The insurance industry has long adapted to AI as a powerful analytical tool, particularly with fraud detection. Jim took them into the future of insurance fraud, challenging them to think about the new insurance risk issues that emerge with ‘the end of reality.’
Keynote: YPO Gold Houston – “The Acceleration of AI” – Houston, Texas
What do you get when you get a room full of CEOs eager to understand the potential investment and venture capital opportunities emerging in the many different aspects of the global AI industry? You get a highly interactive, engaging, and experiential keynote from Jim! By way of background, YPO Houston is an organization of 250 Chief Executive Officers /
Presidents who qualified for membership by first being pare of YPO (the Young Presidents Organization) and then graduating at 50 year old to Gold. To be in YPO you must reach certain
requirements including company size of 20 million in revenue and 100 employees. Each year the YPO Program Chairman, with the help of the membership, put together an
Education Year of 12 Events – with this one focused on the theme of “The Art of Innovation” (Artificial Intelligence). This program was the focus of a great deal of attention and ultimately completely “sold out”.
Daily Inspiration: Mastering Innovation – “World class innovators focus on skills partnerships as a key success factor!”
“World class innovators focus on skills partnerships as a key success factor!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Futurist Jim Carroll is running his Daily Inspiration series for March 11/18 on the theme of “What is it that World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?” The leadership ideas are based on an original keynote he gave early in 2009 after a client asked him to identify these issues. He developed this carefully curated list based on 15 years of observations of how his global clients responded to fast-paced change.
Organizations used to hire all the people they needed to do all the things that needed to be done. In a world of massive knowledge acceleration and specialization, this no longer makes sense – and indeed, is impossible. World-class innovators, as a result, pursue a strategy in which their ability to quickly form external knowledge partners will define their success going forward.
What I saw twenty years ago when compiling my list of world-class innovators was a group of companies who realized this reality – and innovated their way through it. World-class innovators realized early on that this business model of a structure that had all key skills in place was no longer possible. Instead, they realized they needed to evolve into a structure of ensuring continuous availability to what I have long come to call ‘just-in-time knowledge.‘
Mastering this skill is one of the most important success factors today. Think about it: these are the issues faced by organizations today:
- Accelerating knowledge: So much new knowledge is now generated that an organization cannot internalize all the knowledge it needs.
- Skills specialization: As skills become extremely narrow, identifying, accessing, and harnessing all required skills becomes impossible.
- Emergence of new careers: Organizations must continually adapt to the rapid emergence of new careers emerging from faster knowledge specialization.
- “Just-in-time knowledge”: Getting the right knowledge at the right time for the right purpose from the right partner becomes a critical success factor!
My slides a the time caught the reality of the trends that were emerging in that context. They also took a look at what was happening with the Millenials entering the workforce for the first time:
- More than 50% would choose self-employment over a full-time job, given the decline of long-term job security – they would rather be responsible for their future!
- this new generation had little patience for career paths and job longevity, with most thinking that 2-5 years with a company would be a good long-term career
- one survey shows that for this very same generation, 67% were already thinking about looking for their next job on their very first day in a new job!
Corporate loyalty was on its deathbed! These were the trends emerging in the early 2000s, and I was witnessing the organizations that were responding to the reality of these trends seemed to have more success overall in hiring the required talent and skills.
What was the impact of combining these trends in the context of accelerating knowledge and skills specialization? I laid out the case for my audiences:
- massive specialization drives a supply-demand imbalance
- result: future workforce will expand and contract based on need
- access to specialized skills will be critical – and will define success
- Success comes from the ability to deliver rapid partnerships, structures, capabilities
And in that context, this quote grabbed from my research described the future of skills and talent:
….outsourcing will become less about cost containment and more about accessing the best skills and expertise….”
Asian Banker, December 2006
In other words, the concept of outsourcing was moving from being based on a cost reduction strategy (“let’s save money by moving jobs overseas“) and more focused on “how can we access the specialized global talent that we need to do the things that need to be done?” This was a massive shift, and world-class innovators were leading the way.
