One of the reasons we practice foresight on an institutional level is that it takes time for our ponderous bureaucracies to catch up to a quickly moving reality. We simply need time to transform that which is resistant to change, lest we end up misaligned for the world.

One such institution these days is the department of human resources. First of all, let’s forget the somewhat Orwellian feel of that name, which sounds like something vaguely associated with Soylent Green or The Matrix. The function of human resources is fundamentally out of harmony with the way labor markets need to work today. Businesses need to be acquiring scarce talent wherever they can find it and making sure they get paid. That’s all.

Today, markets are so volatile, companies are encouraged and permitted to hire and fire essentially at will. Unless an employer has committed a serious workplace violation, in most places a public company need but declare the position eliminated in the next quarter and move on, without serious fear of reprisal. Actually, this isn’t a bad thing. Allowing employers to try new talent quickly without the fear of being stuck with unproductive or ill-fit workers is a way to motivate innovative new ideas. After all, if your idea doesn’t work out, you can send the quickly assembled staff to “flourish elsewhere,” in the nomenclature of one major industrial company.  This is actually how skilled labor worked under the guild system for centuries. Our most recent development of “lifetime employment” is actually the anomaly, forcing employee and employer alike to remain rigid where flexibility might serve them better.

Makes sense, right? If you want to try to build a new cathedral, you only get the masons and artists to come by while the project is on. And if your brand new buttressed wall, ultra-high dome design isn’t working out and you need to stop, you don’t want to be forced to keep the whole crew on retainer forever. Makes sense, even today.

This is where HR is poorly suited. From just anecdotal data we’ve received, HR departments still hire each job like they are selecting a new bass player for the Rolling Stones or something. Some companies subject candidates to more five hour interviews for a new job than many people require to choose spouses. Months can pass by with interviews piling up and no job offers sent. Why the fear? Why the morass?

Because HR departments are encouraged to choose employees as if they might be around forever.

We live in a world where some of our currencies might not even be around next year.

We live in a world where cheap oil won’t be around in a few years.

We live in a world where your business model might not be there in a few quarters.

Thus, we need less HR and more guilds. More easy come, more easy go.

Now, we just need to think about why healthcare is tied to employment in America…

For those of you who know Gregor MacDonald, you know you’re in for a treat with this podcast- a full hour of some of Gregor’s latest forecasts on energy, economics and society, insights you simply won’t get anywhere else.

For those of you who haven’t discovered Gregor yet, he is one of the top energy analysts in the world, and in our minds, one of the top analysts of anything, period.

This podcast covers sweeping ground:

• Why we’re at peak automobiles
• The end of cheap oil
• Coal’s role in the development of the world economy
• The return to human capital and small towns
• Why waterways are the future
• Our current period of “late phase economic decadence
• Why PAKISTAN holds the key to the Copenhagen Protocol

Crazier still, we could have spend ANOTHER hour talking to him and still not exhausted him of insight.

Enjoy.

I’m very excited for our upcoming inaugural meeting, this Thursday of our new, increasingly global, professional society, The Intelligence Collaborative.

The following video explains what intelligence is, why we need to collaborate, and why now is the perfect moment.

Have a look at the video, and if you’re anywhere in the MidAtlantic region, consider a trip to our nation’s capital this Thursday. Tickets are free – just bring your interest in how social media will change the practice of intelligence.

Today, the airwaves are filled with advertisements for consumer foods that aren’t simply nourishing but portrayed as practically medicine. A slew of softdrinks are marketed as hangover cures, energy, memory enhancers, cognitive enhancers, help with clairvoyance, and fuel for flight. Fish isn’t just fish, it’s OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS. And somewhere along the way, trans-fats replaced “Ebola virus” as the world’s deadliest substance. Is this random or could you see it coming?

