Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

Some of my 19 trends for 2019 aren’t profound, in that people are already aware of them. What is important is acknowledging the speed and reality of the trend, and in 2019, the acceleration is real.  So here’s the thing: despite the current moment of political idiocy around us involving 19th coal, there is one undeniable fact going into the future : oil and carbon is over.

As the CEO of one global energy company said on stage before my keynote for a global energy conference, “we have one last oil boom left. Then that’s it.” Oil will always be with us, but it is now on the decline and alternatives are clearly on the ascendant.

The acceleration of the science that leads to the end of oil is undeniable. Batteries EV’s, solar, wind, biomass – you name it, and in the long run, science wins.

I was in Oman last November, keynoting a global transportation conference. The Middle East region, the world’s largest oil producer, has known for a while that the industry is inevitably in decline. There will always be sunshine. Ride the trends!

I’ve had several keynotes recently where companies in the manufacturing, transportation, automative and financial industry have asked me to come in and help them sort of what is going on with Bitcoin, Blockchain, the Internet of Things, and business model disruption.

That’s typical of the type of highly customized keynote that I take on. What caught the attention of these clients, leading to keynote bookings in Las Vegas, Montreal, Vail and elsewhere, was my keynote topic, “Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin and the End of Money: Understanding the Ultimate Disruption“. Learn about the that topic here.

With that, here are two clips that give you the essence of what you need to know.

First, BitCoin. Seriously, it’s just funny.

Second, Blockchain and the Internet of Things? Massive. 10 years from now, we’ll look back and go, “Whoah!”

If you are in any industry, you need to understand how the Internet of Things and blockchain are coming together, and what it means. As I state at the end, “you don’t need to understand how it works – but you need to understand what it does” in terms of disruption of your industry.

While I often speak to audiences of 500 to 7,000, including large scale Las Vegas events, I also spend a *lot* of time with CEO’s and other senior management teams in small, leadership oriented events, providing a key message on the necessity for innovation in the high velocity economy.

In fact, it’s long been one of the fastest growing areas of my business: my clients include events for companies seen in the list below!

These are highly customized events : by way of example, I’ve gone in and done a talk for Whirlpool/Maytag on the future of home appliances in the era of IoT (Internet of Things); Disney on the future of consumer behaviour; the BBC on the future of broadcasting; and New York Life on the future of insurance in the era of business model disruption.

There are well over 100’s more with very customized industry talks.

Recently I’ve been filming some videos in advance of these corporate offsite events; these are distributed to attendees in advance to get their creative juices flowing! Here are 3 recent ones.

Great companies establish a culture of high velocity leadership, so they are prepared for the rapid economic, market and industry change that surrounds them.  In that vein, I’m often retained by the CEO or other senior management representatives in order to provide a presentation that will help to shape the strategic direction of the organization.

In a nutshell, these talks cover very specific industry trends, challenges and opportunities, based on highly original research, and can often include an interactive discussion that addresses a variety of issues, including:

• establishing forward-oriented leadership skills
• shifting your culture from fearing threat to capitalizing on opportunity
• promoting innovation, flexibility and adaptability
• establishing an innovation culture based on creativity, curiosity, courage, collaboration and change-awareness
• encouraging a certainty culture in the presence of rapid change.

Want to learn more? Inquire into Jim’s Availability

Send some details, and he will get back to you in person as quickly as possible!

Back in the fall, I was the opening keynote speaker for the Annual Coffee, Tea & Water show in Dallas, put on by the National Automatic Merchandising Association. Great feedback – one fellow wrote “Jim, it was just simply astounding. I go to a lot of events and see a lot of speakers, but you hammered home the point that change is inevitable with solid insight, indisputable facts and powerful motivation. Well done!”

That’s my job – to take you in the future. It’s why organizations like NASA, Disney, BASF and hundreds of others have engaged me to come in for a talk to rattle their cages.

“Talk about disruption, in just 90 minutes, Jim Carroll, futurist, and trends and innovation expert, managed to terrify me, Miss geeky nerd!” Is this the right approach to the future? Read on!

And sometimes, fear is a great motivator!

Read this article which just ran in CoffeeTalk, the magazine for the industry association, which just ran. In the context of the quote above, at least I know I am getting through!

