ArchivesTag : futurist
The Future of Marketing 2012 and Beyond
Recently some clients have asked me to think about marketing, brands, consumers, the new media, technology, and how the new relationships among these elements are changing old enterprise/customer relationships. Fundamentally I think the deepest shift that is going to happen can be captured by asking one important question. Traditionally, one might ask which brands you [...]
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Raising Retirement and Medicare Ages Can Backfire
There was a time when I thought that raising the retirement age was a good idea. People were living longer and healthier, and most work was information or service work. So why not? The U.S. age for Social Security is already going up to 67. What would be the harm in raising it to 70? [...]
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Colonizing Space and Yesterday’s Dreams
I grew up on this stuff. In the 1970′s some at NASA believed it may be realistic to be building colonies in orbit of up to 10,000 people, by…about now. It may have been, had we really wanted to. The original dreams came from the work of Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, and his book High [...]
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Can Economic Growth Last and other Math
Yesterday I discovered a really terrific website, a blog called Do the Math, by UCSD professor Tom Murphy. He is a physicist and mathematician, who began wondering if commonly held assumptions mostly about the future could be true when subjected to math. For example, in this blog and a related one he wrote earlier Professor [...]
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Future of Food: The Challenge of Food Security
Here is a brief video clip from my keynote speech to Buhler in 2010, focusing on the Challenge of Food Security. As I suggest in the video, the upcoming challenge of food security is the overwhelming amount of food we need to produce to feed the quickly growing world population. In August, when the speech [...]
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World Oil Prices Heating Up
Recent months brought a sense of security about future oil supplies and prices. Some large new oil discoveries, combined with improved production in Iraq and the Gulf states, had caused many observers to relax. Some even went so far as to claim that worries about oil were over, for the long-term future. Egypt, Tunisia and [...]
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Glen Hiemstra – Why Explore the Future
Why explore the long-term future? In this five and a-half minute video excerpt from a 2010 speech, I suggest three critical reasons to explore the future: To anticipate paradigm changes To see preferred future directions early To develop a shared image of the future, and fold that image back on the present. In this clip [...]
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Egypt, Tunisia, and the Future
It is too soon to assess with any accuracy what will be the long-term outcomes of the recent revolution in Tunisia, and the demonstrations growing in intensity right now in Egypt. The implications for the greater Arab world and the Middle East, and the rest of world are unknowable right now. But I think we [...]
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Predictive modeling, future weather, and a forecast of Pirates
I loved this story today in the Seattle Times newspaper, about a presentation to a conference of 3500 scientists in the American Meteorological Society, by Jim Hansen. Hansen is an applied mathematician at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California. Mr. Hansen’s weather forecast: A Chance of Pirates. Taking advantage of advances in computing power [...]
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The New Pay Gap: Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials
Glen was recently interviewed by Meghan Casserly of Forbes Magazine about the pay gap that many employees in younger generations are now dealing with. Meghan’s key point is that wage stagnation now for the Millennials may have long-term consequences for their career income, an idea that Glen agrees with. But as usual, Glen had additional [...]
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