Food as medicine was a theme we predicted for 2010 way back in 1999 when studying the future of food and health for a group of global consumer product manufacturers. The world seemed to be at a turning point at that moment, with a number of trends appearing to collide in the decade to come:

• Super-size and family value packs had reached their apex, due to increasing penetration of fast food and big-box retail throughout the world
• Obesity epidemic reaching a pitch, not only in America but also in unexpected places like France, Greece, China
• Litigious American culture had finally apexed with its war on cigarette liability, and a new target was likely to be next
• Biotechnology was promising new technological abilities for all plant life (this was the era of the Human Genome Project and techno-positive rhetoric was off the chart)
• Boomers were aging, and increasingly interested in immortality on the cheap
• Sustainability was increasing as a concern, and farming would be one of the most effected industries
• The “Slow Food Movement” was beginning to point back to heirloom breeds of livestock and produce and encourage local diversity in favor of industrial solutions

Basically, it was clear that the strategic trend of increasing portion sizes was about at an end. Food packaging technology had a bit more life in it, especially smart packaging to assure safety and freshness for delivery to developing nations. Genetically-modified organisms were causing a firestorm, and the promise of efficiency in factory farms simply wasn’t attractive enough to overcome the concerns over safety, particularly in Europe and Asia. Something else had to come next other than size and convenience.

Food itself hasn’t changed in the last ten years; a salad is still a salad. Food still grows in the ground. The major cause of starvation remains war, not lack of productivity.

What has changed most has been the industry of food. Most players in the food industry have changed significantly since 1999, and their actions have been in response to trends clearly visible at that time. Most all manufacturers are concerned with portion size, putting out “100 calorie snack paks” and “smart size” formats. McDonald’s stopped “supersizing” and began offering more salads and healthier food for kids. (Other players, like Hardee’s turned headlong into the storm and began to offer even more life-threatening beef-tastic products.) Kellogg’s cereal has reduced-sugar versions. Coca-Cola has diversified into all forms of beverages, and their new offerings are calorie-reduced, often featuring nutrients that are marketed as cures. Whole Foods has gone from a niche player to a major alternative grocery store in almost every urban area in the United States. Lawsuits are being filed for obesity.

In short, the future of food was plainly visible ten years ago if you look at the trends. Are their inaccuracies? Of course. Given the hyperactive coverage of the Human Genome Project and the height of the Dot Com Bubble, many people dreamed that genetic engineering of plants would be letting us grow most materials and chemicals and pharmaceuticals in the field as opposed to the factory. Instead, it looks like farmers’ markets are back.

Do we have food-as-medicine? Yes, but most of it is fake. Your doctor still recommends lots of veggies, a little less cheese and time in the gym as opposed to some beverage full of vitamin B12 and açai. However, the overall understanding of food as a major component of health has gotten more press, despite still-climbing rates of heart disease and diabetes.

Some of this stuff took ten years to fully blossom. I remember when my colleague John Mahaffie started talking about trans-fatty acids in 2000 as the next ticking time bomb, and I had no idea what “fat tech” could have to do with the future food. And yet New York City banned cigarettes and trans-fats around the same time.

Does forecasting give you an understanding of the strategic direction of the future of food? It did to our clients who were first on the market with new products.

I was just surfing SlideShare for some competitive intelligence – always a great source of left-of-center information, unusual sources, and stuff that never gets published. I cam across a provocatively titled slideshow about how digital imaging killed the corner camera shop. Even though the market exploded, the model shifted to one where there was no margin for customer service of any sort.

Food for thought for this Monday.

This is perhaps the top entry in the Guinness Record Book of Complete Philosophical Reversals.

Jack Welch, “Neutron Jack,” the great father of steroid-pumped management, “Flourish Elsewhere” human resources, cutting the bottom 10%, and evangelist of shareholder value as a singular strategy, has now declared the whole “money for Wall Street” thing is the “dumbest idea in the world.”

For those of you who have heard the term “shareholder value” abused in every possible context, a phrase used as a placeholder for an actual strategic thought, this reversal is akin to hearing the Surgeon General come out and say, “You know Marlboros and tequila get a bad rep – I think they are part of a healthy breakfast.”

This too is an overcorrection. People who bet their money on the performance of a for-profit enterprise will expect a certain level of return compared to stockpiling gold or letting money sit in a savings bank (assuming you can find a solvent bank these days.) Jack is right, shareholder value is a result and not a strategy – but it’s still a fine goal.

