JimCarroll

Daily Inspiration: News article – “The Future is Closer Than You Think!”

July 18, 2023 by JimCarroll

“The Future is Closer Than You Think!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

The two movies of the summer appear to be Barbie and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. I have yet to see either; I’ll certainly find inspiration for innovation, creativity, and trends in both.

I was interviewed about Mission Impossible for Inverse, which bills itself as “the coolest place to get smarter.” Their ‘masthead’ is music to my ears:

We explore the science of anything, innovations that shape tomorrow, and ideas that stretch our minds. Our goal is to motivate the next generation to build a better world.

Inverse takes a scientific approach to analyzing culture and a cultural approach to talking about science. Since our launch in August 2015, we’ve endeavored to analyze the world thoroughly — if not consistently. Our aim is to better understand tomorrow by examining today.

The article that resulted, How Realistic Are The Mission: Impossible Spy Gadgets? A Real-Life Spycatcher Explains is a fun read, and I am one of two experts quoted (the other being a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism operative, who obviously gets most of the ‘ink.’) The writer previously interviewed me for my take on the Back to the Future series.

Gait analysis, smart contact lenses, exploding gum, gecko-like walking pads – science fiction movies always offer up a wonderful vision (or a terrifying one) of a new, complex future. The challenge today is that today’s science fiction is often tomorrow’s reality sooner than we think. In the case of the Mission Impossible series, it’s safe to say that many of the ideas in the earlier movies in the series, which might have seemed far-fetched at the time, are closer to reality, if not yet already in existence, today.

I had a few observations along the way:

The closest thing to Mission: Impossible masks that reality has to offer is in the emerging field of regenerative medicine.

Carroll tells Inverse soon we’ll see 3D-printed teeth using live tissue. Other examples in recent years include a 3D-printed ear made from a patient’s own cells.

While the IMF can print a mask in a matter of minutes, in reality, it takes months to grow these replacement body parts for disfigured or disabled patients.

Smart contact lens technology? That’s an easy one:

Within a few years after Ghost Protocol’s release, Samsung, Sony, and Google each had a patent for their version of a smart contact lens. We have yet to see these contact lenses on the market, but O’Neill says the military is looking at how this technology may be used, and Carroll says, “I think that’s one that we’ll look back in five years and go, ‘wow this one really happened.’”

There were a few other comments that I made that didn’t make the final article. Exploding gum? I spoke to the writer about my keynote some years ago for the US Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, previously referred to here, commenting that half the room looked like Doc from Back to the Future. If anyone could be inventing exploding gum, it would probably be these folks!

In any event, science fiction is great – but keeping fiction in science is becoming increasingly difficult!

Video: Event Planners, the Meeting Industry and AI

July 17, 2023 by JimCarroll

An AI interviews me about events in the event industry! No AI’s were harmed in the making of this video.

Daily Inspiration: Trend spotting – “Opportunities only exist if you can see them!”

July 17, 2023 by JimCarroll

“Opportunities only exist if you can see them!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

In 1998, a few years before Steve Jobs announced the iPod, I had an Mp3 player called the Eiger F10, arguably the world’s first portable digital entertainment device.

A small little thing, it held the music in digital format in removable memory – flash cards, as it were – and so the capacity you had depended on the card you used. I think mine could hold about 20 songs. To get music onto the device, I had to plug the card into my computer, encode some songs into the proper format, and transfer them. And to get those songs into the proper format, I had to ‘rip’ my CDs – that is, use some special software to take them off of a CD and turn them into an Mp3 file.

And so years before the arrival of the digital music industry, I was already participating in one.

A few years later, I upgraded to a Creative Nomad Jukebox – a true media powerhouse, it could hold thousands of songs. It was rather big and bulky though, and the same problem remained – it wasn’t easy to get music onto the device.

The result? I kept busy at the time digitizing my entire library of about 1,500 CDs, since there was really no other way to get music onto these little wonders of portability. This state of affairs existed for a few years, with a number of new digital music devices appearing on the market, but all with the same problem – music accessibility.

I still have these two devices, and on occasion will take them out, sharing them on stage as examples of the failure of forward-oriented thinking. After all, it took the insight of Steve Jobs at Apple to realize that the fundamental problem with this wonderful emerging technology was that the digital music issue had to be solved before a true market for such a device emerged. Once he figured out the nature of the real opportunity in front of the organization – music portability combined with easy downloads via an online store with the participation of the record labels – that the real industry of digital music emerged. And with that, Apple began to live up to its potential as the world’s leading innovative organization, with an observation I often share on stage – that at times, some 60% of Apple’s revenue comes from products that did not exist five years before.

