Futurist Jim Carroll, at CRIM 2010, outlines how global CEO’s are positioning their organizations for growth, through a focus on long term transformative trends. As the path to an economic recovery becomes clearer, I’m spending a lot of time speaking at leadership events for strategies for the upturn.
The return of growth
My mantra about innovation is that it is always about three questions: how do you run the business better, grow the business, and transform the business. Address those three issues, and you’ve nailed the essence of innovation.
Since the economic downturn, most of my global clients have been focused on the first issue: how can we run the business better? They’ve been razor-arrow sharp on achieving operational excellence, managing costs, downsizing, and other critical steps necessary to survival.
Now that’s changed.
In the last few months, I’ve had a significant number of bookings — often by senior VP or CEO level execs within Fortune 1000 organizations — for keynotes at leadership meetings that have the purpose of examining how to grow the business and transform the business.
In other words, folks, GROWTH IS BACK. I think the mindset of the global Fortune 1000 is shifting quickly to strategies that are aimed at transitioning products and markets; generating revenue where revenue hasn’t existed before; growth through acquisition; and countless other innovation strategies aimed at growth. And they’re thinking as to what they need to do this; how do they realign their skills base to deal with rapid change ; how do they more rapidly share ideas on fast emerging opportunities; how do they partner up in order to move faster?
This is the fifth recession I’ve gone through in my professional career. I’ve seen these signs before.
Growth is definitely back in business.
- Read: Success Comes to Those Who Evolve
The Innovation Killers
A great little video clip from a recent keynote that outlines the challenges you face if you try and be an innovator!
You can find some useful information on dealing with innovation under the Innovation Inspiration section of my site, and through the Innovation tag.
Video: Innovators thrive on fast paced ideas
Jim challenges an audience to think about collaboration in the era of the ‘global idea machine’.
In this case, Jim was the opening keynote speaker for the 2010 US Navy/Marine/Air Force Child Youth Program conference in Dallas, Texas, and was there to challenge them to think differently in terms of service delivery, particularly as parents and children on military bases come to expect different forms of support and interaction.
Why social networking is like teenage sex
I used this a lot in the past, but it’s probably good to repeat it here; maybe there is a little too much hype around social networking, particularly around the context of marketing.
Given that’ it’s probably a good time to have a little bit of fun with the issue.
- no one is sure what it is, but they hear that its great
- everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it
- those who say they are doing it are probably lying
- the few who are doing it aren’t doing it very well
- everyone hopes it will be great when they finally do it
- once they start doing it, they’ll discover that it is going to take a while to figure out how to get really good at it
- and they’ll realize that they’ll have to try to discover a whole bunch of new methods of doing it to really figure it all out
Innovators always focus on growth!
Leading in turbulent times! That’s a topic you need to focus on in the high velocity economy – particularly as volatility rages around you. And leading means focusing on growth: pursuing opportunities that will materialize over the longer term, rather than just managing short term trends.
That’s the focus of my “Where’s the Growth” document, which you can grab here. It provides a quick, concise overview of some of the many opportunities that are emerging in the the future.
Over the next 10 years, there are several certainties:
- scientific discovery will continue to advance at an ever increasing pace, opening new markets, evolving existing markets, and establishing countless new opportunities
- global collaborative knowledge communities will continue to lead to faster innovation in every industry and market
- new products, methodologies, skills, ideas, organizational structures will continue to evolve at a fast pace;
- agile organizations will continue to come out on top
- the transition of economies in the Mid-East and Asia will continue despite regional economic challenges, and in the larger context,provide vast new opportunities for growth
- rapidly aging economies in North America and Europe will drive rapid spending in certain sectors, particularly on healthcare and lifestyle relocation
- innovation and knowledge discovery in the world of health care will drive new billion-dollar markets several times over, and then some
- global energy consciousness will continue to lead to ever more rapid evolution of “green” solutions
- 1/2 of the global population is under the age of 25. They’re change aggressive, and will continue to lead to the rapid adoption of new ideas
- growth in specific markets often bear a simple reality which define them as a growth market: in agriculture, global food production still has to double in the next 25 years to keep up with population trends.
There’s a lot of growth out there: it’s simply a matter of looking around.
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