The difference in the next economy will be that half the world won’t be investing through Wall Street for the basic societal functions of assuring a dignified retirement for aging citizens. Once the pensions set to grow at 8% fail (coming soon to an economy near you!) people will get even more hesitant to invest in nameless, shapeless glass and steel buildings. Investing in for-profit companies will return to where it ought to – a risk undertaken by the very professional and very observant.

Will corporations really see employees as their number one constituency, as Jack suggests? He obviously saw value in firing over 110,000 employees in his tenure at General Electric – but it sounds like a nice idea.

The future may look like more of a balance between durable human relationships and the need to keep the doors open by making money.

I studiously avoid day-to-day politics into the discussion of strategic trends, but in this moment of critical government decision it is unavoidable.

Listening to President Obama’s speech before a joint session of Congress, I tried to imagine the impact of the trillions in deficit spending on the global economy. America’s recapitalization of banks, according to the President, is to stabilize the economic system but also to get banks lending again.

The concern is that if we do not re-start lending in this country, our recovery will be choked off before it even begins.

You see, the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy. The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.

But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. With so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or to each other. When there is no lending, families can’t afford to buy homes or cars. So businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more, and credit dries up even further.

That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, restore confidence, and re-start lending.

I have placed several graphics on this blog about the trillions of dollars in debt that have been created through this culture of debt in the past twenty years. This crisis is due largely to that culture. Surely, rolling lines of credit are necessary to running most businesses. There are fluctuations in cash flow that require a certain percentage of your annual revenue to be offered to you in credit to keep things functioning.

That’s not what has been going on. We’ve financed trillions of dollars of GDP through rampant debt. Note the difference between real GDP and economic activity financed through leverage:

This culture has destroyed the Anglo-American banking system. Many corporate mergers have been made possible only through billions in available debt. Education prices shot well ahead of wages due to availability of private student loans. Housing is crushing the middle class now that the bubble has burst – a bubble that would have been impossible without a reckless culture of debt.

If we are to recover, the culture must change. According to Mish, who should be one of your favorite economic bloggers:

With all due respect Mr. President, you and Congress want to force banks to lend when banks (by not lending) are acting responsibly for the first time in a decade. Mr, President can you please tell us who banks are supposed to lend to? Do we need any more Home Depots? Pizza Huts? Strip malls? Nail salons? Auto dealerships? What Mr. President? What? And why should banks be lending when unemployment is rising and lending risks right along with it?

Note that he mentions retail, also at an all-time high bubble, and which also will come down.

I’m in a mood to make short-term predictions about management: The future is in growing your business from organic growth, recapitalizing cash from operations. It will not be from exuberant bank lending policies, or this malaise will last an extra five years.

I thoroughly enjoyed the NPR segment yesterday entitled “Obama tests Keynes” in which a couple of young guys dig into the often-bewildering rhetoric of the economic stimulus package. Funny, relevant, and worth a listen.

It’s important that in this case it’s young journalists taking a fresh approach to the economic arguments of Baby Boomers. I don’t think the Boomers at the head of our institutions often recognize that the political ideologies discussed were born long before we arrived on the scene, and often have no connection to reality for Gen X & Y. The snarkiness between taxcutters and economic stimulators often generates as much deep-seated passion as comments about “Hanoi Jane” Fonda – it’s a reference to a fight that started well before our births, and may need minutes of explanation to even make sense.

Case in point: the radio program deals primarily with the multi-decade conflict between Keynesians, who believe that well-timed government spending can save flagging economies, and market fundamentalists who belief that the entire economy can be managed through tax cuts and manipulation of the interest rate. The Keynesians protest, “government spending led to winning World War II and got us out of the Depression!” Market fundamentalists tend to argue that the slump of the 1970s proved that it’s not a cure-all – and that only deregulation, tax cuts, and Greenspan’s masterful operation of the interest rates saved us from big government stagnation.

The radio program concludes by saying that after all the discussion about this once-in-a-lifetime event, the Obama plan is basically pure Keynesian economics. After this, we’ll be able to see once and for all if it works or if we were imagining it the 1940s. The exciting bit is, this may be the first verifiable test of classical economics!

This kind of thing makes me insane.

Here we are, heading straight into the meaty part of the 21st century, experiencing an economic emergency that could only be created by a combination of today’s special mix of globalization, Internet, post-hegemonic power vacuum, unchecked assumptions, and 6.8 billion people at an unprecedented moment in history. And the only topics our elites can discuss is:

“So should we spend a lot of money on credit or fool around with the interest rate?”

