Jim Carroll delivered the keynote address at the Indiana Municipal Power Authority (IMPA) annual meeting in French Lick, Indiana in April 2019, speaking to senior executives representing small and mid-size municipal power utilities from communities across the state. The talk explored the transformational forces reshaping the electrical grid — the rapid emergence of wind and solar, accelerating battery storage costs, the rise of microgrids, and the early but unstoppable wave of electric vehicles fundamentally changing load patterns. Carroll challenged attendees to look past the regulatory and political noise and focus on the pace of technological change that was making the old utility business model increasingly fragile. His central message: innovation leaders don’t wait for permission — they move early, adapt fast, and treat disruption as opportunity rather than threat.
Upcoming Keynote: The Future of Education @CECUed 2019!
It’s been announced that I will be keynoting the @CECUed 2019 – Career Education Colleges & Universities – conference in New Orleans this June, with a talk on the future of education and careers.
Velocity of knowledge is everything!
Get in the speedy frame of mind by watching this pre-event video which I put together!
Daily Inspiration: “When the village is raising an idiot…”
“Look, if the village is raising an idiot, it’s probably a good idea to leave town!”
Apparently windmills cause cancer.
Oh, and the earth is flat, man didn’t walk on the moon, JFK was assassinated by little green men, and the holocaust never happened.
That’s the insanity of the world that we now live in.
Here’s an interesting thought – in the era of the Jetson’s, where do you think companies are going to choose to locate future economic investment? In an area or region that subscribes to the ideas of the crazy, goes to the church of the lunatic fringe, and embraces the ideals of the white supremacist?
Or, will it choose to locate in an era of open minded, progressive, future-aligned people who think that science is a real thing?
I’m off to Indiana later today; tomorrow, I’ll speak to several hundred utility executives from small and mid-sized towns throughout the state. Utility is being massively disrupted by science. According to Bloomberg, 90% of the $150 billion to be invested in energy in the future will go into wind, solar, renewables, battery storage tech, microgrids, EVs and more. Only a small portion will go into natgas, oil, nuclear….
So these regions really have a choice. Wind doesn’t provide power 24 hours a day? Um, there’s this thing called battery storage technology, and it is fundamentally re-architecting what we can do with renewables through advanced architectural design that loads it into the grid only when required.
I know that my audience in the morning will be a mixed bag – and I won’t be able to reach those who are busy with an idiot.
But I will tell my story of the reality of the future to those who still have an opportunity to leave town.
##motivationalquotes #inspirationalquotes #speakerlife????
You’ll Always Have the Opportunity to Reinvent! What I Really Learned from Frogs in Texas!
It’s 2002. The dot.com collapse has happened. Business is in a funk. Nobody is making decisions about anything. Aggressive indecision is settling in. It was a pretty dismal time.
Up to that point, I’d been online since 1982. In the 90’s, I’d built a remarkable career riding the wave of the emerging Internet, providing audiences worldwide insight into the disruptive impact it would have on business, and the remarkable business opportunities it was presenting. I’d been in the media all the time; had several successful radio shows; was co-writing 34 books; I had media crews coming to my house to interview me for the national news.
And then it all came crashing down. The dot.com collapse had the potential to kill my career.
Around this time, I had been booked to go on stage and headline a national SAP event in Toronto, Canada, my home town. I was kind of pissed off, to be honest. At my circumstances. At the disbelief in how people had lost initiative and their belief in the future.
I took the fire in my belly onto the stage.
I told a story about frogs I had seen on a road in Texas the previous week while speaking at an event at the Woodlands Resort. I made the story up on stage on the fly. I spun into the story of the frogs the problem in the world of business today. I spoke about my son and the power of initiative that I saw in him he was 3 years old. I told the audience they had to get out of their self-imposed funk.
I was probably talking to myself. I had to get out of my own funk. I was yelling at myself on stage. This is how it unfolded.
That little performance – captured above – was one of those moments that truly change my life. A fellow named Lloyd Adams – now a senior executive with SAP – saw me catch fire on stage, and immediately booked me to headline a similar event for SAP in Chicago the next week. That led to another event. Another booking. A career reinvention based on a new message. A massive change in my circumstances.