How? For those world-class innovators, the idea of workforce innovation was taking hold. It was becoming focused on the ability to pursue and innovate with different workplace policies, alternative career paths, changes to workforce structure, experientially oriented job descriptions, skills banks for specialized skills, and more.
The interesting thing is that all of these trends came together as the global pandemic enveloped the world; suddenly, workforce innovation was no longer just the purview of global innovation leaders, but was becoming mainstream – and in fact, necessary for survival.
Today, some organizations understand that relentless workforce and skills innovation is a key component of their overall innovation strategy, and you can see it in their success. Others still seem to cling to the command-and-control hierarchical business structure of the late 20th century – and in their actions, one can see the dinosaurs of a long-gone era lumber along in complacency!
Daily Inspiration: Mastering Innovation – “World class innovators focus on long term wins through constant incremental improvements”
“World class innovators focus on long term wins through constant incremental improvements” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Futurist Jim Carroll is running his Daily Inspiration series for March 11/18 on the theme of “What is it that World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?” The leadership ideas are based on an original keynote he gave early in 2009 after a client asked him to identify these issues. He developed this carefully curated list based on 15 years of observations of how his global clients responded to fast-paced change.
Want something boring? This is it! It’s the BIG impact of the new SMALL incrementalism!
Huh what?
It involves thinking like this: “How can we continue to evolve our solutions in small ways that provide regular, continuous improvement for our customers?” And a realization that success can come from pursuing a mindset that success can be a cumulative process with these key attributes:
- Small steps add up: a growing recognition that you don’t always need the BIG wins – but instead, a realization that many small wins can be bigger!
- The new incrementalism: an innovation mindset that knows that a regular series of incremental improvements can be better than a big leap forward!
- Continuous small innovation: knowing that small ideas can be BIG ideas when they are grouped for cumulative improvements – think small, act often!
- Chasing new methodologies: not all innovation involves new revenue and products – it can come from finding all the new ideas on how to do old things!
This is a trend I noticed while researching my World Class Innovators list, and I certainly found several concepts that fit into the box I was building:
For example, in the utility industry, there was (and is) a growing realization that they didn’t just have to focus on building new power facilities – they could see significant returns by fixing what they have in place.
- T7% of power on transmission and distribution lines is lost as heat
- reduce loss by 10% – would equal all the new wind power installed in the US in 2006
- (or three new coal-fired power plants)
- if the US system were just 5% more efficient, that’s the same as reducing the fuel and greenhouse emissions from 53 million cars
The same type of thinking was happening in the energy sector:
- the typical oil field recovers only 35% of what is available – that’s only 1 out of 3 barrels of oil!
- the balance too difficult or too expensive
- yet new thermal, chemical, or gas injection techniques allow 20-30 billion barrels for every 1% increase in recovery methodology
- result? An example is Shell’s Schoonebeek (Netherlands) field where only 18% was recovered; now focusing on reopening, and up to 14,000 barrels a day
In the auto industry, due to environmental and political concerns, there was a new focus on incrementalism as a pathway to innovation.
- today’s typical automotive system uses only 25% of the energy in the tank — the balance is lost to waste, heat, inefficiency
- ‘I don’t believe there are big step changes, but the incremental biting-off of small percentages.”
And then there was a growing recognition that new trends involving green energy and other ideas would lead to incremental improvements:
- “We produce now 40% more material as a global company than we did in 1990 on the same amount of energy….:” Dupont
This might not seem like terribly exciting stuff – after all, when people are focused on innovation, they are often thinking about the BIG ideas, the BIG inventions, the BIG initiatives, the BIG thinking. And yet, at the same time, there can be a lot of innovation to be found in thinking incrementally, achieving small wins, and taking small steps that add up to BIG returns.
That’s what I found that world-class innovators were often focused on, and so it made its way onto my list of “What World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do.”
There might be some powerful thinking for you here: what are the small incremental steps that you might start taking today that will start you on your larger voyage to a BIGGER future?
Daily Inspiration: Mastering Innovation – “World class innovators check their speed and focus on corporate agility”
“World class innovators check their speed and focus on corporate agility” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Futurist Jim Carroll is running his Daily Inspiration series for March 11/18 on the theme of “What is it that World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?” The leadership ideas are based on an original keynote he gave early in 2009 after a client asked him to identify these issues. He developed this carefully curated list based on 15 years of observations of how his global clients responded to fast-paced change.