Every day, people wake up and turn on the television or radio or Web site of their choice and begin worrying about a select group of numbers that are forced at them daily. We hear these measures so often, people are mistaking them for important or relevant.

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average – a collective of large-cap equities, and the prices that Wall Street gamblers are willing to pay that day to take part in their eventual earnings
• Housing starts – the number of new suburban homes under construction, with the assumption that all human housing should eventually stretch to the planet Mars
• Consumer spending – The amount people spend on Guitar Hero and couches and other goods for their new suburban homes
• Interest rates – The rate at which money can be borrowed from banks to the Federal Reserve, to other banks, to people, through credit, through…oh cripes I have a master’s degree and still don’t really get it. Suffice it to say that the interest rate policy appears as logical as Aztec shamanism, and about as transparent as the election of the Pope
• Stimulus packages – The amount of fake money spent on real things, supposedly to be paid – with interest! – by future generations, who will repay this through all the fantastic, super-paying jobs that are right around the corner…so…uh…just let us retire in peace, um, and keep paying your taxes…

We follow these things excessively, and to the untrained eye, they don’t seem to be leading to better management of the world economy. In fact, the world has been managed exclusively through these kinds of measures, and our policymakers are stuck arguing on the radio about whether KEYNES got us out of the GREAT DEPRESSION using these numbers.

GUYS – CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE NEW STUFF HAPPENING?

U.S. manufacturing now resides in China. Our kids are in debt. The Internet is making new companies possible and other companies obsolete. Science and technology is rolling onward. This is probably just another phase of Kondratieff cycles or Schumpeterian creative destruction. We’re looking at a huge change of management between the Boomers and Gen X. The Boomers are going to start going to the doctor a LOT and will crush the private healthcare system. Mass media is about to go extinct. Europe is out of kids, while the average age of Iran in 24.

Now, how is it that the argument can still be down to deficit spending versus interest rate policy?

Here’s some new measure to try out on the TeeVee, just to inject a bit of new debate into the public sphere:

• The Gig Rate: Measure the percentage of people who just graduated with expensive student loans and got a job that pays for rent, food, and debt repayment
• The Grandma/Doctor Ratio: Percentage of grandmothers able to get to their doctors appointments as scheduled, not left at home, letting their prescriptions go out of date, because they can’t get transportation
• The Ebay Entrepreneur Stat: Number of cash flow-positive home-based jobs created through Internet technologies, allowing people to make money and still raise their kids
• The Youth Diabetes Drop: Number of young people diagnosed with Type II diabetes mellitus able to reverse their disease through diet and exercise, thus saving society billions in the long-run
• The Volunteer Volume: Number of people financially secure enough in their lives to donate time to a local charity, improving their communities at no cost to taxpayers
• The Revitalization Rate: Dollars generated through the repair of our natural and built environments, from wetland and waterways to city centers and school districts, creating economic prosperity while giving future generations even more opportunity

I don’t care if you use these – invent your own. Find a way of discussing economic prosperity in a way that doesn’t use these same, tired, busted statistics.

It’s time to leave John Maynard Keynes where he was: a Cambridge elitist who bounced around the London dinner party circuit, hating the working class and delivering all kinds of new, interesting ideas just for shock value. I think he’d be sorely disappointed in us if he thought that in 2009 we hadn’t moved past him, despite having gone to the moon, defeating communism, and inventing about 1000 new world changing technologies.

KEEP THINKING.

I really enjoyed last night’s event at the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. True to this year’s theme, we discussed the future trends of 2009 and beyond, but moved immediately to positive action. About 25 of us put our heads together on the toughest problems of humanity, and tons of new business ideas came flowing out. Despite dire economic statistics, the mood is lighter and more positive than I’ve seen in years.

Here are last night’s slides for those of you who want to play along at home. We’ll likely have a webinar on this topic soon – we’ll keep you all posted!

With the release of Future, Inc. in Korean and Chinese, I’ve had the great opportunity to do interviews with Asian business magazines. I find that they ask more interesting, more insightful questions than many of their Western counterparts, so they are often fun interviews. The only problem is, once they are translated, I have NO IDEA what they said.

