Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

Take a look at my client list. I’ve developed a worldwide reputation for keynotes and talks at Fortune 1000 leadership meetings that go beyond customization – they go to the heart of the transformative issues that need to be discussed in the room.

What’s my secret sauce? Read about how I work with you in this little video clip!

I’ve been booked by the folks at Eye Recommend to close two conferences in Edmonton and Niagara Falls, Canada, next month and this fall. I will be speaking to several hundred optometrists and their staff/vision care specialists on trends related to he future of their industry. This follows a highly successful similar talk for Nikon Optical in Tokyo.

I filmed this little video overview of the big trends impacting the profession and industry going forward.

There’s lots going on! Enjoy watching!

Siemens has booked me to headline a major energy conference in Houston in May.

So I did a little video about what to expect. Give it a watch. We are going to see more change to the global utility/energy industry in the next 5 years, than we have seen in the next 100!

So, I had a potential client ask, “do you have any really futuristic video clips that don’t involve some of the trends of today?”

I’m not quite sure what the question actually means – interpreting what a client is looking for is sometimes a great mystery, which is why I always suggest that they jump on an exploratory conference call with me.

But if a client wants freaky futuristic stuff, I’ve got that too. Here’s a clip, where I’m on stage at the World Government Summit, talking about a future in which we might enhance the ability and capacity of our brains through Human-Computer Interface technology and off-brain storage, through what I would call a Yottabit ball. Sort of the type of stuff we might see in 2030 or further out.

The fact is, we will witness the next evolution of the size of the human brain with this type of thinking. Like, wires that go from our brain into a crystal ball that will help us to offload some of our thinking and brain processing. Current trends with HCI might lead us to this type of future.

But I don’t do a lot of this type of thing on stage. I really find that freaky doesn’t work in getting people to align themselves to the future.

But for the fun of it – here’s the trend at play. Every step along the way in human evolution, we’ve seen a big increase in brain capacity. The arrival of tools, and then weapons, saw big increases in cranial capacity. The arrival of the Internet, global connectivity and more, is leading to the next wave in the size of our brains. HCI leads us there – the next wave of cranial capacity increase will come from an extension our human mind to a light based cube. The math and science supports it. We can take the trend there.

But I often wonder – how are such stories helpful? Sure, there are some futurists who do really freaky talks about freaky trends and where we might be 50 years from now. Yet I often find that type of keynote is a little bit like Chinese food: people get excited, have some fun, but sort of forget about the context in an hour and are hungry for more.

I tend to put into perspective trends on a 5 or 10 year timeline, some of which surround us now, and which will have profound impacts on our business models, industries, skills. 25 years on stage has taught me that is what resonates. such as found in my 2018 outlook videos.

And so, as always, when I am mystified in trying to figure out what a potential client actually wants, I encourage them to pick the phone and call me.

I’ll actually answer the phone.

The National Fire Protection Association has booked me to headline their annual conference in Las Vegas this June.

As with every organization, they know that effective event marketing is a key to their success: and that they need to work harder to build attendance and interest in their events. To that end, I’ve been working relentlessly on some extremely customized, short videos that can be shared in advance of the event. Take a look at some of them here.

For this particular event, I pulled together 3 distinct video clips with my producer. Have a watch – they focus on future fire risk, accelerated infrastructure risk, virtual reality and more.

 
You can also watch the full, long version. We need to change things up a bit – long versions for the Web, shorter versions for social media!

Want to take your event to the next level? Work with a speaker who actually cares about your event and your own message – not theirs!

I spoke last night at this massive conference which explores the edge of innovation and opportunities for the transformation of government. Here’s a great little highlight clip – it even comes with epic music!

It was covered in The Gulf, a local newspaper, this way:

Innovation expert fast forwards time to showcase glimpse of future
February 12, 2018, The Gulf

DUBAI: An era of instant knowledge obsolescence and exponential job creation are around the corner, according to Jim Carroll. The acclaimed futurist, trends and innovation expert was speaking at the ‘Fast Forward to the Future’ session at the ongoing sixth World Government Summit, WGS 2018, in Dubai on Monday.

Carroll said that new learning is occurring so rapidly that half of the knowledge that is acquired during our first year of college will be either obsolete or revised by the time of graduation.

“The future belongs to those who are fast. It is your ability to embrace these fast-paced trends that will determine your success. Seven out of 10 children between five and six years old today will work in a job that doesn’t exist right now. That’s why this event is so critical. It provides an incredible opportunity to ingest knowledge and speak to thinkers and innovators from around the world, which is absolutely critical to our future success,” he said.

He added, “We live in an era of acceleration. What we once considered to be ideas and products meant to live only in science fiction or in the distant future are becoming an integral part of our reality. We live in a time where we can expect companies that do not yet exist, to build products that seem inconceivable, using materials never before imagined.”

