There are 147 million people interacting on social networks through mobile devices today – expect that to grow to 1 billion within 5 years.
A clip from a recent keynote in which I outline the dramatic impact that social networking — Twitter, Facebook, etc — is having on brand image, relevance of brand, and longevity of brand.
Enough said.
Get over it.
Get out and innovate.
Think growth!
ENTREPENEURS: Recessions provide ‘tremendous opportunities,’ trends expert says
London Free Press, May 28, 2009
Recession or not, the future belongs to companies willing to adapt to rapid change, Jim Carroll, a trends and innovation expert, said in London yesterday.
Jim Carroll, speaking at the TechAlliance annual meeting yesterday, says smart businesses must look past the recession.
“Recessions provide tremendous opportunities for growth because everyone else is scared to do anything,” Carroll said at the annual meeting of TechAlliance.
Carroll, who grew up in London, is an author, columnist and speaker specializing in new trends and technologies affecting the business world.
He said even when the economy is being “pummelled by negativity,” smart businesses are looking past the recession for growth opportunities.
“Recessions are cyclical. I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends,” he said.
He said at least one billion people in Asia are entering the middle class, providing new markets for agriculture, technology and other sectors.
Carroll said global food production will have to double in the next few decades, boosting opportunities for agricultural areas around London.
He said health care, another major sector in London, would soon undergo a major shift toward preventative care, aided by genetic testing and diagnostics.
“We will know what you are likely to develop in your lifetime and we will treat you before you develop those conditions.”
He said medical care will enter an era of “bioconnectivity” in which expensive hospital beds will be replaced by remote technology allowing for care in the community or home.
Carroll said businesses have to adapt to a “high-velocity economy” driven by technological change. He said the shelf life of a digital camera model has shrunk to a few months while most of the sales on a video game are made within the days of release.
Carroll said business is entering an era of “pervasive connectivity” in which all industries will be transformed by smart communications technology.”Everything in our lives is plugging into everything else.”
One of the columns I write on a regular basis is for CAMagazine, which goes to about 100,000 professional chartered accountants. My big secret? Despite the fact that I spend my time advising some of the biggest organizations in the world on strategies for innovation and creativity, I’m also a professional accountant. I spent some 12 years way back in the 1980’s with one of the world’s largest professional services firm.
My June column is out — and it talks about the challenge of trying to reconcile the emerging demands for more financial disclosure with the short attention spans that come with the Twitter era.
You can access the full article below; but here’s a few excerpts:
We stand at a seminal moment – a crossroads as it were – between what we might call the new age of disclosure and the new era of inattention.
….we will see all kinds of new rules and regulations within the financial sector and beyond, including most of the business world. Let there be no doubt, in the year to come we will witness a new, onerous set of regulations surrounding financial disclosure….
On the other hand, while we ponder an emerging need for more detailed disclosure, media reports seem to indicate that the general populace is rushing off to Twitter-ize itself.
So here’s the thing: to satisfy the demands of angry investors, the typical 10Q and SEDAR filings will have to quadruple in size, if not more. Pretty soon, a typical public company will need to file several thousand pages of disclosure documents to keep up with regulations. Financial statement footnotes will become complicated enough to deserve their own dead tree. An army of accountants will find itself dedicated to the cause of digging deeper with every single sentence.
At the same time, the audience for whom these lengthy documents are targeted is concentrating on writing 140-character texts.
So, the big question is, what is the relevancy of accountancy in the Twitter era?
Might you instead find yourself one day writing a financial disclosure that goes like this: Qlfd opn’n. Gng Cncrn vr m2m vln on unreal(dude!)ized rvnu.
If you understand that, then your brain synapses have shrunk enough to fit the speed of information in the modern age.
Read the article Accountancy in the Twitter era 
Here’s a video clip from a recent keynote in Las Vegas.
I was on stage in front of an audience of 4,000, speaking for a global organization.
In this clip, I’m speaking about the challenges that organizations face with innovation — and in particular, the fact that every organization has people who wake up each day and ask themselves, “what can I do today to kill innovation?”
Do such people exist? Are there really attitudes like this out there with such high-velocity change in the economy out there? You’ll realize the answer to this question is yes, as soon as you hear the list of the “innovation killers.”
Think about what they say:
I challenge the audience with this issue, and get them thinking about the need to innovate — faster — to keep up with rapidly evolving trends.
I led a small workshop last week after an event, focused on the issue of “how can we establish opportunities for growth during an economic downturn.”
The cover of my handout was titled, “It’s January 15, 2020: What did we do to move through the great recession of 2009.” Inside, I presented a number of scenarios that challenged the participants to think about innovation strategies that could be pursued right now, in order to provide that growth.
The concept resonated extremely strongly. All around me, I see opportunities for growth in a wide variety of industries. And what is becoming obvious is that some organizations are aggressively adopting strategies that involve “aggressive innovation” to change their direction now, rather than later.
Since last year, when the recession began, I’ve seen some of the best and worst approaches to how organizations are dealing with the challenges in the economy. And I go back to a previous blog post, in which I identified a list of 10 more things that smart, innovative companies do to create an overall sense of innovation-purpose. It’s still a great list, and is worth repeating.
What are you doing right now to make sure that when you look back from January 15, 2020, you’re happy with the fact that you developed the right sense of purpose?
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