I just finished an interview with Korea’s KRX Magazine, which covers the Korean stock market and business in general, and I decided to post the whole text in English, so someone can appreciate it.

The questions:

Companies have hard time in business due to the global financial crisis. What new trends can we look for?

The most important trend is away from the philosophy of growth at all costs. For years, particularly in the United States, management has followed a typical playbook – get big, quickly, through borrowing money from private venture capital or public offerings. Then, you can go national or international, reaching bigger markets and gaining leverage over vendors and distributors. Once you have leverage over vendors and distributors, you cut costs by firing excess employees and force downward price pressure on the market. With the extra cash from operating expenses, you buy more national or international companies. For around forty years companies have repeated this formula.

The theme here was BIG BIG BIG. The problem with “big” is that it sometimes comes at the expense of “smart.”

The financial crisis in the United States illustrates this theme perfectly. Financial institutions were merging at an unprecedented rate, devouring already huge national banks until only a few savings banks, investment banks, and insurance companies remained. The international approach leaves managers little room to be creative or to make exceptional strategies. Once you are at a global size, you are less able than ever to adapt to a changing world. All these companies had the same goals and the same risk models. To obtain profits for their international stock holders, they felt obligated to balloon the size of the housing market – even though this ultimately destabilized the world economy. Presumably, smaller companies would have had the agility to choose different strategies in response to these unprecedented changes.

As a result, I believe the counter-trend of the next couple of decades will be SMALL, ENTREPRENEURIAL, and LOCAL. This is the opposite of many of the trends we have seen in the past decades, which is why I believe we are in such a critical moment in history. This point should be of particular interest to Koreans, since this change will have important implications for the chaebol system.

The pharmaceutical industry illustrates why small and smart companies may likely beat large organizations in the future. The past decade has seen unprecedented mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical sector, making enormous global corporations like  Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKlein, and Novartis. The thought was that large corporations could combine their research and development budgets and make new, maybe even revolutionary drugs faster and more profitably. That simply hasn’t happened. New drug applications at the Food and Drug Administration appear to be unchanged since 1999. The strategy today, as a result, is to find small, innovative companies and to buy their intellectual property while it’s cheap. The implication is interesting -  it says that size is not the benefit it has been assumed to be.

What efforts should countries make home and abroad, respectively, in order to be a leading power.

The future of economic prosperity will be dependant on a number of social, economic, and political factors, but there are some characteristics that will make the winners of tomorrow.

INFRASTRUCTURE: A country’s infrastructure – railways, airports, roads, hospitals, electrical grids, telecommunications, etc. – leads the way for entrepreneurial companies to create new business. Look at Asia versus Latin America. The Western countries have moved significant portions of their manufacturing sector to Asia in the past twenty years.  The theory behind this is that companies wanted to take advantage of lower labor costs – after all, China is a long way from France and the United States!

But wait, if all America needed was cheap labor, Latin American countries featured low-cost labor forces, all of whom speak a language closer to English than Mandarin, and much, much closer. The difference was infrastructure – the port of Shanghai can process container ships in a few hours, while the ports of San Salvador can require WEEKS of wait time. Interconnected rail, roads, airports, and seaports made the difference in the economic fate of nations.

You can thus see the potential winners of the future today. China is investing 9% of its GDP in infrastructure. The Korean government’s “Vision 2030” program focuses heavily on infrastructure investment, which you can see in that it has the best Internet connectedness in the world (I believe.) Meanwhile, the United States is investing less than 2% of its GDP in infrastructure – and our levies are bursting (Hurricane Katrina) and bridges are collapsing for no reason (Interstate 35 in Minneapolis.) Europe is fixing bridges and building more high-speed rail.

Another part of infrastructure is EDUCATION. This will be particularly interesting in light of the trend in online education, which could bring all sorts of training to the developing world. We’re evolving into a knowledge economy, moving to higher value-added products. Education and job skill training will determine who will win and lose in the coming decades. Once again, I am particularly worried for the United States, which has been increasing the cost of education at a rapid pace without increasing the quality. As a result millions of our young people enter the job market with thousands of dollars in debt.

