Daily Inspiration: “Be thankful that you’ll always have an opportunity to reimagine your tomorrow!”
“Be thankful that you’ll always have an opportunity to reimagine your tomorrow!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
My thoughts go to my American friends on this US Thanksgiving Day.
It’s a pretty complicated one, and it can be difficult to give thanks when 2020 has been such a challenging and difficult year – and when the joy of gratitude is tainted by the continued defiance and dismissal of reality by those around you.
That said, there’s always hope even in the most complex of circumstances.
You can’t tell me that if you are someone who is aligned to your voyage to tomorrow rather than clinging to your yesterday that there isn’t some buoyancy in your soul and joy in your heart. Events in the last few weeks have finally given all of us some belief that there is some sort of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
(And if you aren’t that person, you probably don’t’ read this blog, LOL.)
On this day, all of us who believe in the opportunities of tomorrow should give thanks for our ability to do the hard work to arrive there reinvented, rejuvenated, and reimagined!
Notable Keynotes : Lessons in Leadership for Your Post Pandemic Future – Godiva Chocolates, McVities & Ulker – “What’s Your Tin Can?”
I’ve been running a video series from my virtual broadcast studio, with insight gleaned from over 25 years on stages around the world speaking to organizations about innovation, change, the future and disruption.
This story? It involves a presentation in London, England for these global food icons on fast paced retail change. There are powerful lessons in today’s eventual post-pandemic recovery.
Daily Inspiration: “When shift happens, why do you not shift?”
“When shift happens, why do you not shift?” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Third times a charm! – that’s the final, authoritative quote for today – the third attempt!
The next to last? I had this image below, and was about to commit to it but still didn’t think it was quite right: “When shift happens, why do you remain stuck in your tin can rut?”
The tin can reference? It goes to the heart of a story I often told on stage and one that I filmed in the studio yesterday – how Star-Kist saw a $200 million revenue uplift by switching to resealable pouches instead of tin-cans for certain products. A wonderful product innovation – particularly when they had been using tin cans for 110 years.
Don’t get stuck – always challenge yourself to align with the future, because it’s pretty likely that barring ill-health or unfortunate circumstances, you are going to end up there! That was the thought running through my head when I was putting together the first version of today’s quote, which looked like this: “What’s your tin can? Why are you clinging to your old future, when we’re so busy building a vastly new and different one?” Too wordy!
As I started typing this first blog post after assembling the picture, I instinctively wrote: “When shift happens, why do you not shift?” At that moment, I knew I had my idea for today. Even so, I changed it yet again.
Here’s the key thing: when people all around you are busy building a different future, what possesses you to cling to your old, out of date one? When it’s pretty obvious that everything you’ve done in the past won’t be done in the future – why do you keep doing what you have been doing before? When it’s extremely likely that your old business model is gone and that you’ll need a dramatically new and different one, why do you still keep investing in the old one? When it is massively evident that what worked for you in the past might be irrelevant in the future, why do you hold yourself to irrelevance?
These are the questions of my world which have always mystified me, and yet have allowed me to build a global career of sharing my insight. Simply put, I think I help people to understand, confront, and adapt to a new and different future. I find it easy to do so; obviously many others do not.
I fully intend to keep doing this, albeit more and more in this virtual space. The more I connect with people throughout my industry and take a look at what is happening, the more I come to realize that there are no other speakers around the world who are doing the sophisticated type of virtual home studio setup that I’ve been doing. If you know of someone who is even remotely close, I’d love to know of them.
Do you want some words to live by? Don’t keep doing what you were doing yesterday: start doing something new and different yesterday that you might have a chance to use tomorrow.
Side note: What I am happiest about with this particular screen grab is that it utilizes the new wide-angle camera lens that I purchased some weeks back. I’ve been building and scraping together this studio carefully, ever mindful that my new business model isn’t quite yet firing on all cylinders. I was never really happy with the 12-year-old lens that I was using for this particular camera angle – this new one rocks in terms of clarity!
Reconstruction, Recovery, Renewal : 6 Clients, 6 Industries, 6 Virtual “Keynote” Sessions for Aligning to 2021 and Beyond!
What’s your plan for 2021?
It will be a long slog towards the future as the world works to slowly emerge from the pandemic, but there are signs of hope. Promising vaccine candidates, more political stability, less global uncertainty (hopefully), and perhaps a bit less craziness. And as I noted in my Daily Inspiration earlier today, a lot of work to recover from the incredible damage that has been done to global economies over the last year, and indeed, the last four years.
My mindset has always been that the pandemic has set in place a series of massively transformative changes that will forever change the entire foundation of entire industries. Some organizations are waking up to that fact. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be delivering some fresh baked insight into ‘what comes next and what should we do about it?’ Much of it is found within my keynote theme, “2021: What To Expect When Your Future is Unexpected: Understanding The Trends that Define Your New Future!” You can learn more over at https://2021.jimcarroll.com
What’s up? Here are a few of the upcoming and recent virtual keynotes I’m soon to deliver from my virtual broadcast studio
- the future of restaurants and fast casual : a mid-size pizza franchise owners association is having me in for a talk on what the restaurant and food delivery business will look like into 2021, with a focus on consumer behaviour, disruptive ideas and more
- the future of agriculture: what happens when a sector is faced with severe labor challenges, global markets in upheaval, a reluctance to spend and invest due to economic damage? I’ll be revisiting the future of the agriculture and farming industry for an agriculture supply company
- the future of economic development: how has the global economy shifted, and how can a region align itself to the tectonic changes that have occurred through a focus on new economic opportunities that might result?
- the future of retail: how do we maintain the speed of innovation achieved through curtsied pickup, logistics and last mile delivery? What trends stick and which ones go?
- the future of healthcare: what’s been learned through 2020, and how do we apply it to the future?
- the future of energy: how have concepts of ‘work’ and ‘place’ forever changed future energy demand and infrastructure, among other topics
Are you thinking about 2021, or are you stuck in your current pandemic-blindness rut? Maybe it’s time you start to fire up your future-opportunity imagination engines!
Ready to go? Start here – watch this. And then, reach out, and I’ll bring you into my home studio for a virtual tour and an overview of how I will help you accelerate into your next future!
Daily Inspiration: “Rebuild, reconstruct, rehabilitate, repair, restore, reset: you too must formulate your own Marshall Plan for recovery!”
“Rebuild, reconstruct, rehabilitate, repair, restore, reset: you too must formulate your own Marshall Plan for recovery!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Is it over yet?
Not quite yet, but there are incredible signs of renewal and hope this morning finally!
Even so, there is a tremendous amount of hard work that has to come. Trust has been destroyed, respect has been squandered, rational thinking has been put aside, sanity has checked out, hatred has been unleashed, and realistic strategies have been plundered. It’s going to take a huge amount of effort to bring back anything great again when so much has been made worse through the egomaniacal thinking that the future is something that is something easily made better through fiat via angry tweets.
The road back is going to be long, complex, and horrifically difficult, particularly given that a vast number of people have chosen fantasy over reality, easy mythical solutions as opposed to actual hard work.
With this thinking in mind, I’ve just ordered the book “Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II,” for a good, hard look at what worked when a similar moment in history, wherein a huge section of an entire population fell prey to the delusions of a dictatorial mind, somehow found their way to a path of recovery. In my mind, I need to understand the past to try to comprehend any sort of road to the future.
The damage that has been done is pretty extraordinary; simply read my 2017 post, What Comes Next with the Decline of an Empire.”
But we’re at a new and complex starting point as the nightmare of now gives way to a cold, hard analysis of the destruction in its aftermath.
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