The genius of Jobs was that he could see and perceive opportunities that others could not see; he could spot potential markets that did not yet exist; he could find opportunities where others had blind spots. He did it again with the announcement of the iPhone, famously concluding that it was an e-mail device, Web browser, and portable media player combined.

So why was it that so many other people and industries missed out on what is now an obvious opportunity? After all, we already had Mp3 players, opportunities to create digital music and a market for digital music players. There are many reasons, but chief among them are:

lack of awareness: Simply put, people don’t spend enough time examining the world around them to understand what opportunities might be staring them in the face. As I often say, the future is all around us – you just need to know where to look.
a lack of forward-oriented thinking: it’s always been a mystery to me that even though many people know they are going to have to live in the future, they don’t spend enough time thinking about the trends that will take them there.
a fixed mindset: a misguided belief that things won’t change and that most things will always stay the same – which blinds people to opportunities for tomorrow.
fear of the future: hand in hand with a fixed mindset, people miss out on seeing opportunity because they fear the future; they fight the future; they refuse to acknowledge the future.
dential of the future: any particular music company could have come to market with an Mp3 player, but no one did, because of a misguided belief that CDs would always remain the dominant music format.
a short-term focus: it’s too easy to stay focused on today p- who has time for tomorrow?

Denial, lack of awareness, blindness, a lack of a future focus – all these reasons and more cause people to fail to see obvious opportunities. Innovative organizations and forward-oriented leaders are different – they establish a mindset of forward-thinking, a culture of tomorrow-centric action, and a team of collaborative innovation based on the opportunities of the future rather than the realities of today.

The conclusion is obvious – spend more time studying the future to really see the future!

Daily Inspiration: Mindset and Leadership – “‘I’m going to do it anyway’ is usually not a good setup for success!”

July 14, 2023 by JimCarroll

“‘I’m going to do it anyway’ is usually not a good setup for success!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

To golf, you need to know how to do all these things, consistently, in order, at the right time.

If you do not do these things, in the right order, it might not go well. Golf is all about the rhythm, mindset, tempo, and pre-shot setup. Given that it is summertime, I’ve got a few games going on. And while I’m out there, I can’t help but relate the success and failure that I see on a personal level to issues of mindset, leadership, and innovation success. That’s because we often make decisions out on the course that are similar to the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis in our careers and our organizations.

Many of those decisions are not the right ones – but we pursue them anyways, even though we know it is wrong.

Consider, for example, one of the worst, and most consistent mistakes that a golfer can make – the ‘I’m going to hit it anyways’ shot. That’s the one where you know you haven’t teed the ball up properly – it’s too high and you know you are going to have a pop fly, or it’s too low, and you know are going to ‘skull’ it, or you have it set up pointing in the wrong direction and you know it is going to go into the trees or will visit the creek or pond. Seconds before your swing, you know you are doing it wrong, but you decide, “I’m going to hit it anyways.” That thought enters your mind momentarily, but you swing … and it goes spectacularly wrong.

Because, even when you know it was wrong, you decide to do it anyways!

Companies, people, and organizations do the same thing. We consistently pursue actions that we know are likely not to succeed, and yet we do them anyways. We tend to chase the same strategies which we know will not succeed – but we chase them anyways. We make decisions that we know are the wrong ones but they feel comfortable and easy – so we make those decisions anyways. We constantly return to old behaviours that we know have not worked before – but we do them anyways. We becoming too comfortable with things we’ve done before that we know are doomed to fail – but we do them anyways.

There are other things we do in golf that are similar to the leadership and innovation mistakes that we make.

We will often tend to overthink our swing – facetiously, trying to remember all the items in the swing diagram above – and forget to let our setup routine and muscle memory define our action. From a strategy perspective, we sometimes overthink our course of action and response at any given moment, instead of simply doing what we know will work. We will often choose the wrong club, knowing that it isn’t appropriate for the given yardage, thinking that we might pull off some miraculous new reality – in the same way that we make the wrong decision for any particular situation, knowing in our gut it isn’t the right thing to do. We start to rush our swing and our setup, forgetting that a good pre-shot routine is the basis of much golf success – just as the process of careful, deliberate action is sometimes preferable for well-known, previously encountered situations. We try to do a ‘hero shot‘ – thinking we can narrowly move a ball through a 2-foot wide gap in a set of trees 50 yards ahead – when we know in our gut that it is a fool’s errand – in the same way that we try some sort of business ‘hail mary’ when we know the change of success is nil to zero.

