Technology Revolution: The Future of Now

The buzz: Crystal ball time! If your #1 business wish this holiday is to know what 2017 holds for your company, your industry and the world, we've got the next best thing. On Dec. 7, 14, and Jan. 4, 11 and 18, we'll bring you more than 50 thought leaders' insightful predictions for the technologies, strategies, and trends that can help you grow and compete in 2017 and beyond. Pour a cup of Joe, Ea...

The buzz: "Impossible is not a fact. It is an opinion" (Muhammad Ali).A unique clustering of inventions in the century after the U.S. Civil War improved the American and European standard of living – human well-being – more than any period before or after, with advances in everything from food and energy to health and work. Can our current innovation explosion have a similar impact despite uninten...

The buzz: "Shall we play a game?" -WarGames, 1983 film. Successful Fortune 500 companies anticipate—and often invent—the future before their competitors do. Why? They know that anticipating industry disruptions is predominantly a creative act. Their secret weapon? Competitive "war gaming" exercises that produce solid defensive strategies and innovative offensive growth strategies to help them proa...

The buzz: "I want to be around people that dream…and do things" (Amy Poehler). Forty-six percent of US privately held firms are at least half owned by women and represent ~16 million jobs. But while female entrepreneurship is rising, male-owned businesses are 3.5 times more likely to reach $1 million in annual revenues. With just 2 percent of US women-owned businesses earning $1M a year, what reso...

The buzz: "Cities are never random." (Neal Shusterman) Cities around the world are on a mission: maintain a safe, clean, well-oiled, inclusive urban environment for residents, businesses, and visitors. The key is to perform mundane tasks more efficiently than ever. But how to automatically clear storm drains in a downpour, repair street light outages, keep traffic flowing efficiently 24/7? The sol...

The buzz: "Shall we play a game?" -WarGames, 1983 film. Successful Fortune 500 companies anticipate—and often invent—the future before their competitors do. Why? They know that anticipating industry disruptions is predominantly a creative act. Their secret weapon? Competitive "war gaming" exercises that produce solid defensive strategies and innovative offensive growth strategies to help them proa...

The buzz: The Electric Slide. News flash for Utilities: You can no longer be profitable on a one-sided business model providing power to customers. Enter the prosumer. While the consumer is utility-dependent and generates revenues, the prosumer and utility are interdependent. The utility needs the prosumer's commitment to reduce electricity use or supply it to the grid at specified times, and the...

The buzz: "Change is the law of life…those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future" -JFKennedy. The term "digital transformation" is ubiquitous, but what does it really mean? Easy answer: software and technology adoption. Not! Digital transformation is about changing everything else – business activities, models, activities, processes, competencies, organizations, opera...

The buzz: 'The unicorn is noble' -German folk song. Wow! Companies led by EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners are among the most successful in the world, generating 3T dollars in revenue, creating 13M jobs, outperforming the US market in stock returns and longevity. The majority go public at 300 percent the rate of US private companies. How did EY identify these 'unicorns'? What entrepreneurial le...

The buzz: 'I'm gonna tell Mom on you.' Women remain under-represented in government, boards, C-suite and influential business roles, often due to unconscious bias. A man named John or David is more likely than a woman to be on a board. But the unintentional blame-and-shame messages in workplace diversity and inclusion programs often leave many men feeling excluded and alienated. How can we get pas...

The buzz: Mom, are we there yet? We're seeing a ground-swell of policy and practice discussions and activities about the under-representation of women in the boardroom, C-suite and high-growth entrepreneurship. The Lean-In Revolution has brought men into the conversation and spurred women's power networks. More venture capital firms, angel investment groups, and accelerator programs are aimed at f...

The buzz: 'Welcome to the future' -B. Paisley. Move over, 4th Industrial Revolution! Welcome to the 5th Industrial Revolution with intelligent robots, 3D-printed human organs, drones fetching warehouse orders, and driverless cars. Bhaskar Chakravorti describes it as 'the fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.' The experts speak. Jas...

The buzz: "I fell off my pink cloud with a thud." -Elizabeth Taylor. By 2019, cloud software delivery will grow to 112 Billion dolars –five times faster than traditional software– leveling the IT playing field. With uneasiness, skepticism and "technical acrophobia" about the cloud mostly a thing of the past, cloud adoption could grow from 22 percent today to 32 percent in the next 24 months. The m...

