumentally mammoth sensation.  Ironically, sensation is the name of the game.  Where’s the capture?  Modern news media focuses on sensationalism daily; gotta go for the attention-getters.  Sex sells, etc.

So where does this all leave us?  Well, a gap for one.  We are at a turning point where conventional media is turning to social media.  The burdens of overhead are shifting to outsourced expenses for services, to sacrifice the silver lining that contributes to the bottom line.

It is time to innovate.  It is time to stick our heads forward, confidently.  I am not a large proponent of ‘2.0′, as I believe the term to be thrown around so loosely, much like HD and going Green.  Yet, we are emerging on business 2.0, across all spectrums.  Much like the industrial revolution inherently set the landscape for the 20th century, we are now embarking on a new journey.

We have set foot on the technological revolution; the digital revolution.