Also part of national infrastructure is HEALTHCARE. Since the population of the developed world is aging at such a rapid pace, success will come to those countries who can provide their citizens with good quality healthcare without overly taxing businesses and citizens.

What strategies and blue prints for the future should business leaders have?

ANY plan for the future would be nice. I think that a professional approach to foresight must be standard skills for every leader of business and government. I travel the world talking to executives, and it shocks me how few leaders are able to answer the following question: “What are three major trends in the world, and how will they affect your organization in the long-term.”

So I don’t have specific recommendations for future blueprints – I simply recommend that leaders learn how to make them.

What would happen in the global economic landscape when all the dust in the financial markets settles down?

My prediction is for an increase in trade barriers, slowing of globalization, and increase in national regulations.

Globalization is positive in the way it has increased prosperity and alleviated poverty – but the downside is that it is very hard to manage. We can trade together, but it quite difficult to manage multi-national problems such as global warming and the credit crisis because all leaders must answer to their own citizens, each with a special set of values and goals. The credit crisis has been particularly toxic, since so much of it began in the United States and its decisions about regulations in finance and housing. What do you do if you are affected by one set of decisions, but you can’t really influence them? I think the answer will be to insulate nations from the decisions of other countries, at least in the short-term.

What are the challenges for the new president of the United States regarding the financial debacle?

The challenge is to regulate while allowing innovation. It’s not fair to any one president -  an incredible task in the face of decades of policy that lacked foresight – but I believe the Obama Administration can set the stage for decades of success or failure in its reaction to this crisis.

Many American policymakers, unlike their Asian and European colleagues, have been operating under the assumption that private industry can act in its own interest with minimal guidance from national policy and regulation and that the result will be positive for both individuals and nations as a whole. The financial crisis shows that actually, companies can act in their individual interest and lead both individuals and the nation off a cliff.

The answer is NOT the establishment of giant national regulatory bureaucracies that remind us of Soviet-era politburos – it was a disaster then, it would be a disaster now. So this government has to strike a very delicate balance – it must set up a strong national economic and industrial policy, accompanied by regulators who can exact penalties on companies that commit transgressions. But it must allow those companies to be started quickly and easily and to choose innovative strategies, to keep the spirit of American entrepreneurialism alive and well.

I think the Obama Administration has a lot of work ahead of it.

Let’s say the America used to be the center of the world in the past and China would take over the U.S. in the future. What changes would the ordinary people on the globe experience in a world where China is the most powerful country?

First, it will be difficult to directly compare China directly to the United States in the post-Cold War era. The United States had an economic, industrial, political, and culture advantage in a way that might not ever be duplicated. The rest of the world has been developing economically in the meantime, and the United States is unlikely to disappear from the world.

Also, language will change how China can extend its power in the 21st century. English is currently the international language, and that is unlikely to change no matter what China does. There are already billions of people who use English as a first or second language.

What is your outlook on the Asian economies, including Korea?

One of the biggest issues is AGING POPULATIONS. Japan, China, and Korea all have unprecedented proportions of their populations reaching old age in the coming decades and an insufficient number of young people of working age to support social programs. This is no different than Europe and the United States, but both of those regions will benefit from more liberal immigration policies to attract talent workers. The future of Asian economies will depend significantly on the responses to this issue.

Otherwise, I’m interested to see how China will balance its rural populations and its newly urbanized industrial population on its east coast. The difference in the values and needs between both populations will cause much difficulty for the Chinese government, and there is already the spectre of unrest that threatens growth in the country.

Could you tell me ‘keyword of future’ that people need to know.

Entrepreneur. The future belongs to those who can create new businesses quickly in respond to rapid change. Nations need to create a culture and an infrastructure to encourage entrepreneurial activity, or these changes will appear very unwelcome.

The last question. Could you give some advice to Koreans as to what they must do to prepare for the future?

Maintain your national identity! The age of undifferentiated global brands and mass manufacturing seems to be coming to an end, and those who are thriving (nations and companies) have a competitive advantage because they do something very well that nobody else does. France still does luxury very well, as does Italy. Japan and Switzerland excel at ultra-complex manufacturing because as a people, they love details.