You would think that I’m somewhat focused on the issue of speed as a core metric of success.
I come by it honestly.
After all, several of my books play into the theme – The Future Belongs to Those Who Are Fast being one of them. (Another one carries the theme in the subtitle: Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast.)
And yet, this isn’t just a simple idea to latch onto to write a few books. At the time I was compiling my list of ‘world-class innovators’ during the global economic recession of 2008-09, there was a clear focus on the issue of responding to speed through corporate agility. Check the Google Trends insight chart for that!
All around me, I witnessed organizations and their leadership teams becoming focused on their speed of response to rapidly changing circumstances – there was a lot of talk about the need for corporate agility and flexibility. I saw this within the discussion points raised by the companies who were booking me around that time – the CEO or other individual responsible for bringing me into a corporate event needed examples and stories of how ‘world-class innovators’, were learning to respond to fast change with fast action.
I captured this trend later in many of my presentations, where I directly took on the issue of speed and agility.
My observations?
“We live in the most staggering time of acceleration. The challenge is this – the challenge is comprehending the speed! I spend my time with fortune 500 organizations worldwide helping them to comprehend and adjust and align ourselves to a world in which the future belongs to those who are fast. I’m going to talk about the future, I’m going to talk about trends – and it’s going to be your ability to ingest these trends and turn them into opportunity that will increasingly define your future!
If you think about what is going on – if you think about the speed of change – it’s so encompassing, it’s so overwhelming, that increasingly the future belongs to those who are fast. Every day you open the news, you look at what is occurring and you realize the scope of change is stunning. We’re in an era in which multiple trends are coming together – artificial intelligence, 3d printing, additive manufacturing, the internet of things. You take all of the trends which are coming together and you realize that we‘ve never witnessed a period in which so much change is coming at us so quickly.
We’re in a situation in which companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived based on ideas not yet generated use materials not yet invented with manufacturing methodologies that aren’t yet in existence.
I think increasingly that’s our reality going forward. Success will not come from your history, success will not come from your legacy, success will not come from what you’ve done in the past – it will come from your ability to ingest fast-paced change. What you really need to do going forward is think big start small, and scale faster!”
The idea was also captured in my World Class Innovators video – noting that not only did they focus on speed, but they also obsess over it!
(My favorite moment in the clip came with the perfectly timed landing behind me. We filmed this at the end of a runway at Toronto’s Pearson Airport; it took a few takes to perfect the timing!)
Corporate agility? The idea was becoming all the rage – fast-moving realities meant that the ability to respond with the speed of action was critical. This fed into a keynote I did for the global leadership team of Yum! Brands – that’s the parent of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut – in Las Vegas.
Quite clearly, a new leadership paradigm was emerging, one that lasts to today, that consists of three key ideas:
- Speed: An acknowledgment by leadership that speed now defines success – and that the future belongs to those who are fast!
- Agility: Success is defined by the ability to respond to rapidly changing products, markets, business models, economic trends, competitors, and skills issues.
- Results: The organization quickly pivots with identified trends, responds to fast emerging volatility, and is now structured for speed.
The idea that the future belongs to those who are fast and that organizations need to think big, start small, and scale fast?
It directly comes from the fact that world-class innovators focus on those ideas as key factors for thriving in a world that is becoming ever faster, and which the era of acceleration is clearly upon us!
Daily Inspiration: Mastering Innovation – “World class innovators focus on ingesting fast ideas”
“World class innovators focus on ingesting fast ideas” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Futurist Jim Carroll is running his Daily Inspiration series for the weeks of March 11/18 on the theme of “What is it that World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?” The leadership ideas are based on an original keynote he gave early in 2009 after a client asked him to identify these issues. He developed this carefully curated list based on 15 years of observations of how his global clients responded to fast-paced change.