Carrol concluded by envisioning a not-so-distant future where trends will merge, where the speed of change will accelerate, science will develop at an exponential rate, every industry will become a software industry and Moore’s law will define innovation velocity.

Jim Carrol is globally recognised for his unique insight into trends. He has researched key innovation success factors for dozens of industries, associations, professions, companies and individuals. Over the last 25 years, more than two million people have shared his insight with his events on stage. He has authored books including The Future Belongs To Those Who Are Fast, and Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast. His latest book, Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast: Stories from the Stage on Innovation, Disruption and the Accelerating Future will be published in Q2 2018.

Next month, I’ll keynote the National Rural Electrical Cooperative Technology conference. It’s an unprecedented 5th repeat booking by this organization.

The energy industry is in the midst of fast hyper-disruption.

Here’s a quick little video that I put together for them to outline some of what I’ll cover.

Are you ready for 2018?

You need to be. Change is fast and furious, and it’s everywhere. Watch this to understand what comes next — and what you need to do!

Production note: ‘green screened’ in my basement with my new iPhone X. The video quality of this phone is staggering! Awesome video edit done by my partner in Moscow, Armine Simonyan, aka Alexandra. Her work is wonderful!

What are the drivers of disruption in your industry? Where is all the fast change coming from?  Edge thinking, iterative design, small beats big, rapid prototyping, devices change and more.

Watch my 2nd 2018 Outlook video – “The Seeds of Disruption: The Impact of Edge Thinking and More!”

Beneath the surface of normalcy lies a hidden layer of complexity. And the fact is, we are building a big, global, complicated machine, and it’s obvious that people don’t know how to secure it, ignore the challenges, or take advantage of those who don’t understand what is going on.

What do South Park, Pineapple’s, the BBC and admin:admin have in common? Watch this!

 

If there was one word in the security industry in 2017, it was this: Equifax. I don’t even need to explain…..

Yet going forward, we will continue to see many more Equifax situations that will result in the destruction of billions of dollars of corporate value. Some CEO’s will be held accountable; others won’t. Yet the sad fact is that entire companies will disappear to avoidable negligence with respect to security and infrastructure issues. The trend will become accelerated as technology driven disruption comes to drive forward every industry. We might one day see a car company go bankrupt — not because of fraudulent diesel mileage manipulation, but because someone hacked into the internal IT engine of millions of cars through a known backdoor.

Add to that the fact that 2018 will probably be characterized by the emergence of cryptocurrency scams as one of the leading news computer related news stories of 2018. You simply can’t have an important trend go supernova without a lot of fraudulent activities coming to the forefront as people “rush in to share the riches.” Blockchain is a critically important and transformative trend, but as with any trend, the good will come with the bad. I suspect that we will see not only individuals make stupid mistakes as they work to cash in without knowing what they are doing — but corporations and government as well.

Add to this increasing hyper-connectivity. The Internet of Things (#Iot) is only going to make the voyage more challenging, as we continue to link billions of devices to this big global connectivity machine. As we do so, many aren’t paying proper attention to the issues that come with #IOT either — read my 2 posts on #IOt that cover some of these security issues here and here.

It’s not like we haven’t known about the risks. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, I regularly read Peter G. Neuman’s Risk Digest, and even contributed a few emerging risks to the regular newsletter. Looking back, most of was predicted back then has come to pass, including the hacking and hijacking of election systems and technologies. It’s only going to get worse; I covered these challenges when I did 2 talks for the chief legal officers for a vast number of Fortune 500 companies last month, as covered in my post, Understanding, Managing and Minimizing Accelerated Risk.

Why does IT risk continue to be an issue? Because the fact remains : companies simply do not pay attention to what must be done to protect themselves against KNOWN RISK, because it is not at the level of the Board. Most major companies do not have IT or security as a Board level skills matrix responsibility; they are still focused on legal, finance, executive compensation and the other same old stuff they’ve always been focused on as Boards. Yet I’ve long said that IT and risk management needs to be something dealt with at the Board – until then, things will not change!

Gosh, back in 2003 – 14 years ago — I wrote in a post: “There is a common theme here — companies continue to ignore security issues, and the result is significant business damage. And to be frank, this isn’t just a small issue anymore — we are witnessing the actual destruction of corporate value due to negligence! THIS IS A CEO LEVEL ISSUE NOW, FOLKS!” —> https://www.jimcarroll.com/2003/02/security-has-to-start-at-the-top/

I used CAPS!

Then I wrote in that same post: “Until senior management wakes up and realizes that without action, they can see their corporate value destroyed over night, we’ll see more of this.”

Sadly, I nailed that trend….

Sadly, for many organizations, nothing will change into 2018 and going forward.

If you do anything, pay attention to security. The future of your organization depends on it.