JimCarroll

Live poll – When will we see an economic recovery?

June 16, 2009 by JimCarroll

I’m doing a keynote for a leading global loyalty management company on Thursday; I’ll be incorporating several live text message polls into the talk, in order to have a truly interactive experience on the stage — this is something I do quite often.

In advance, I’m running a brief test of the polling service I use. Please participate in this poll to help me ensure I’ve got things scaled correctly.

POLL NOW CLOSED; THESE ARE THE FINAL RESULTS!

Replace your audience response systems with Poll Everywhere

Simply use your cell phone to send in a text message to 99503, with the text response (i.e. ONEYEAR) in the body of your message (no charge for the poll from me!) or go to http://poll4.com on your Web browser and type in the one word response.

Keep an eye on this blog entry, as the results should update dynamically.

N.B. The chart is small; we’ve contacted tech support to see if we can scale it!

Trend: The emergence of the Chief Momentum Officer

June 5, 2009 by JimCarroll

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.

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 lifecylces, 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!

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 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.

The Impact of Social Networking on Brands

June 5, 2009 by JimCarroll

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.

The Time to Invest in the Future is Now!

June 4, 2009 by JimCarroll

Enough said.

Get over it.

Get out and innovate.

Think growth!

“Recessions provide tremendous opportunities”

June 4, 2009 by JimCarroll

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.”

Accountancy in the Twitter era

June 3, 2009 by JimCarroll

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

JimCarroll

GET IN TOUCH

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.

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.