Besides if you give up kim chi, bulgoki, and tae kwon do, I’ll be very upset.

We’re so excited about this upcoming SCIP meeting, I need to repost the entire meeting description:

It’s January 28th in Washington DC. You should come and be part of this discussion!

New Ways of Knowing 2.0: Social Media and the Future of Intelligence and Decision-Making

Intelligence is at a watershed moment. After decades of developing a profession to collect information and provide early warning, we find ourselves in a broad-reaching financial catastrophe that was unknown or ignored by decision makers. Despite a collection and analysis of economic information, most businesses walked unknowingly into a ruined banking sector, retail distribution on the brink of bankruptcy, housing grotesquely overvalued, American automobiles at the point of extinction – all while most leaders continued to view change as incremental.

This unprecedented current economic crisis seems to represent a failure of intelligence. After all, if intelligence cannot motivate leaders to action, then as professionals we must ask – what good is it? Many analyst voices in the desert warned about the risks in real estate, derivate markets and reliance on leverage, but it’s not clear that this led to action. Are we in our current mess because the leaders in business and government simply didn’t listen? If so, how can intelligence professionals deliver analysis that drives appropriate action?

The next generation of intelligence might solve the inherent weaknesses of Intelligence 1.0 by relying on a broad range of information, focusing on relationships over hierarchy and replacing official dogma with a continuous dialogue. Technology will be a major driver in this evolution: Web 2.0 and social media tools are moving into the mainstream– not just in the consumer space but also in business. 2008 has seen the year of “Enterprise 2.0.” Web 2.0 has gone to work to enable collaboration, smash silos and change business processes. Intelligence analysts have new tools and methods at their disposal for primary research, secondary discovery, collaborative analysis and communicating actionable insight.

“New Ways of Knowing 2.0″ will be an interactive educational event in which we will examine the potential of social media to improve the intelligent organization of the future. Participants can expect to teach as much as they learn and see connections among diverse concepts, tools, intelligence practices and business processes. Our panelists will include:

• Suki Fuller, social media maven and CI consultant
• Eric Garland, strategic forecaster, intelligence thought leader, author of Future Inc: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit from What’s NEXT, and principal of Competitive Futures, Inc.
• August Jackson, market and competitor intelligence analyst and Enterprise 2.0 evangelist at Verizon Business.

You will come away with this program with immediate and actionable advice about how you can incorporate Enterprise 2.0 tools into your intelligence processes to improve your ability to adapt to our ever-changing world. Discussions and highlights from the program will be posted to the new SCIP DC chapter blog at http://scipdc.wordpress.com.

Amazing news that General Electric will no longer provide quarterly earnings guidance.

This is not just a decision by a public company to change its relationship to Wall Street, but a sign of a much bigger change in industry itself. It’s not just that people are going to take the longer view out of some appreciation of foresight or sudden development of wisdom, but out of respect for the massive changes currently facing global commerce.

It was a fine time last night with the Washington chapter of the American Society for Training and Development. I enjoyed the opportunity to interact with the people who will be finding and training the next generation of leaders.

Last night we focused on the major challenges that lie ahead. Below are the slides we used as a conversation starter.

Want to discuss more? Have us out for a workshop or panel!

How funny that the tools and principles of foresight are coming into vogue, this time without even the mention of a flying car or a rocket pack.

Take my friend Jim Cramer for example, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, textbook definition of an extroverted personality, and one of the greatest fund managers in history. Even he’s doing it. Last night’s show was entitled “Don’t Assume – You Know They Say,” and in it he spent the entire half hour inciting his audience to challenge all of their assumptions about the global economy.

You know, CRAZY intellectual exercises like challenging your assumptions about the price of oil around the global (under $60!), asking if America will have an automotive industry, wondering if the United States will keep taking cues from Evo Morales’ socialist administration in Bolivia. To play with the different possibilities that come out of each tweaked assumption – it’s a good practice for everybody.

Wait, if all the television hosts start thinking this way, what will we do for a living at Competitive Futures? I suppose I’ll go back to playing Latin music and enjoying our new intellectual Golden Age. For the moment, I think I’ll keep showing up at work.

My intelligence buddy August Jackson just made an interesting point: given the fantastic new AUTOMOTIVE BAILOUT that’s flirting with us, will the world lose its taste for giant, conglomerated corporate entities?