It all goes back to those 3 minutes (cut down to 2:20 for Twitter). From there, I never looked back. I turned the story of the Frogs into a book; the book into a keynote; the keynote into a reinvented career.
And listen to my closing line. “There’s lots more yet to come!” After that came Youtube, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, #IOT, self driving cars, 3d printing and so much more. We’d barely scratched of the future in 2002.
Lesson learned: It’s never too late to reinvent. You just need the right spark! And never believe those who tell you the future has no more surprises. It always does!
Daily inspiration: “Insurmountable opportunities…..can be beat!”
“Those ‘insurmountable opportunities’ that block your way can always be beat!”
My youngest son turns 24 today. How did this happen?
Both my sons are remarkable young men, and both have made their way into my stories on stage over a 25 year speaking career – because they have been so inspirational! And so this quote comes from Thomas and the ‘hockey blocker,’ a story I first began telling on stage in 2003 as part of my ‘What I Learned from Frogs in Texas’ business parable.
The quote comes from Walt Kelly and was used in a well known Pogo strip – ‘We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.’ A massive admission of helpless defeat – but the embedded contradiction in the phrase is meant to get you thinking.
Which brings me to the hockey blocker – as seen in this photo.
For many years, I told the story on stage of Tom and his hockey blocker. You see, when he was 3, he wanted one (a goalie blocker glove). We explained to him that we wouldn’t just go and buy one at the spur of a moment…
So he made his own. Out of a cereal box. While he was at his sitters for the day. Because we told him he couldn’t have one, he made his own.
What an inspiration! He kept it and used it for two years, until it was absolutely falling apart.
Around that time, I often used Tom and the story of his hockey blocker as part of my “What I Learned from Frogs in Texas” story — which eventually became a book of the same title. His part in the story was the power of initiative, determination and action. It remains for me a powerful lesson.
Happy birthday Tom! Always make sure that you construct the hockey blockers in your life – and always take the initiative!
No block is too significant to get in the way of success! Around that time, I often used Tom and the story of his hockey blocker as part of my “What I Learned from Frogs in Texas” story — which eventually became a book of the same title. Read more about that remarkable story – and in essence, how the hockey blocker story became a part of a 3 minute stage performance that changed my life.
Happy birthday Tom! Always make sure that you construct the hockey blockers in your life – and always take the initiative!
Daily Inspiration: “You can’t procrastinate your way to the future!”
“You can’t procrastinate your way to the future!”
Don’t wait until tomorrow what you should be doing today, because it is going to be here earlier than you think!
With that line of thinking, consider the year 2025 – check the slide and look near the bottom of the image. That’s the cover photo from my ’25 Trends for 2025’ trends piece I put together years ago. It’s a simple grab bag of a wide variety of disconnected trends, and was offered up as food for thought for a global client to encourage them to align their innovation engine to what comes next.
You can read the document here: https://2025.jimcarroll.com
Last year, the trends piece caught the attention of the senior leadership team at Royal Carribbean Cruise Lines – they were holding a global leadership meeting in Miami, and needed someone to kick off the event.
As things would have it, they found the document and found me. Before I knew it, I was on stage, telling the story of 12 of those trends, and putting into perspective the impact of those trends on the future of the cruise industry.
The undercurrent of my talk, though, was that of many of my presentations – that they should have a compelling sense of urgency with these trends, despite the fact that the year 2025 might seem far away.
Because it’s not: and neither are the trends outlined within the document, such as ‘vertical farming.’ I covered how quickly new methods of ‘growing up’ are coming about as massive global urbanization takes hold, as we learn to grow crops in vertical towers inside cities to feed growing populations. That trend is happening quickly, and provides a potentially huge opportunity to the future architecture of cruise ships.
So don’t delay – get involved now! Understand the trend, experiment with it, learn from it, and discover what it might mean. That was my message for them, and it’s my message for you.
Because you can’t delay your way into the future!
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