Transition and Relentless Disruption as the New Reality
by Kerri Goodman, CoffeeTalk, January 2018

While attending the recent NAMA Coffee, Tea & Water conference, I was impressed/terrified by the keynote speaker whose topic was Innovation, Disruption, and Our Industry. Now, I have always prided myself at being not at just the ‘leading edge’ of technology, but at the ‘bleeding edge’ blazing trails through trial and error, rather fearlessly. In fact, CoffeeTalk launched our website in 1994, quite some time before even Coca Cola!

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“Inaction in the face of opportunity is but an excuse!” – #Futurist Jim Carroll

Part of the role of a futurist is to provide people insight into the trends that will be a part of their future, but also to put into perspective the opportunities these trends present. A lot of people get excited when they see what I can offer in that regard.

But people are funny – and here’s a good story you can think about to see if you are suffering from a culture of inaction.

I recently had a call from a senior VP of a major company in the retail industry. She thought that it would be extremely helpful to bring me in to their upcoming corporate leadership meeting – with so much change in retail they need to be challenged in their thinking. With clients like Disney, The GAP, Pepsi, Godiva, and more, I certainly have a track record for doing just that – I spend a lot of time speaking to the massive and fast trends sweeping the world of retail. I even have separate keynote topics on retail and the Amazon effect.

Fast forward. She wrote back last week, indicating that their CEO didn’t think it was a good time to be doing this. As in, stay the course. Stick with the status quo. They didn’t need to be challenged right now ; they had a strategy and needed to see it through. They might think about doing a deep-dive future session next year. Something like that.

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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!”

Your business model and  your industry won’t look the same in 5 or 10 years. In fact, you might not even recognize it.

That’s a reality, and you are likely not able to cope! Here’s why:

1. It’s the era of acceleration
2. In that context, the future belongs to those who are fast
3. There are few exceptions to the reality that small = speed, big = slow.
4. The fact is, most legacy companies are not structured for speed
5. Yet they need to be – disruption is everywhere, and it is happening quickly
6. And as tech comes to drive every industry, the speed of change will only increase
7. Making the big-small dichotomy even worse
8. This faster future requires innovation risk, but big companies aren’t built for risk
9. Not only that, but big companies have inherent health issues – they are clogged up with organizational sclerosis that clogs up their abilities
10. The only way to challenge yourself and deal with these issues is to challenge yourself on speed/

Yet, too many organizations spend their time making the excuses that lead them to failure, rather than focusing on the ideas that will define success.

They are structured for failure. It will only get worse in the era of acceleration. Here’s why – watch an organization vote in real time for the attitude failure embedded in the organization.

Get around your innovation killers. Be agile! Focus on speed!

Get inspired, every day! I start my weekday morning with my coffee, my laptop, and a stage photo. I’m hitting the ground typing, thinking of the thought that should drive your day forward.

It’s the very first thing I do! And I’ve been doing this since September 2016.

Each business day, you’ll discover a new motivational stage quote posted to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Pinterest and Flickr, having to do with disruption, innovation, the future, trends, and your mindset. Over 50,000 people now get this little nugget of insight each and every day!

You can find me here!

• Instagram : start here – it’s where I post the original photo early morning, usually between 530 and 7am EST
• Facebook : they are autoposted here, but the page also includes blog posts and other insight
• Flickr : a great option if you wan to search by phrase, concept, etc. (i.e. quickly search for my posts on ‘imagination’
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn: aka The Thinking Mans Facebook. I’ve been using LinkedIn more, and am posting a regular series of daily video clips there as well!

You asked, we listened. I’ve got one client in 2018 who is bringing me in to demystify what is quickly becoming one of the most disruptive issues today.

Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin and the End of Money: Understanding The Ultimate Disruption”

In as little as ten years, the very concept of money will have been forever changed. And the fact is, it’s happening now in real time. But it isn’t just money that is being disrupted: the blockchain concept promises to unleash a wave of innovation that parallels and exceeds the impact that came with the arrival of the Internet economy.

