JimCarroll

Daily Inspiration: “If you aren’t learning lessons from what you are doing wrong you’ll never learn to do what’s right!”

September 14, 2022 by JimCarroll

“If you aren’t learning lessons from what you are doing wrong you’ll never learn to do what’s right!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

We are a byproduct of our personal failure – so set a goal today to make some great mistakes!

This is very true right now when there is so much opportunity to do things you haven’t done before -and yet are bound to go wrong during your journey. Experiment, explore, push the boundaries, take risks, and yet discover joy in trying new things! People who fail but then bounce back are the ones who really succeed in the long run.

Wouldn’t it make sense to spend more time with them, and learn from their resilience – or to be one of them?⁣ ⁣They are trying things, exploring boundaries, and most important of all, learning from their mistakes. ⁣And when it comes to innovation, that’s one of the key factors for success – be willing to make mistakes along the way!

Mistakes are a funny thing — they can set you back, but they can also push you forward. They can be powerful motivators. That’s why people who succeed are usually driven to that success from a series of previous, multiple mistakes⁣ ⁣The challenge comes from the fact that we are in a world in which people are paralyzed by the fear of failure: we are a culture that abhors mistakes. Anyone who errs is shunned; people whisper quietly about what went wrong, and what it might mean. With that, we are taught that we should avoid the rebels, the people who seem to be failing at everything they do.⁣

⁣Here’s a secret – they are using their mistakes as a launchpad for eventual success….!⁣⁣⁣

Banish the thinking that mistakes are bad: you should take your failures, analyze them, and learn from them to do things better.⁣ ⁣If you are trying to do anything, you will make mistakes. It’s guaranteed. It’s your ability – and the ability of successful people to bounce back from your mistakes – that really defines success!⁣

Where’s the growth? Rethinking long term opportunity in the context of volatility!

September 13, 2022 by JimCarroll

I wrote this PDF report late in 2008 after the global economic meltdown as the great 2008-09 recession was settling in.

It was an important document then, and it is still powerful, albeit slightly dated read today.

Titled “Where’s the Growth: Global Innovation Opportunities for the Long Term“, it was a clarion call for the need for CEOs and organizations to ensure they weren’t losing sight of long-term opportunities while managing the short-term complexities of volatility from the fast-moving economic downturn.

It drew quite a bit of attention at the time and was part of what led me to provide a vast number of keynotes for associations and corporations on how to innovate through the recession. Today, I’m doing the same thing with keynotes such as 9 Things You Need to Do Right Now: Rediscovering Growth, Opportunity, and the Future When Volatility is the New Normal! [ link ] and Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity: Leadership Strategies and Insight for the Post Pandemic World [ link ]

Mindsets at that moment in 2008 were focused on the downside of the future – as I wrote in the introduction:

“Gloom has set in on global markets. Volatility rages. Some organizations have gone into a mode of “aggressive indecision,” deferring action while they try to figure out “what comes next.” A pretty lousy strategy that is doomed to fail in the longer term.

And yet, I also wrote that real leaders were focused on a longer-term view.

Future-oriented leaders understand the reality of growth. They know that we live in a time in which opportunities for growth abound. They’ve aligned the mission of the organization so that they are capitalizing on real opportunity, not short term economic challenges.

Growth is everywhere

It’s easy during a time of economic volatility to lose sight of where the global economy is really headed. Yet while stock markets might rock, innovation thrives.

New ideas continue to be explored, markets grow, and industries emerge. A variety of trends indicate that opportunities for growth continue to surround us.”

So what happened? Shortly after that period of the gloom of ’08-09, we saw the longest running period of economic expansion in history, and those who were already preparing for it during the downturn – those who decided NOT to participate in the recession – as well as those who were prepared to think big and bold, were the winners.

With that in mind, what are you doing right now to ensure you are positioned for the inevitable economic recovery headline?

I’m often providing detailed strategic guidance to senior executives and leaders on trends and the future, and certainly, the economy has become a big part of what I address today. Much of my time is spent putting into perspective the fact that we’ve always had downturns; there are still plenty of growth opportunities out there; innovation is even more critical now to ensure that you’re ready to go as the economy starts firing on both cylinders again (which it will.)

What has become evident is that the most pressing issue for leaders today is a future focus. While volatility rocks global markets, there continue to be fundamental truths: your industry, products, competition, skills requirements, organizational capabilities, and ability to respond to rapid change will define your future success.