There is so much in the game of golf that matches what we do in our corporate lives that it is uncanny. Years ago, when the PGA of America invited me on stage to talk about opportunities for innovation withn the sport, I covered many of these issues. Every golfer in the room was nodding their head in agreement.

Including the fact that when it does not go well, we immediately think of our next opportunity.

Golf – it’s a game of consistently motivating ourselves to move beyond consistent repeatable failure to a time of consistent repeatable success through the avoidance of consistent, repeatable mistakes.

Or something like that.

And we love it!

Daily Inspiration: AI & Big Data – “Life in the 21st century is all about learning how to trust the algorithm!”

July 13, 2023 by JimCarroll

“Life in the 21st century is all about learning how to trust the algorithm!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

We are surrounded by machines that are making decisions on our behalf; bits of silicon processing information, determining some state of action based upon some pre-defined set of rules; gates of logic that determine how to proceed based on some virtual interpretation of the reality in which we live.

We can only hope they are doing it right.

I’m reminded of this each and every day as I look at the plethora of devices that are a part of my life and the online networks in which I participate.

But the reality was brought even closer to home when my wife and I recently embarked on a 1,800 km round trip road trip in my Tesla Model 3 and relied on the network of Tesla Superchargers for our journey. The good news is – as any Tesla owner will tell you, the company has done an absolutely brilliant job in creating an infrastructure of reliability with a network that can get you anywhere in North America from Point A to Point B (and doing the same in an increasing number of other regions in the world.) The bad news is that so far, my wife and I are ‘data algorithm wimps‘ – we have not yet developed the ability to place our full trust in the Tesla charging algorithm. Perhaps that is because we are boomers; or perhaps, we are just new to the game of EV algorithmic charging, despite having had the car for almost two years.

Let me explain with an example. Let’s say that I want to go from my home to Chicago. I punch in the route, and my Tesla screen will show me a map of my route; where I will stop along the way at a Supercharger in order to ‘top up’ the battery; and how long it will take at each stop to charge. The screen in the car will show something like this – this is the same same thing, rendered in a 3rd party software program known as A Better Route Planner.

It’s all quite logical, and any mature Tesla owner will tell you that it works brilliantly and is completely reliable – as long as you don’t exceed the speed and become inefficient, just as you would with a carbon-based vehicle.

And yet my wife and I struggled to trust the algorithm. Our route plan told us that we might arrive at one Supercharger with a 15% battery level, and in our carbon-based minds, we weren’t sure we could trust that – what if we were lower? What if we ran out? What if the algorithm was wrong? The result was that our trip ended up involving an excess number of stops, too frequent charging, and more time than we should have. The same thing happened with a recent trip in which we had to grab some gear from our chalet; the algorithm told us we could easily make it there and back on a full battery with the capacity to spare, but we stopped off part way to top up.

Our carbon-based minds kept on rebelling in an electric, battery-based world.

As this was unfolding, I kept running through my mind that what we were going through was an exercise in how well we might trust the algorithm. Clearly, we weren’t quite ready. And there is no doubt that we are surrounded by similar algorithms – thermostats that control our AC, medical devices which interpret our health data, and social networks that programmatically feed us information based on some unforeseen and potentially misused set of rules.

Everywhere we turn and everywhere we go, we are surrounded by little machines doing the work and making decisions on our behalf – and a unique part of life in the 21st century has to do with the question – how well do we trust them?

And that question is only to become more frequent – and more challenging – as we go full-speed ahead into the world of generative AI, large language models, and other algorithmic technologies.

Welcome, to the 21st century – a time of all algorithms, all the time!

Daily Inspiration: Reputational Integrity & Custom Corporate Projects – “Trust is that thing you earn through consistent quality action”

July 12, 2023 by JimCarroll

“Trust is that thing you earn through consistent quality action” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Your career is built on. foundation of trust; your reputation is your most critical asset; your integrity is your most important calling card; the professionalism you bring to your work is your most important reference.

And you will know that any time you have an opportunity in front of you – whether pursuing a new job, chasing a consulting contract, or exploring some new opportunity, due diligence is a key part of the process. Whoever is interested in you will dig into your LinkedIn profile, Twitter feed, and other information-rich sources; they will peel back the legacy of your previous work; they might reach out to your references. They will examine your experience, and take a look at who has been willing to place their trust in you.