An idea on its own is just an idea. Shared ideas are different – they accelerate innovation through faster discovery of opportunities! The fact is, if you have an idea and I have an idea, we have two ideas. If we share those ideas, we have something powerful! And the fact is, we can never be too short of great ideas. In that context, world-class innovators recognize that ideas are their most powerful asset, knowing that the smallest of shared ideas can become the most powerful opportunity.
What I noticed when compiling my list of world-class innovations was this: world-class innovators were becoming relentlessly focused on doubling down on their ability to share ideas, chase ideas, find ideas, develop ideas, and internalize ideas. It seemed they came to realize that ideas were becoming the new currency of success – and in that context, the convergence of a variety of trends suddenly allowed organizations to accelerate their ‘idea machines,’ and hence, accelerate their capabilities for innovative thinking. Four key trends were underway.
- Sapiential circles: We have connected the minds of people around the world who share an interest in a topic or issue — they become an idea-generating sapiential circle.
- Social connectivity: The rise of social networks led to an explosion in the source of new ideas – powerful discussions about anything and everything in open view.
- Open innovation: The trend of cooperative open-source development and other innovations led to the birth of new ideas and opportunities – tracking them became critical!
- Idea platforms: Powerful collaborative software platforms emerged that allowed organizations to work faster, smarter, and collaborate more – and share new ideas faster!
Suddenly, there were some increasingly powerful tools and idea machines available all over the place – and world-class innovators were rapidly aligning and adapting to them, recognizing they would provide a path to the future of innovative thinking.
Sapiential circles
One of the most profound of these trends had to do with the rise of “ever-growing sapiential circles” – a core trend that is driving rapid knowledge growth, and which is having a huge impact on idea sharing. The phrase comes from Warren Bennis, a distinguished professor at Southern California’s Marshall School of Business — he was referring to how the knowledge of a group tended to increase exponentially as new members were added to the group. What we are witnessing in the world today is a dramatic increase in our human sapiential circles as a result of global connectivity.
Quite simply, we have connected the minds of people around the world who share an interest in a topic or issue — they become a sapiential circle. The result is dramatic — for example, the amount of medical knowledge used to double every eight years but now doubles every 78 days; it is said that half of what an engineering student learns in their first year is obsolete or revised by the time they graduate because new engineering knowledge is shared so quickly; discoveries now occur quicker simply because like minds are connecting quicker.
Social connectivity
The explosion in the growth of social networks is both good and bad. They’re massively destructive when it comes to social order, politics, personal ethical behavior, and more. yet at the same time, they are an invaluable source of idea insight. Customers are talking about products and services in the open, providing a powerful feedback mechanism. People share concepts ideas and information quickly and openly, allowing news ideas to bubble and then explode into global view. Companies can launch new ideas and instantly gauge potential reactions, and as a result, change their future trajectory faster. So many things happen all at once that quite simply, social networks lead to the future happening all at once, everywhere, all the time.
Open innovation
The trend towards open software as embodied by the Linux operating system defined the future of many industries, with the idea that open and shared research and development could provide a better product or service. Today, everything from farm tractors to home automation technology to energy microgrids is being impacted by open source ideas and open innovation – providing a powerful source of innovation ideas for any world-class innovator that chooses to plug in, tune in, and listen and participate in the development.
Idea platforms
In the early days of collaboration, organizations were using software like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Sharepoint, Skype, and Google Docs to share ideas and information. Today, software like Slack and Teams allows organizations to collaborate and share information faster; GitHub accelerates software development through collaborative development; Zoom allows massive interpersonal video-based collaboration. World-class innovators adapted and aligned to the use of these types of platforms early and often, knowing that a solid foundation for idea sharing was a solid foundation for faster innovation.
Take all of these trends and add them together, and it’s quite clear that we are in a different world with fast ideas. Quite simply, world-class innovators learned early on, and know to this day, that the ability to create and nurture a culture, foundation, platform, and methodology for idea generation, sharing, and listening to these fast ideas would be fundamental to their future innovation success!
Fast ideas matter. Capturing them, nurturing them, sharing them, and learning from them matters more!
(Note: The images for this post were generated through a text-to-image AI tool. The arrival of AI will accelerate idea sharing even faster than before, and world-class innovators are already aligning with this reality.)
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