Here’s my advice on what you should be doing right now to ensure that you are ready for what comes next, based, in part, on what I was talking about in 2008.

think growth: It’s all too easy right now to lose your enthusiasm and sense of purpose. When economies contract, so too does your motivation. Don’t let that happen — now is the worst time to lose sight of the future! Think opportunity: study my “Where’s the Growth” document, and think about what it implies
check your speed: it’s the high-velocity economy. Markets, brands, products, industries, competition, and globalization are changing faster than ever before. Make sure you’ve got a team that can operate at the pace of change. Agility is the keyword. Search this blog for insight on that!
immerse in ideas. The global idea cycle is collapsing. New ideas are launched, analyzed, and developed into products at a speed that is astonishing. Rapid product change is the new norm: I’m dealing with the CEO of one organization that is involved in a rapidly emerging, multi-billion dollar market that will appear, go super-nova, and disappear, over the course of about 18-24 months, before it is superseded by the next generation of product. That’s fast, and that’s a new reality.
check your bench strength. After the cutting begins, the value goes out the door. Yet your ability to access ever more scarce, specialized skills will define your future success. It’s your ability to establish a fast, agile, quick-to-assemble collaborative team that will define your ability to grab all the opportunity that is emerging out there.
assess your threats. where could emerging technologies, fast science, radical business models, new industry dynamics, and new regulatory macroeconomic, political, or social trends impact your bottom line in a way that you hadn’t thought of before? Two years ago, China and quality weren’t an issue.
invest in the experience. Experiential capital — the depth of capability that you have from exploring, taking risks, and trying things out — is the financial capital. It’s a precious resource and might be in short supply if you aren’t working to build it up.
set the tone. If you let the current economic headlines drive your corporate spirit, you’re sunk. You have to keep people focused on the future — otherwise, your team will smell your fear. Leadership is all about keeping your team focused on opportunity and goals, not on ongoing and regular (“new normal” volatility.)

As I wrote in the doocument: “Think growth. Think opportunity. Innovate for future, don’t stagnate with the past.

Daily Inspiration: “Change is hard. Transformation is even harder!”

September 13, 2022 by JimCarroll

“Change is hard. Transformation is even harder!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

At the end of the month, I’ll find myself in Kansas City, with a keynote for a CEO leadership meeting for a massive global infrastructure company. He is bringing his team together for the first time since Covid for some strategizing and planning – and wants me to help set the stage as to why the organization must transform itself for a fundamentally different future.

The word ‘transformation‘ has been used a lot in our discussions as he recognizes that the massive disruption underway in his industry means that everything is changing pretty rapidly, and the company must change at the same speed. The changes can’t be small – a fundamental and complete transformation is required. He recognizes that everything the company does and how it does is changing forever and that if they don’t step up to the realities of this, they will fall behind.

The other day, in advance of one of our planning calls, I put together a list of how his world is changing, and this applies to you too. The future will see fundamental transformation in:

the products you develop
the services you deliver
the methodologies you use
the materials at the heart of it
the skills that are required
the speed with which you operate
the speed at which you are impacted
the competitors that you face
the revenue that you generate
the age group of those you were up against the collaboration you require

Transformation is far more difficult than nibbling around the edges of change, and it’s been a focus of many of my talks. Even NASA had to struggle with the deep transformation that must come with the future and invited me in a number of years ago to address the issue with a leadership team. Consider the context at the time – commercialization of the space industry was picking up, ending a world that previously only saw national agencies in the industry.

Some folks in the organization were still struggling with this issue – some viewed a future with new partners like SpaceX to be a threat – others saw it as an opportunity. But clearly, the world was going to involve a different future- and a complete and fundamental transformation was necessary, not just simple change. My job was to set the stage for the reality of the future, to help them align to reality. You can read the summary post of my dinner talk here.

Transformational leadership: My dinner keynote @ NASA

This reality is common to so many organizations today. How big is the change that our future involves? Start with this post: 20 Trends into 2030: Are You Ready for the Massive Transformation of Just About Everything?

20 Trends into 2030: Are You Ready for the Massive Transformation of Just About Everything?

For years, I’ve been describing leadership and the future on stage with a simple structure. It’s by being focused on three questions: what can I do to run the business better, grow the business, and most importantly, transform the business?

It’s the final issue that is so critical in today’s disruptive era!

Daily Inspiration: “The nearest thing to magic can now emerge in moments!”

September 12, 2022 by JimCarroll

“The nearest thing to magic can now emerge in moments!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I failed art in kindergarten.

But now, because of extremely rapid advances with AI, I have the opportunity to be an artist – and this fact is indicative of the absolutely massive speed of change and acceleration of everything having to do with artificial intelligence today. To me, it’s indicative of a world in which the magic of our imagination can suddenly become reality faster than we might think!