The buzz: It's NOT like "déjà vu all over again"! -Yogi Berra. Wake up call for the Chemical industry: Digital Transformation is real and more relevant than ever for your businesses. Reality check: Many of them still think of "digital" only as a way to improve manufacturing and supply chain. But today's digital is a path to becoming more agile and productive, growing profitability and achieving su...

The buzz: Knock Knock! Futurist Edie Weiner coined the term 'templosion' to describe rapid and massive changes in increasingly shorter timeframes. As the templosive acceleration of digital transformation – Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Smart Machines – disrupts tech-laggard Finance, do they need a new business model to adopt and adapt? The experts speak. Sam Parikh, Deloitte: 'Computer...

The buzz: Living for the City -Stevie Wonder, 1974-. Violent attacks in Florida, France, Texas and Turkey make public safety a top global concern. Can governments protect us in our homes, in public, at work and play? Tech advances in facial recognition, geo-fencing, streaming multi-source data analytics offer law enforcement and security organizations better awareness, sensing, detection and predi...

The buzz: Talk is not cheap! With dramatic workforce and business changes – multi-generations at work, gender inequity challenges, developing economies and globalization –it's high time for the CHRO role to evolve. How? For starters, the CHRO can build transformational value-based relationships with HR supporting the business and strategies, engage permanent and external workers in new collaborati...

The buzz: The Gambler (K. Rogers). Business ownership can be a Coney Island rollercoaster. One moment, an exhilarating ride up; the next, a frightening plummet down. There are thousands of guidebooks, but no one has ever walked in your shoes with precisely your mix of talents, opportunities, and obstacles. How do you know "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em?" if you don't know what's "normal" o...

The buzz: 'Takin' Care of Business'. According to Forbes Magazine, 543,000 new businesses launch each month in the U.S. The catch: of the 28 million U.S. small businesses, 22.5 owners are self-employed, average 44,000 in annual revenue and have no employees. Is that the life you want now? Could you ever retire? Tune in for secrets -and not so secrets- to building a business that runs independently...

The buzz: The Internet of Who (Whom)? The Internet was created in 1969 to facilitate the free flow of information. The IoT inherited this spirit. Fast forward to 2016. With cameras and emerging connected devices collecting and reporting data about our lives, it seems we're designing the IoT to quantify and see ourselves clearly, like a virtual mirror. It's time to take a step back and examine what...

The buzz: Stressed? Join the crowd. 78% of employers in the 2013/14 Staying@Work™ Survey said stress is the #1 workforce risk. We have a solution: Radical Resiliency. But individuals, managers and senior executives face tough challenges in achieving it for themselves, their employees and their culture. How to overcome and prevail? The experts speak Eileen McDargh, The Resiliency Group: "It is more...

The buzz: Show me the money? Our current financial world is rife with inefficiencies: cross-border payments take days and cost money, inter-bank funds are slow, accessing money is cumbersome, trading securities takes time. Hail, cryptocurrency! Bitcoin and blockchain were created to solve some of these challenges. How does it work? Should your business, your industry, and you personally adopt this...

The buzz: "We just have a way of getting ourselves into hot water" (Carl Wilson, The Beach Boys). How Social Selling is conducted and how a brand is portrayed in social media – whether undertaken by the PR department, sales force or an individual worker in a large company, or by a small enterprise or a new start-up entrepreneur – can have big ramifications for the company, good and bad. If you're...

The buzz: "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." The key to a healthy population is more than an individual's personal decisions and behaviors. Genetic science says the fault may be in our stars, after all. Can population-based wellness programs be equitable when our genes, cultures and environments make good health a stroll for some but an uphill battle for others...

The buzz: "Trust, but verify." (Ronald Reagan) Social Selling is real - now! How do we know? The numbers. Sales people not using social media missed quota 15% more often than peers who do (Hubspot). Directors with SSI 70 were promoted 1.6X faster to VP than those with SSI 30 in the past two years (LinkedIn profile data). Sounds great, but you may still need to convince your entire sales organizati...