Google Alerts for Futurist Glen Hiemstra

Showed up in google news alerts twice this week…

The first one, two actually, refers to a program that I helped to create with well known stress and anxiety expert Lucinda Bassett. She has developed and now has a available a 5-CD program called “The Solution .” I collaborated on the first CD in the series, all of which are designed to help you manage in the current stressful times.

Check out Bio-Medicine.org

The second alert is from the Investors Business Daily. In an article entitled “Turn Your Team Around” the author quotes some material from my book Turning the Future Into Revenue, on the nature of creating a vision.

Check out Investors Business Daily

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet video host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

What is a futurist?

Want to know some of what a futurist does day by day? Check out this nice summary of how she scans the daily environment, by Brenda Cooper, at her blog, brenda-cooper.com.

Future Careers and Aging

Not long ago I had the opportunity to interview Jan Reha, whose company is Career Discovery, Inc. We talked about the challenge of career adjustment in the current economy. Jan aims her practice at people in transition, as well as a wider clientele, and I asked her specifically what she is advising older workers, as they look ahead. Her advice?

1. People have to change their mindsets, about retirement at 65, an "artifact of the manufacturing age."

2. If you have a job, hold on to it.

3. Downsize your life-style and expectations, hard though that us,

4. Go back and get some training.

We are in a time of of a transition. Time to keep changing folks. Watch the interview below.

(Jan also interviewed me, about Futurist.com, and you can see that video here.)

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet video host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Discovering the Future

I've been reading a popular old book, Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon (1982). This is the story of his long driving tour of the U.S., keeping to "blue highways" (or two-lane roads) and small towns.

At one point he gets lost (more than once actually), and writes about it, commenting in a way that relates well to scientific discovery, and to discovering the future through curiosity.

Again on the road, I drove up a lumpy, dry plateau, all the while thinking of the errors that led me to Hat Creek. The word "error" comes from a Middle English word, erren, which means, 'to wander about,' as in the knight errant.... Yesterday I had been mistaken and in error, taking one road after another. As a result, I had come to a place of clear beauty...

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring. (pp. 223-224)

You can wander around, here.

Futurist Speaker – Media Futurist Videos

Gerd Leonard, EU-based media futurist and I just got a nice notice for our video series in a blog called SkipVision, by David Potsiadlo. He links to all of our online videos about media futures and the forces impacting the future of media. He says,

Remember when you were a kid and used to think about the future? If you were like me, visions of the future were full of hoverboards, flying cars, and shiny chrome everything. There was no doubt the future would be awesome, even if it seemed forever away.

Things seem quite different as an adult, especially one living in the early 21st century. The future no longer waits quietly over the horizon, but is instead standing at the doorstep. At times, peering ahead one or two decades seems somewhat unfathomable, as our lives change so much with each passing year. How to put it all into perspective?

The solution is simple: turn to a media futurist!

Particularly, I speak of media futurists Gerd Leonhard and Glen Hiemstra, the work of whom has left me recently fascinated....

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Futurist Speaker Glen Hiemstra in Google News

This is just a quick note to alert you to two currently available articles that feature quotes from me, noted for me by Google news alerts.

The first is actually about China and the Beijing Olympics, "Beijing results serve food for thought," which appears in the blog at the WRAL TV station out of Raleigh Durham, NC. It is written by Barry Jacobs. Mr. Jacobs notes the successes, failures, and inherent contradictions that seem inevitable in a authoritarian yet capitalist state. He quotes an observation I made last week when speaking in North Carolina to the annual meeting of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, in New Bern, NC. I had described the success that China has had moving quickly to build high speed rail systems.

The second article, on the future of the economy, appears in the Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch. The writer, Emily Dooley, bases her assessment on interviews with several experts. She had explored with me in particular two of my major interest areas, the impact of an aging society, and the energy transition now underway. Ms. Dooley reaches an interesting conclusion, that we should expect a strong economy in five years. In my conversation with her I was a bit more cautious on that prediction, suggesting that the energy transition may not be an easy one, and that we may be in a period that is not quite like traditional business cycles.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

AquaCurrent Science

One the most unusual and enjoyable jobs I have had as a futurist came in late winter this year, for Proctor & Gamble Beauty, a job which I did via DeVries Public Relations of New York. DeVries was recently named the Consumer PR firm of the year.

The job involved a new product introduction by P&G Beauty, a line of products based on new science called Aquacurrent, which itself was based on the nobel-prize winning discovery of "aquaporins." The latter are proteins that channel water through the millions of human cells. Working with this discovery, P&G scientists (did you know they have one of the largest R&D teams in the world?) reformulated several branded products, and created new ones, all designed to enhance the movement and retention of moisture.

What did they want from a futurist at the product launch in New York? I helped to research and then did a scene-setting presentation on the channeling of water, from ancient canals to current day closed-loop green buildings to micro and nano-channeling of water in medical and filtration devices. Water is life was the theme.

Check out the press release on Aquacurrent Sciencefrom Devries and P&G.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Seattle Shines

The City of Seattle reported that its on-target to its Kyoto goals. That is fabulous. There’s a conference of Mayor’s meeting there this week that includes other global warming luminaries as well (Clinton/.Gore – sound like a ticket to you? And perhaps they are now doing even more good than they did in the White House).

In a post awhile back, I mentioned that Global warming is a problem we need to solve on a global basis. I still believe that. The good we do in Seattle must be joined by the good we do in Shanghai, in Dubai, and in Mexico City. To succeed, we must have an unprecedented level of global cooperation.