Making sense of the trends and the reality of what it represents can be a challenge. A new vocabulary has emerged that involves radical new concepts, the decentralization of authority, and rapid hyper-innovation : blockchain, Ethereum, ASIC and currency miners, hard forks and smart contracts! At the same time, headlines speak of the ongoing rise in the value of grandfather of all crypto-currencies, Bitcoin, while other news outlets and experts label it a bubble.  Merely interpreting all of the components of this new world can be a fascinating journey.

Yet the voyage becomes even more challenging when faced with opinions that are all over the map. What does it meaan when when Jamie Dymon, the head of  JPMorgan Chase calls Bitcoin a fraud and the people who buy it “stupid,” and yet at the same time, the head of the IMF says that Bitcoin could give existing currencies and monetary policy a run for their money? When a cryptocurrency goes from a valuation of a few hundred dollars to over $10,000 in a matter of months? When 2018 will be defined by an acceleration of the acceptance of distributed ledger concepts at the same time that a horde of fraud artists invade this fascinating new world? When some countries state they will abandon long held concepts of a national currency in favour of digital cash?

But wait, there’s more! The impact doesn’t stop with the arrival of the first wave of concetps as found in ‘money’ such as Bitcoin. What is emerging is the infrastructure and a foundation for the next economy: one that is reliant on distributed, digital trust, the elimination of the middleman from many business interactions, and fundamental, disruptive concepts that run up against most of the economic models of the last 100 years. These are challenging times, and difficult questions are being presented.

What does this complex new world mean to your business and your business model? Is it a fraud, or is it a bubble? What’s real, and what’s not? Are we in the midst of the latest Tulip and dot.com phrase, or is there substantial change underway?

In this keynote, futurist and technology expert Jim Carroll peels away the layers of the world of cryptocurrency, outlining the challenges and opportnities that come with the end of the concept of money as we know it. These are truly transformative times – for the realty of blockchain goes far beyond the current hype surrounding Bitcoin. The concept of distributed ledgers will change entire industries, challenge the very nature of the legal concept of offer and acceptance, and unleash a torrent of hyper-innovation around business models.

I just wrote this one up for the brochure copy for an upcoming 2018 event.

The issue of Amazon isn’t just about retail — it is about any industry with a middleman. Insurance, wealth management, finance, medical or dental care, home services and renovations. You name it. And the big question is – what are you going to do about it?

Disrupting Amazon : Accelerating Strategies for Success in the Era of Industry Transformation

Amazon is the elephant in every industry room. They will challenge and disrupt your business model, and shake your belief in the future to the core.

Why not change that before it changes you? Don’t wait for Amazon to disrupt you – disrupt yourself and disrupt Amazon first! As we witness the Amazonification of industries, deep insight into this massive-but-cheetah-like-elephant is critical, a fast strategy is required.

Futurist Jim Carroll has a key message: Don’t compete — transform! When Amazonian scale disruption occurs, you can’t hope to complete on price, the sophistication of the online interaction, or the other areas in which Amazon (and similar disruptors) clearly excel. You need a different proposition, different ideas and a different strategy. In many cases, this will come about through an implicit decision to compete based on the unique value you can bring to the relationship – service, support, personal interaction and other factors. In doing so, you specifically choose to not compete based on a race to the bottom and price.

Futurist Jim Carroll has headlined ‘Amazonificaiton strategies’ at a wide variety of corporate leadership meetings and association events in the medical, dental and veterinary industries; in the global optometric industry; in the agricultural dealer market, in the home renovation sector, and many more. He has provided deep insight on the transformative strategies and mindset that needs to be pursued.

The acceleration of disintermediation via Amazon is a cruel reality of our modern day world. Think about the business model of a a group of agricultural dealers who sell products to farmers. The simplistic view is that they buy products from the manufacturer, and then sell them to the farmer, with an obvious markup in price. Amazon could do this (and will) with a more sophisticated online system, and avoid the cost of the markup, thereby offering a lower cost alternative. How to compete? Become an invaluable partner to the farmer in terms of advice, expertise and personal support for new initiatives, products and ideas.

In the era of Amazon, you can’t hope to compete on price — because you will watch your business disappear! Futurist and innovation expert Jim Carroll outlines the key trends, strategies and opportunities to be pursued in the ear of Amazonian acceleration!