Jim Carroll: The Futurist Who Knows Your Industry

The Futurist Who Knows Your Industry. 

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Daily Inspiration: “History tells us that 10% of organizations become breakthrough performers during a recession – because they decide to double down on innovation and opportunity despite lingering and pervasive uncertainty!”

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“History tells us that 10% of organizations become breakthrough performers during a recession – because they decide to double down on innovation and opportunity despite lingering and pervasive uncertainty!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

On this recession thing – how about those markets!

I guess it’s a good time to roll out a memo to the CEO! After all, as many senior executives began to panic and make rash moves, it’s important that they don’t lose sight of what history has taught us – right now, when things are uncertain, volatile, and unpredictable, is the best time to double down on opportunity.

Why is that? Here’s a key observation I dug out from some research by the head of innovation at GE some years back, when he studied how organizations performed in a period of economic decline:

He has researched four U.S. slowdowns of the last half century: the oil shocks of the early 1970s, the crippling unemployment of the early 1980s, the recession of the early 1990s and the dotcom bust of 2000. “In each period, about 60 per cent of companies barely survived, while 30 per cent died. But the remaining ten per cent or so actually became breakthrough performers and that’s mostly because of the choices they made during the recession period.”

The keyword there is choice. The choice that you need to make right now is to focus on growth, particularly, growth through innovation.

The same thing proved to be true with the great economic downturn of 2008-2009 – some of the biggest disruptive innovations of our time were born in the ashes of the economic ruin of that era. Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla – all emerged or saw dramatic growth during one of the worst recessions of our time.

Recessions and economic volatility are opportunities – we know that through history! With that in mind, send this memo to your CEO. He or she needs to read it right now!

You can grab the PDF if you like! Share it now!

 

Memo to the CEO – 2022

To: CEO’s Worldwide

From: Jim Carroll

Date: May 19, 2022

I know things are extremely busy, particularly given the current climate of economic uncertainty. Yet, there is a key issue that you need to make sure is on your agenda.<

Innovation.

The most important thing that you can do right now, as you work to navigate your way through the challenging economic shoals that surround you, is to make sure that you don’t kill it in its tracks. My observations are that you risk doing so. That’s worrisome.

In the last few years, you’ve supported a core group of people in your organization who have become relentlessly focused on innovation, and you’ve created a culture that nurtures their efforts. They’ve been obsessively focused on process, service, and product innovation. They’re matching the needs of customers through accelerated innovation, are taking you into new markets through rapid product innovation, and are figuring out what to do in an economy that changes at a furious pace.

In the months and years to come, as volatility rages and we go into a new era of economic uncertainty, these executives are going to be some of the most important and critical individuals on your team.

So why is it they are telling me that they are finding less of a sense of urgency than a few months or a year ago? Is it the current climate of uncertainty, and a creeping culture of aggressive indecision?

Leaders set the tone. The tone you need to set for your leading innovators is that innovation matters now more than ever.

Here’s a key reality I have shared with my global clients through previous periods of economic uncertainty: only 10% of organizations become breakthrough performers during a recession – but that is because they have decided to double down on their innovation efforts. The other 90% become the marginal performers, the weak, the failures.

That’s why your innovation heroes are so important. These are the folks who are willing to stick their heads up, take a risk, and do something new and dramatic. It’s your innovation heroes who will help you to continue to open the future despite volatility and uncertainty.

You must ensure that they still have the courage to take risks. To open new markets. Accelerate the adoption of transformative technology.  To realign the business for the future. To respond to rapid business model disruption. To continue to do what needs to be done to continue to run the business better, grow it, and transform it.

Celebrate them. Elevate them. Make their contributions known.

You have a momentary chance to ensure that you stay focused on the opportunities that come from your innovation heroes.

If you want to chat about this, give me a call. I’m here.

Sincerely,

Futurist Jim Carroll

Rethinking Innovation: Sometimes, it’s Not What You Think It Is!

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I do a lot of Fortune 1000 leadership events – and it’s important that my leadership keynote speaks to the concept of innovation in a way that is relevant to everyone in the room. Here’s a clip where I am reframing the concept so that it doesn’t seem like something mystical, out of reach, and difficult to achieve.