Seriously, what’s the upside of having businesses so large that governments believe they shouldn’t fail? We’re spending ludicrous amounts of tax dollars to keep banks alive. The U.S. federal government is running a debt that would cause any individual to choose bankruptcy. Now, the car companies feel that they need more of (my) tax dollars to keep afloat, because letting them fail would be far too painful for all concerned.

What is the benefit of companies so big, we can’t let them fail?

And if consolidation is so bad, why is the pharmaceutical industry considering even more of it?

Questions for this new age.

You know you live in interesting times when the business press reports the BIGGEST gain ever in the Dow based on the happy news that the United States is nationalizing nine of its banks!

We’re testing out the nice folks at blip.tv to see how their flash players work.

In this spirit, here’s a clip about the future of urbanization:

Here at Competitive Futures we regularly tell clients, “Just because something is a disaster doesn’t mean it will be a disaster for everyone.” History is filled with stories of leaders who perceived danger early, acted appropriately, and profited.

I’m a bit fatigued of straining about this financial mess, and naturally began to ask, “OK, what’s going to be positive out of this?” Despite the ugliness here, there will likely be many positive developments resulting from this crisis of business and governance. One example is quite close to home for me.

My father is in his 28th year running the Rutland Agway, a store dedicated to farm, home, and garden in Central Vermont. Recent economic trends have sent both farming and manufacturing to far-flung states or countries. Giant retailers like Home Depot came to take a piece of the diminishing supply of disposable income in the state. For local stores, things got pretty tight for a moment.

Fleeing jobs and rocketing fuel oil prices are putting a massive financial strain on rural households. How are they responding? By going local – planting gardens like never before. Staying at home, avoiding pricey vacations – and sprucing up the backyard with fertilizer and lawn mowers. And suddenly, times are better in the home and garden business. (On top of it, Vermonters are back to eating their own delicious local foods!)

What else could be positive about this? Think it through – there will plenty of time to think about disaster soon enough.

It seems that the fundamentals of the banking industry were unsound, and that ultimately this led to a collapse. It’s a question of structural assumptions – what is underpinning our industry? What might change? When could a tipping point come? These heady questions are often left to us futurist-types, but it seems like this week it would be a good idea for everybody.

For example, I would like to propose a betting pool on when the healthcare industry in America will need/receive its bailout. Between the demographics of the Boom generation’s retirement and the massive wasteful spending of our current system, the now $2 trillion industry has been forecast to increase to $4 trillion by around 2020.

My assumption – which I state here – is that this is structurally unsound. The economy as a whole will crack long before we get to $4 trillion. If we don’t change the structure of the industry, it will require one of those bailouts. What year do you figure it might be? 2015? 2023? 2025?

What about your industry? What assumptions are you using to justify the long-term profitability of your company? This isn’t gloom and doom, things might be great for you. But what’s the structural long-term?

This is a good week to ask those questions. The implications of failing to do so seem quite clear.

Amazing.

Drug giant Pfizer tries to force medical journal to reveal anonymous sources.

Yes, Pfizer is suing the New England Journal of Medicine to get them to compromise the confidential peer-review process that keep science from becoming a big political game in which scientific fact can be swayed by money.

Pfizer has issued a subpoena demanding that the journal release the
identities and comments of its referees, who normally remain anonymous
so that they will feel free to give their honest opinions.

Wow. Talk about a short-term strategy that will forever alter your relationship with your customers.

Note to Pfizer, and all pharmaceutical companies: Doctors are your customers. Doctors are scientists who treat people. Doctors take a Hippocratic oath to treat people, whereas you have shareholders who expect money to be made from the treatment of disease. This is a fundamental tension.

Note to pharma companies: Doctors see their relationship with medical data as sacred. Often, your industry sees it as something to be manipulated for market strategy. Notice the difference in emotional content in the description of these two relationships.

Note to pharma companies: You might consider looking at the record industry, when they started suing their clients. Their sales have been plummeting, and their customers look in variety of places for the service that records used to provide.

Note to pharma companies: Suing your customer base, even when you think you are legally justified is
the last gasp of a burned out business model.