“Companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived using methodologies not yet in existence with materials not yet invented based on ideas not yet imagined by people who do not yet know they are inventing tomorrow, today.” That’s the context for tomorrow – a future that will be here sooner than you think. What are you going to do to turn the trends of tomorrow into the opportunities of today?
We live in a time of massive challenge, and yet one of massive opportunity. We’re faced with deep and complex issues involving the environment, health care, water and food. At the same time, every industry is faced with upheaval, disruption and change. There are massive changes underway all around us – it’s pretty clear that we are moving to a world of 24-hour farming based on autonomous technology and virtual agriculture; a time of healthcare that is more focused on fixing you before you are sick rather than after; one in which we underwrite insurance based on real-time analytics rather than looking back in time. A time in which most cars and trucks are electric, rather than being based on gas and diesel; one in which most of the world’s population lives in cities, not urban areas; a time when we do more construction offsite instead of onsite; in which more of our energy is coming from small, local community energy microgrids instead of big centralized energy utilities, with the majority of that energy coming from renewables instead of gas, coal and nuclear; a world in which more and more of our food is grown in vertical farms instead of traditional farms.
In this context, it’s clear that we will see more change in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 100 – every industry is being redefined at blinding speed by technology, globalization, the rapid emergence of new competitors, new forms of collaborative global R&D, and countless other trends! The art is discovering the opportunity in the trends, the growth in the ideas, and the future in the reality!
Once you do that, you need to align yourself to the big opportunities of today through bold, transformative thinking; take the small-scale steps today to align yourself to this future, and focus on a culture of speed and agility that can help you to get there at the right time! You need to think about transformation, not just innovation!
In this keynote, Jim outlines his simple but transformative structure with deep insight into what it takes to master the new, complex volatile world, by embracing the chaos, thinking transformation not innovation, mastering the timing of trends, and accelerating forward-oriented growth opportunities. The new model for going forward in the era of accelerating change: Think big, start small, and scale fast!