Let me explain why this is important – this is a long post, and has to do with the fact that, as I explain on stage, in a fast-moving world, any trend that has bubbled along for years can suddenly ‘go supernova’ and become everywhere, all at once. AI – or artificial intelligence – is now that trend – and your world is going to change a lot in but a few short years.

Let’s start here. Take a look at the little ship on the left in the image above, a larger version of which is seen here:

This horrid little drawing of a ship is imprinted in my memory as one of the first school drawings that I was able to do around the age of 4 or 5. I hated the visual arts – and so while other children were drawing marvelous, glorious drawings that they could take home to their parents, I never seemed to be able to draw anything. Perhaps silently rebelling, I would sketch out this little multi-level ship on the water any time I was asked to participate.

Do you want art? Here, have a ship. It became my go-to effort to get out of the stated requirements.

Fast forward to this weekend – while working to understand the latest advancements in AI – specifically, the bit having to do with “machine learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions” – I once again drew the ship in order to feed it into an AI image system that I set up on a virtual server in New Jersey.

Huh? What? Why?

Part of the art of figuring out the future is keeping on top of trends, and part of the art of figuring out trends is to geek out and actually work with those trends. So I geeked out – because, in the last few months, I’ve seen the buzz of AI-generated art go from a buzz to an overwhelming roar. You might have seen it too – friends sharing pictures from systems known as DALL-E, Imagen, Stable Diffusion, or MidJourney.

If I’m losing you, and at the risk of getting it wrong, here’s what has happened. For a long time, folks have been working with ‘text to image’ AI (artificial intelligence) systems that can take a simple text description of something, and generate something else, entirely artificial.

In other words, if you say it, it can draw it. So for example, as used on the Dall-E Wikipedia page, if you told such a system to generate “1960’s art of cow getting abducted by UFO in midwest”, you would get something that looks like this:

This image would have taken but seconds to generate and is based on a reference library of millions and millions of images.

Why is this important? Several reasons, much of which have to do with the fact that as art-based AI evolves, so too does all AI. And that is important – because AI will have a profound impact on all aspects of science. One example has to do with research into what is known as protein-folding, which, once mastered, leads to all kinds of opportunities with respect to healthcare, pharmaceuticals, medicine, and more. Another field is genomics – the more we can use AI to relate particular gene sequences to particular healthcare conditions, the better we can transition to a world of preventative medicine. Or in the world of construction, if we can use AI to examine and predict areas of potential structural fault, we can change how we assemble buildings and bridges.

AI is going to change our world, and the fact is, as we move faster with AI, we move faster to new discoveries, solutions, opportunities, and industries – and this whole world of ‘virtual art’ is but a subset of this rush to a new world. And suddenly, it is all happening and becoming very real, very quickly.

You might be wondering – isn’t AI going to ruin our world? Isn’t it scary? Isn’t it going to take away our jobs? I have a post about that hype and hysteria – OMG!!!! Man is DOOMED by the Machine Age! Giant Robot Brains Are Destroying Jobs!. I’d encourage you to read it.

OMG!!!! Man is DOOMED by the Machine Age! Giant Robot Brains Are Destroying Jobs!

There is no doubt that this world of virtual art is presenting all kinds of challenges – for example, having to do with plagiarism, intellectual property, and more – but as with any technology, a complex cat is out of the bag, and it won’t go back in. Consider this – t is only a matter of years before this same technology will be used to create an entirety of a feature film. If you want to explore that aspect of this strange new world, there are plenty of articles like Plagiarism by Machine.

But I digress. Back to my ship.

To explore this world, I set out to install a version of Stable Diffusion, which is an ‘open-source’ version of this concept. In essence, for the layman, this is a free, open-to-anyone computer code that can be used to do what some of the commercial offerings like Dall-E will sell you access to. To set it up, I followed this handy guide: The simplest way to get started with Stable Diffusion on Ubuntu. I created a virtual server on my favorite cloud platform, Vultr. It took me a few times to get the specs right, but I ended up setting up a Cloud GPU server in New Jersey with 10GB of memory. Following the guide, in a little while, I had my own little Stable Diffusion AI art system.

So I asked it to generate an image. My first prompt was for it to generate a “photograph of highly detailed ship with multiple levels on a horizon with clouds with smoke coming out of smokestack.” In a. matter of seconds, it drew me this:

Not quite what I expected! And keep in mind that my little system didn’t simply do a search for a similar image – it drew this by referencing its dataset of millions of images, interpreting and assembling the image using the capabilities of the graphics GPU in my setup. All this was happening within about 5GB of code and took but seconds to do. To me and others, that’s staggering – and its a form of magic.