But that doesn’t diminish the value of the shining light in our region. I’m quite proud of Seattle. Of my city, Kirkland, too (We have signed up and are working hard to get a handle on measurement. We’re behind Seattle in our program, but still, we’re in there making real changes). Cities, in particular, matter. Statics show that over half of the world’s populations will live in cities in the very near future. We should all cheer the luminaries leading them to cleaner and better designs.

Why plan for possible futures?

Sometimes people ask me "Why plan for the future?" They go on to say something like, "The world is changing so fast we don't even know what the future will be."

Well, we do know a lot. We've also had a fabulous example of planning that paid off in the California fires. Disaster planning is important, but I'm trying to make the point about all planning here, and just use an example we are all familiar with in this moment. I live in the Seattle area now, but I used to live in California, and when I did, I worked with cities. At least at that time, every city staff member in California carried an "emergency worker" card. They all drilled. They all had first aid training. They all know from day one that in an emergency, they were supposed to be willing to report to work. They almost all participated in planning. We drilled so much people sometimes complained that it interfered with their other work.

Of course, in California, certain things like fires and earthquakes are in the probable future (the set of things that are likely to happen). A firestorm like last week was surely worse than imagined, but I'd venture to guess that almost no other state could have evacuated that many people that well. None of the southern states did nearly as good in the hurricanes. I bet they did plan and drill, but I bet they didn't do it nearly as much (neither do we in Washington State, although we're getting better).

So with so many things in our probable future - for example, an aging society - shouldn't we be paying more attention to planning? After all, the greying society is even more inevitable than wildfires in California. I heard Glen give a keynote speech this week, and he talked about how we aren't building the kind of housing that healthy but aging baby boomers are going to need. Instead, we're tearing that kind of housing down and building big houses with multiple floors and large yards (at least around here). In other words, we're not planning for probable futures. In business, we should be planning now for fewer workers that want to stay on the job for less time. We should be designing plans to retain older workers.

Global Launch of Future Talks Online Video Series

Leading futurists Glen Hiemstra and Gerd Leonhard today announced the launch of a web-based video series called Future Talks. Future Talks, produced by Doug Kaye (founder of the Conversations Network), debuts today on the Media Conversations channel with two long-form, in-depth videos that feature each futurist individually. They are interviewed by Mobile Entertainment Forum Chairman Emeritus and renowned music industry figure Ralph Simon. The first regular episode with Leonhard, Hiemstra and Simon, entitled “Media Megatrends”, will be available next week, on October 16, 2007. Interested viewers can subscribe via RSS and receive both the video and the audio-only versions, for free.

The new Future Talks video series is the result of an expanded collaboration between Gerd Leonhard and Glen Hiemstra, with Leonhard coming from a more specialized music, media & entertainment background, and based in Europe, and Hiemstra employing a more generalist and broader futuristic view, and based in the U.S.

Visitors to Futurist.com can access the series directly by going to our own Future Talks page if you wish, and from there you can watch the videos, or follow links to download them as MP3 audio files or MP4 video files. The first episode is available here...

After the introductory videos that are released today, Future Talks will feature a new, 10-15 minute episode for the next nine weeks. All videos will be widely syndicated on the Internet and are made available for free embedding and downloading under a Creative Commons license. The Future Talks website at www.futuretalks.com will serve as a hub that lists all related resources, blogs and episode details.

Quoting from the global press release...

"Glen Hiemstra is an international futurist who has been advising leading companies and government agencies for two decades. As the founder of Futurist.com he is recognized for his expertise in describing future trends and assisting enterprises in long range planning. He is the author of “Turning the Future Into Revenue” (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), and co-author of "Strategic Leadership: Achieving Your Preferred Future" (2000). Glen is on the advisory Board of EcoMedia, and among many current projects is advising a GM/SAIC/China consortium on a “sustainable mobility 2030” exhibit for the Shanghai 2010 WorldExpo.

Gerd Leonhard is known as an influential Music & Media Futurist and Media2.0 expert, provocative speaker, thought-leader and blogger. He is the co-author of “The Future of Music” (Berklee Press, 2005) as well as the author of “The End of Control” (www.endofcontrol.com) which was recently released online, for free. Gerd is based in Basel, Switzerland and blogs at www.mediafuturist.com. He also serves as CEO of music widget company Sonific LLC.

Gerd comments: “Guided by one of the most knowledgeable in the media business, Ralph Simon, Glen and I had a great time recording these shows, spinning and riffing on some very exciting future scenarios. Glen’s wider view of the future is absolutely amazing and the resulting videos are full of great gems of knowledge and inspiration.”

For me personally it was exciting to sit with Gerd Leonhard, who really is a media visionary, and tackle the challenging questioning by Ralph Simon. I expect that viewers will find what we had to say exciting, even inspiring at times, and certainly provocative. The web continues to become more and more visual, and I am pleased to join Gerd and the Conversations Network team in this project.

It was our decision to make Future Talks available for free, and syndicate it under a Creative Commons license. Gerd and I agreed that, “Sharing our knowledge and ideas as widely as possible is what we both cherish the most, and we believe that it is both our responsibility to do so, as well as an important and viral way of branding for both of us. We think the benefits of offering the Future Talks episodes for free will assure a wider audience. As you watch the series over the next several weeks, you will understand why we think this is the way of the future. We also realize that the future of media is conversations, not monologs, and we therefore look forward to engaging with our audience using our blogs and various platforms such as our Kyte.tv channel.”