Hence, three simple things about innovation!

  • it’s urgent that the organization focuses on innovation right now
  • it’s important that as they do so, they re-evaluate the concept of what they believe innovation to be
  • it’s critical that they take on a large number of experimental projects oriented toward innovative thinking

Putting each of these issues into perspective explains my thinking:

Do it now: Every industry is faced with unprecedented change. Think about financial services: there’s the impact of mobile banking, the transfer of wealth to a new generation who thinks about financial management in entirely different ways, and the emergence of new competitors. The list goes on and on. You can come up with a similar list for any industry. That’s why it is important that organizations establish a culture in which innovation is a priority, in order to keep up with and take advantage of the trends swirling around them

Reframe the concept:  Many organizations fail at innovation because they don’t really understand what it could be. Many people think innovation is for cool people who design cool products that change the world: call it the “Apple effect.” But for years, I’ve been reframing innovation from another perspective that helps to open up the minds of people as to its opportunity.

Innovation is a culture in which the leadership and the entire team continually challenge themselves with three questions: what can I do to run the business better, grow the business, or transform the business?

Experiment – a lot:  Technology is the driver of disruptive business model change in every industry. Social networks, new competitors, the Internet of Things, the Amazon effect — you name it, and there is an absolute flood of disruption. Most organizations don’t have the skill or insight to deal with fas technology-driven change. But world-class innovators continually establish a regular series of projects by which they can build up their experience with the stuff that comes from the idea flood. The more experience they build up, the more “experiential capital” they create. I’ve argued that going into the high-velocity 21st-century economy, “experiential capital” will become as critical if not more important than financial capital.

Suffice it to say, if you rethink innovation in terms of these three basic concepts, it will help you deal with a world in which the future belongs to those who are fast!

Daily Inspiration: “If you are too busy making time for excuses, you’ll never find time for success!”

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“If you are too busy making time for excuses, you’ll never find time for success!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Organizations fail because they have failure ingrained in their corporate culture – powered by the excuses they make for inaction!

Do you?

It can be difficult to try to be innovative in many organizations. People with an innovation-oriented mindset often find their enthusiasm destroyed when they approach senior management with an initiative. And when their effort is turned back, it can extremely frustrating! What happens is that a series of excuses are made as to why we don’t need to focus on the future right now:

  • we don’t understand it, so we don’t think we need to do it!
  • maybe we shouldn’t confront the tough issues right now
  • we are too busy fighting fires – there’s no time for anything else!
  • we don’t have the skill sets to deal with this!
  • we haven’t thought about this in our strategic planning process
  • we don’t have time to think about it…
  • we don’t have a budget
  • what we’ve been doing all along is perfectly ok, isn’t it?
  • there’s so much going on, and we don’t know where it might fit in terms of priorities!
  • and the worst? it’s too far ahead of its time!

Of course, it’s easy to take this wall of negativity and step back from the project and curb your enthusiasm — and give up!  But real innovators don’t give up! They work to address organizational sclerosis that might be in place. What you should do  is confront these excuses head-on: there are a variety of different reactions depending on the different excuses that are used:

  • if they don’t understand it, educate them! This might involve building a better business case for the initiative; bringing them up to date on the key business drivers and trends that require some bold steps and dramatic change.
  • help them that those who tackle the tough issues usually win. This is a good time to put into perspective the concept of accelerating change. You need to make sure that the leadership team understands that everything around us today is changing faster than ever before, and will continue to do so: business models, methods of customer interaction, and new forms of competition. Business today is all about continually confronting a flood of tough issues; we should be bulking up our capabilities to deal with a world of incessant change.
  • if the organization is always in fire-fighting mode, change the agenda. Maybe they won’t be fighting as many fires over the long term if they have a clear view of the future, and have a strategy that aligns with that future. So rather than asking, “whoah, where’d that come from,” they’re asking “ok, what comes next, and what do we need to do about it?“
  • skillsets don’t give us the capability: That’s a weak excuse: if there are shortfalls in certain key skills to deal with current business realities, deal with it and fix it fast.
  • if it’s not part of the strategic planning process, make it part of it. Every organization has multiple processes in which issues and activities rise to the top because they’ve been identified as fitting within the overall strategic plan. If yours isn’t part of the plan, work to get it there.
  • get people thinking about what comes next: Does the organization have a regular series of forward-looking leadership meetings? Does it take the time to assess the trends which might impact it on a 1, 2, 5, and 10-year basis? Is it busy looking at we have really spent a lot of time thinking about what comes next
  • we don’t have a budget for that! Following the process of getting the initiative into the strategic plan will help to lead to the next step: getting the project properly approved and funded within the overall budget process for the organization.
  • make it clear that it isn’t ok to keep doing the same thing that has been done in the past. You’ve got to clearly articulate the new threats the organization faces and the opportunities that it can pursue as a result of ongoing change.
  • there’s so much going on, and we don’t know where it might fit in terms of priorities! This is a tricky one because, in this type of situation, it’s pretty well certain that there is some weak management in place who doesn’t know how to set a clear action plan that the team must follow. The best bet is to address the other issues on the list and work to put in place a clear business and strategic plan for your initiative, with sound business reasoning as to why it needs to be done.
  • it’s too far ahead of its time! Frame the future of the organization this way: do we want to always be fast followers, or do we truly want to be market leaders?

I will often note on stage that “we develop corporate cultures that stifle — that kill our ability to try to do anything new…..” That’s what you’ve got to work to avoid — it’s not easy to do — but absolutely necessary!

Daily Inspiration: “Abandon your slow. Structure for speed!”

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“Abandon your slow. Structure for speed!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Maybe you need to have a Chief Momentum Officer.

If you’ve been following me for a time, you will that one of my key themes through the years has been that “faster is the new fast” — that the biggest challenge that organizations must face is how to keep up with the high-velocity economy. In almost every industry, particularly post-Covid (although we will never really be ‘post-Covid’), I’m now observing that in many markets and industries, the pace of change is so fast that we need to put in place a senior executive whose sole area of responsibility is ensuring that the organization can keep up with ever-increasing rates of change.

Organizations need to adapt to all kinds of different issues when it comes to the velocity of change: rapidly changing business models, the emergence of new competitors, ever-shrinking product lifecycles, a faster pace of new product development, furious rates of technological innovation, furiously fast new trends in terms of customer interaction, the decreasing shelf-life of knowledge and the more rapid emergence of specialized skills: the list could go on! Layer on top of that the reality that the global pandemic has accelerated all of these trends.

Hence, the likely emergence of the new position of “Chief Momentum Officer.” This individual will carry a number of responsibilities, such as:

  • managing the product innovation pipeline, so that the organization has a constant supply of new, innovative products, as existing products become obsolete, marginalized, or unprofitable
  • managing the talent pipeline, so that the organization has the ability to quickly ingest all kinds of specialized new skills
  • managing the technology pipeline, so that the organization can adapt itself to constantly improving and ever-more sophisticated IT tools that will help to better manage, run, grow and transform the business
  • maintain and continually enhance brand and corporate image; as I’ve written here many times before, brands can become “tired” and irrelevant if they aren’t continually freshened and refreshed
  • ensuring that the organization is continuing to explore new areas for opportunity and that it has the right degrees of innovation momentum
  • that the business processes and structure of the organization are fine-tuned on a continuous basis so that it can keep up with all the fast-change swirling around it
  • ensuring that a sufficient number of “experiential” programs are underway with respect to the product, branding, markets, and other areas so that the overall expertise level of the organization is continually enhanced

In other words, the CMO has two key responsibilities:

  • keeping a fine-tuned eye on the trends which will impact the organization in the future, and which will serve to increase the velocity that the organization is subjected to and;
  • keeping their hands on the appropriate levers throughout the organization such that it can keep evolving at the pace that these future trends will demand.

I don’t know if that makes perfect sense, but I think its a good issue to think about!

 

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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.

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Definitions: Core • Deep Dive I • Deep Dive II
Series: 2026 • Megatrends • Forward • Tomorrow