I kept going with different variations of my text request and kept getting different images. Still not quite what I expected, but interesting! I began to learn that in this new world of modern art, the specificity of the request has a lot to do with what you will get – I don’t need to be able to draw, I now need to be able to describe what I want to draw. So with that in mind, here’s a series of images my little sytem generated for me.

I began changing my request, with phrases like “”photograph of modern cruise ship with multiple levels on a horizon with windows with smoke coming out of smokestack” and simpler ones like “drawing of a ship with smokestack and smoke,” I was generating images at a furious pace, and os here is but a sampling of what I got back.

Look at that first one! That caught my attention – it was like mine!

Continuing on, reading the documentation, I also began to learn that you could offer up the system your own ‘base image’, and have it feed off of that in its process of magic. So I drew my ship, and used a command like this: “drawing of a large ship in the sea with a blue sky with mountains behind with 8 levels with smokestack and smoke -U 4 –init_img=Ship.png”, the .png file being the magical little drawing of my ship.

And with that, I received my beautiful little ship, and became the artist I always wanted to be!

To me, this is pure magic – we live in a world in which the magic of a concept can suddenly become real extremely quickly. AI has always been on the periphery of what I’m watching, but his sudden acceleration of the world of virtual art is indicative of the sudden acceleration of all things AI-related.

And that fact has pretty profound implications for what comes next!

That was my Saturday afternoon! What did you do?

Daily Inspiration: “Only a fool dares believe their past defines their future!”

September 9, 2022 by JimCarroll

“Only a fool dares believe their past defines their future!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

And yet, I’ve met a lot of fools. Hubris, arrogance, imperiousness – these are the sins of failure.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of companies and the leaders in charge follow a path down to irrelevance. Either they have clearly understood how their world is changing and have refused to act, or they have been blind to the change and have failed to act. Either way, their fate is assured in the face of relentless change.

When I keynoted the World Government Summit in Dubai, the highlight clip the organization put together of my talk highlighted the reality of our future:

The key message underlying this? When everything changes and you don’t, your fate is doomed. You need to go forward with certain basic realities in mind:

if you aren’t innovating fast enough, products that don’t yet exist based on ideas not yet conceived will challenge your market dominance
if you aren’t innovating at speed, your customers will see through your products and your brand as tired and old
if you aren’t aware of new competitors that might be emerging that might challenge you, you will likely be caught flatfooted by surprise
if you haven’t realigned yourself with a focus on agility and speed, you’ll be moving too slow in a fast-paced world
if you haven’t accelerated your knowledge asset capabilities, the skills that you have to take you into a new and different future will be lacking
if you haven’t infused your organization with the spirit of new thinking you’ll be encumbered by old ideas

History is littered with the wreckage of organizations that did not step up to the plate of the speed of future trends, and who have failed to adapt to fast-paced market change. What happens to organizations like these? Why do things go wrong? There’s a long list of the reasons for failure:

a belief in their ‘incumbency’ – they’ve been successful for so long they do not fear any threat!
the invincibility syndrome – nothing will ever come along that might challenge their success!
arrogance and hubris, particularly at the CEO level – they simply have everything right with their formula! (They don’t)
a culture that does not promote shared goals, and in which each and every division is in it for themselves – promoting massive dysfunction and missed collective opportunity
and a failure to realize and adapt to the pace of change – simply put, they are structured for slow in the era of fast!
an inability to recognize their competitors are moving faster than they are – they don’t like to acknowledge their competitor’s success
an inability to confront the truth of what they see out in the world around them – denial runs rampant!
an inadequate trends radar: they simply miss the signs of what is coming next!

The list goes on. So your task today?

Recognize the essence of foolishness and guard against it!

Daily Inspiration: “The legacy of deep respect is forever”

September 8, 2022 by JimCarroll

“The legacy of deep respect is forever” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Before there was the national anthem of my homeland, “Oh Canada,” there was “God Save the Queen.”

As a child in the 60s, each school day began with the song playing through the school speakers, in the auditorium, and at any school or sporting event. When I heard the song today with the announcement, it did deeply affect me, as it would for millions.

This is my favorite picture of our Queen – deeply reverent to her role to the very end, she was also a human being, a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, and a godmother. Her love for her husband was unparalleled, and this picture captures the moment when he posed, unknown to her, as a palace guard. In this picture, we see her for the person that she truly was, usually hidden by a veneer of deep responsibility.

The Queen was and remains an inspirational beacon to all. Much will be said in the days to come; many words will be written; many statements will be made; the news coverage will be relentless.

The legacy she leaves is endless; the respect we all have for her is unparalleled.

R.I.P. Elizabeth II.

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.