I’ve always got some useful information to share with these prospective partners when they approach me. Over the years, I’ve had many global organizations engage me for custom video, audio, and written content; work that goes far beyond my time with them in preparation for a keynote and while on stage or in a Board of Directors meeting. From custom video production to customized articles, and podcasts to books, I’ve worked hard to earn the trust of major corporate partners worldwide with my ability to share my insight beyond the stage.

The logos of some of the companies that brought me in for these projects are found in today’s image – and I can assure you it takes a lot for a corporate organization to trust its logo and reputation to a new partner. There is always an army of lawyers involved with wonderfully complex contracts, a full division of marketing executives eager to place their stamp on whatever campaign is underway, and a full battalion of public relations executives who stand on guard for the sanctity of the corporate name.

I’ve detailed many of these projects over on a page of Custom Corporate Projects. It’s an interesting assortment of companies, and I’m still working quite a few more into the list. This has come about as the nature of the ‘business of insight‘ continues to shift, and I get approached by a greater number of organizations for projects that ‘go beyond a keynote.’ I’m fortunate that I can share with the folks who send me these inquiries a long list of reputable partners who placed their trust in me for a project – and who saw powerful results. I’ve worked hard throughout my career to build a legacy of trust, a reputation of integrity, and a foundation of quality. It’s one of the most important things that you can do.

Here’s just a bit of that work.

Notably, PG&E engaged me for a custom video on “The Future of Energy.” The CEO of this massive US west coast energy utility needed to get across to his team the fact that the industry was being disrupted by the emergence of micro-grids, the acceleration of battery technology and renewables, and local community energy grids. He found me; and I worked with a professional film crew throughout San Francisco to film the video “Could The Energy Industry Be MP3’d?”, a fast-moving, hard-hitting video that brought some disruptive ‘shock and awe’ to his team – and to the industry.

Deloitte South Africa was eager to bring me to Capetown for an event, but I was already booked. The result was that they arranged for a professional film production they could use to open their annual ‘best in practice’ HR awards show with a hard-hitting message of world-class excellence. The result was the highly customized, fast-action video, “What Do World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?” With the ground filming around Ontario, Canada done by a local production company, Riverbank Pictures, the final product was edited and produced to perfection by South Africa’s FogHound Studios, providing a world-class global production.

VISA? Many years before e-commerce became a staple of our lives, accelerated by the lockdowns of the global pandemic, my original book writing partner Rick Broadhead and I wrote a seminal work about the topic in our book, “Selling Online: How to Become a Successful E-Commerce Merchant.” Released in 1999, the book caught the attention of a senior VP at VISA USA, who commissioned a custom print of 60,000 copies, with some custom content provided by VISA. The book was widely publicized by VISA in corporate mailings, PR campaigns, and advertisements, and was provided to leading merchants as a pathway for them to follow to begin understanding and exploring this complex new world of online commerce.’

Oh, and then there are always a few projects you look back with a bit of thinking – ‘how did I do that?’ That brings me o the IBM video, The Family Guide to the Internet.

Every career involves a momentary embarrassment, a minor moment in time that you would like to recall! This video is that moment – filmed in 1994, in the early days of the Internet, the video was aimed at the consumer marketplace. IBM distributed tens of thousands of copies on VHS; you can still find it in a few local libraries. It was actually sold for a time in video stores and other locations; you could actually find it in Costco!

It was pretty intense, filmed, and produced with a full audio and video film production team that included upwards of 12 people on location. It also took one heck of a lot of work – two days of filming on location, stretching well into 14-hour days to get the ‘film into the can’ – quite the experience! But I can also assure you that it takes a lot for one of the world’s most prestigious technology companies to get involved in any type of cooperative project, and for them to place their logo on a VHS tape nonetheless is indicative of the trust they placed in the ‘star’ of this production, Jim Carroll!

I wrote much of the script and storyline – and with that in mind, here’s the opening scene.

Keep in mind though – it’s 1994, and I’m pretty much predicting Skype, Facetime, and Zoom, albeit from an interesting location!

Whatever the case may be, a long list of projects always provides a useful foundation of trust for chasing the next one! Because “trust is that thing you earn through consistent action.”

JimCarroll

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THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO ARE FAST features the best of the insight from Jim Carroll’s blog, in which he covers issues related to creativity, innovation and future trends.

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO ARE FAST features the best of the insight from Jim Carroll’s blog, in which he
covers issues related to creativity, innovation and future trends.