So if you are selling a product, but is transforms into some highly-connected, intelligent, Internet-of-Thing device, then the nature of your selling proposition needs to change. This association represents companies that sell a vast array of hi-tech products, and they had me deliver a keynote looking at the vast, disruptive trends occurring in the IoT era – and how it will challenge their sales role in the process!
It’s been a fun week, with keynotes in Dallas and Napa Valley – one on the future of education, and the other involving the future of manufacturing.
Yet my talks don’t just include keynote presentations — I’m often engaged to come in to small, intimate leadership meetings to help senior executives understand some of the trends that will shape their world. This week, that included a presentation to a group of CEO’s at an off-site event in Colorado Springs. The event was organized by a private company that has equity interests in the organizations in the room — representing some $10 billion worth of value.
My talk focused on the trends that will provide opportunity and challenge in the future — ranging from business model disruption, to the Internet of Things, the impact of the next generation, accelerating science and the new R&D, and many other topics.
In these situations, I don’t provide insight on particular stocks to invest in — but do provide guidance on the trends that will shape our world on a 5,10, 15, 25 year basis.
And it is clear that with an increasing number of these bookings, private equity managers have come to rely on my insight in a way that helps them to assess where they are going with their own investments and interests.
What’s interesting is that through the years, I’ve done quite a few of these presentations for very-high net worth families and firms. It has included such groups as the Wrigley family foundation and companies that manage the Rothschild wealth.
And in one of the most fascinating events I’ve participated in, I was invited to Athens to address several hundred representatives of what are known as ‘family offices’ — organizations that manage the wealth of the world’s wealthiest. While I did not get a complete list of attendees, I do know that some of those in the room represent and manage the wealth of folks such as the Bill & Melinda Gates family office; the Accellor-Mittall families, those of the founders of Google and many, many others.
It was suggested to me that some $10 trillion of wealth was represented in the room.
What’s common to all of these talks?
Viewpoints on the trends that will define our world, and which will spell opportunity in the future!
I’ve been quite priviliged through the years to be able to observe, within my global blue chip client base , some of the fascinating innovation strategies that market leaders have pursued.
What is it they do?
Many of them make big, bold decisions that help to frame their innovative thinking and hence, their active strategies.
For example, they:
These are but a few examples and the list could go on; the essence of the thinking is that we are in a period of big change, and big opportunity comes from bold thinking and big creativity!
Earlier this week, I was the opening keynote speaker for EdNET 2016, a conference focused on those in the business and preparing knowledge delivery tools for the K-12 sector (aka textbooks!)
It was a fun talk!
Rather than speaking to the specifics of the education industry, I took an in depth look at the global mega trends which are shaping industries, jobs, careers and knowledge into the future.
I then took a look at a wide variety of approaches to innovation that they might consider to align themselves to fast paced knowledge trends.
The folks over at EdWeek Market Brief ran an article covering my talk.
‘Forge Ahead and Move Fast,’ Futurist Tells Education Businesses
by Michele Molnar, Associate Editor
Carroll’s message to “think big, start small, and scale fast” was delivered to an audience of executives who are trying to gain market shaJimCarrollre in the historically slow-paced K-12 marketplace.
It’s advice he’s already given in presentations to NASA, Walt Disney Corp., major pharmaceutical companies, and the Professional Golf Association.
The group gathered here for EdNET are product and service providers in the education industry, meeting for three days to discuss their shared challenges, opportunities, and to network.
“It’s not big organizations that will control the future,” Carroll told the attendees. “It’s speed, agility, flexibility—the ability to respond to rapid change—that will increasingly define our success.” For instance, 60 percent of Apple Inc.’s revenues come from products that didn’t exist four years ago, he said.
Educators in everything from universities to elementary schools are “enveloped by speed,” he said, and asked the audience to reflect on “What can we do with this?”
Carroll drew on the perspective of Bill Gates as part of his rationale: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction,” wrote Bill Gates in his 20-year-old book, The Road Ahead.
Earlier this year, Gates predicted major changes on the horizon in education, particularly around personalized learning, within the next five years.
As educators are being asked to teach students for future jobs that don’t yet exist, Carroll said businesses can help with this challenge. He pointed to the disappearance of existing careers and the rapid emergence of new careers like creators of real-time predictive analytical dashboards to monitor people’s health, and programmers who provide location intelligence.
Carroll encouraged the audience to start thinking of ways it can prepare for a future in which students are accustomed to “just-in-time knowledge,” where they can learn what they want to know from watching a video online or doing an internet search.
“Be the Elon Musk of your industry,” Carroll said, referring to the co-founder of Tesla. “Build experience, build knowledge, build understanding. It’s only by trying to do things we haven’t done before that we can get ahead.”
Over the years, I’ve done quite a few talks for investment groups – equity investors seeking insight on the dramatic changes occurring in the economy so that they might assess and evaluate their next investment decisions in light of disruptive growth trends. In this case, I spoke to the leadership team as well as the CEO’s of the key companies they were invested in, providing insight into where we would see the next wave of big growth opportunities emerge.
This association represents much of the industry which puts out traditional education content: textbooks and such. And if you are going to be providing the foundation of knowledge for the education system, you’d better have good isight into how that knowledge is changing. They invited me in for a keynote on this topic; and I took a look at the sweeping career and knowledge trends of our time: the rapid emergence of new jobs while traditional jobs disappear at a faster pace; how knowledge velocity is increasing while existing knowledge becomes obsolete in real-time; how careers for life are ending, replaced by careers driven by just-in-time knowledge.
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