thinkfuture: technology, philosophy and the future

A wise man once said – if you are not embarrassed by your first version, then you waited too long to launch it.

Have you ever looked at what you were doing and realized that you were just washing the walls, and not pushing the balls?

Do you know your customer journey? Have you mapped it out lately?   Do you make it easy for customers to do business with you? After a time, your processes may have begun to deviate from the ideal customer experience. Are you seeing an increase in customer service calls, lower net promoter scores, and other key indicators that something is amiss in your customer experience? 

As humans, we’ve been biased to go after short term results over long term results ever since we were primitives wandering the savannah. The ability to plan and think to the future, to save for tomorrow, to think about what is next, is something that only human beings have, along with the ability to think and reason. But like most humans, we are lazy, and only look as far out as we need to.

In every company, there are troublemakers. These are the radicals, those who don’t toe the party line, they use different processes, they don’t go through channels, they might say or do things that cause some discomfort. Some may describe them as “pains in the ass,” rogue elements which create all manner of disruption, and the company would be better served if they either just went away, or just s...

Do you know which role in your organization is ultimately responsible for innovation? Some people might guess the CTO or the CEO. If you have a dedicated innovation group, then it might be the Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), or the VP or Innovation, or some other senior leader with innovation in their title. But you’d be wrong. Innovation is more than a job title – its a risk-taking, experimental...

The story of Popsockets , founded by a philosophy major (just like me) is an awesome example of invention, design thinking and pivoting.

A fantastically interesting conversation as we discuss the future of work, culture change, agility, personal branding and much more. Here are the books we referenced. BTW, did you know that Warren Buffet spends 80% of his day reading? I know I'm slacking, are you? Drive, Daniel Pink Startup of You, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari Homo Deus, a...

We unpack what it takes to build a successful brand right now - and it's not as hard and you might think. Its an amazing wide ranging interview with Henry Kaminski, Jr. – Founder of Unique Designz . We dig into the best way to have a unique voice among all of the other voices out there, talk about the past, present and future of branding, the ups and down of building a business, and talk about how...

Your customers are trying to complete a specific task when they contact you - how easy do you make it?

Today's episode digs into AI based recruiting and bias. What if we did eliminate bias, but we didn’t think it was, because of the output of the system? Even with a fully transparent AI picking candidates, would we ever get to a fully unbiased system? Maybe, but I think that the only way we could do that is to allow the system to make the decisions and eliminate the human from the process. We all c...

 To innovate – you must absorb many different sources of information – especially in the areas not in the area you are trying to innovate in, let those percolate in your brain, then apply them to your current challenges.  If you don’t fill up your funnel with new materials, (as in new experiences, new learning, new people, new places), then it becomes challenging to solve problems with n...

Wondering what SEO even means anymore? We peel back the layers of work needed to get the organic relevancy you've always wanted. In discussion with Damon Burton of SEONational , we cover meta keywords (not a thing anymore), loading speed, mobile friendliness, intuitive structure, relevant content creation, getting quality backlinks , newsjacking, what cadence of blog posting is ideal, length of po...

 We talk about the past and future of AI and all of the elements of it - from computer vision to machine learning to data science. We cover AI taking your job, how virtual assistants work (and don't work), some of the most exciting breakthroughs in AI (many of which have just occurred in the last few years, as we finally have the data and the processing power to make them happen). We wrap up...

We delve into deep data analysis, does it have the answer to every question? A while back I blogged about big data , and the possibility that with enough of it, we'd be able to answer every question. While this was a future vision, we may be there right now. Today, we have a great conversation with Rado Kotorov , a Technology Innovator and Leader and his new startup, Trendalyze . They do time seri...

We chat with Bob Sager , author of 101 Freaking Brilliant Business Ideas: And Ten Ways YOU Can Create Your Own . We range from discussions on innovation and great new business ideas - how to get training to stick, and exercises to make you more creative. 

Today we feature a great wide-ranging interview with Coach Mya from coachmya.com

Are you in it for the money, or are you in it to help people?

Automation should take jobs that humans are no longer fit to do, so we can be free to do more human jobs

Why is Elon Musk so interesting? He solves problems with solutions of the future - we need to invent new things before we can solve them.

How can you tell if your innovation is real or fake?

Ideas can never be right or wrong - everything is an experiment

Even if the unknown is better, we still fear it, which is a normal human reaction we need to conquer

When it comes to feedback to your inventors, saying nothing is worse than saying no.

Its still too difficult to configure things - we need to figure out a new generation of true plug-and-play