Global Remix

By RICHARD SCASE

ISBN 0-7494-4871-7

At first I was confused by this book. I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether it was a futures text about the future of management, or whether it was a management text about the application of foresight in management. About half way through the book I decided that it was both. There are elements within the book that will appeal to those who wish to engage in management issues, and there are elements in the book that contain some very useful insights into the future.

This book is an ideal purchase for those managers and corporate planners who are looking for an introduction to foresight and futures studies. It is not too demanding and it does not require a great deal of technical knowledge in order to get the best from it. I would thoroughly recommend the book as a corporate gift for junior managers looking to raise their game. This is the demographic to which the book is aimed.

READ the full review.

BUY from Amazon UK.

Why Europe Will Run The 21st Century

by MARK LEONARD

ISBN 0-00-719531-1

I really enjoyed reading this book. Mr Leonard has a style of writing that makes it easy to follow the argument. The book is divided into digestible sections, which makes it easy to put down and pick up again without losing the thread of the argument. This book is well recommended to those who would like to study the case for Europe put by an enthusiastic Europhile. The fact that Mr Leonard is a British Europhile is just an added bonus.

READ the full review.

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Turning The Future Into Revenue

by GLEN HIEMSTRA

ISBN 0-471-79293-4

I really enjoyed this book. It is well written, the argument flows very well and the topics are quite easy to follow. This makes it an easy read. The book is not too long, and does not dwell on points, which helps it to avoid being long winded. We can thoroughly recommend the book as it covers an important topic in an informed way, with a style that helps the reader to understand the points being made. I would recommend the book to strategic planners as a text to describe the preliminary activities to strategic planning, and to act as an introduction to the study of the future.

READ the full review.

BUY from Amazon UK

More Pieces In The Jig-Saw

Sometimes I find it useful to consider the future as a large unmade jigsaw puzzle. A puzzle where we currently do not have all of the pieces, and where, in the course of our travels, we find the odd piece here and there. Generally, the pieces that we find are relatively small and do not always link with other pieces that we have found. Every now and then, however, we do find a couple of interlinked pieces that help to reveal a good part of the overall picture.

Last week was a bit like that - we have acquired two important and linked pieces in our puzzle. The first was a very small piece on ITV News (ITV is the tabloid TV Channel in the UK) on the fate of the Carteret Islands. Click here to access the piece. I spent a little while trying to find out more about the islands. The Wiki entry is the best I have found so far (click here to see this). Anyway, it appears that the residents of the carteret Islands are about to become the first climate refugees.

The second piece to my jigsaw came from a piece on Yahoo News about Carbon Footprints (click here to access the piece). It always struck me as odd that Dubai, whilst being as hot as the desert, has the worlds longest indoor ski-slope. An estimate by the WWF now suggests that the UAE (of which Dubai forms a part) has the largest per capita Carbon Footprint in the world. What will surprise many in Europe is that it even larger than the US.

We can argue that the small population of Dubai rather limits the impact of this per capita footprint, but that is not the point. The point is the degree to which the indoor ski-slope impacts on the climate refugees. We are soon to reach an important milestone in global warming - the point at which we can no longer say that our activity (or inactivity in some cases) does not impact on the plant as a whole. Far from being a victimless phenomenon, global warming is now becoming personal, starting with the Carteret Islanders.

The Search For Meaning

An interesting invitation came across my desk recently - to go Tankballing. Tankballing is the latest version of the sport of Paintballing, which I believe, is known as 'wargames' in the US.

The idea of Paintballing is that a team (usually a group on a corporate team-building day) dresses up in army fatigues and goes around an enclosed environment shooting an opposing team with pellets of paint. Tankballing is the mechanised version of this, where teams go around a course, in a tank, shooting paint pellets at other tanks. (See Link).

It is interesting to reflect on why people do this sort of thing, as it has something quite profound to say about our futures. If we accept Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs', then as our more basic needs of, say food and shelter, are met, then we find that we are likely to progress on to higher orders of needs, such as finding meaning in our lives. Looking at this globally, last year over 100 million people in India and China moved out of poverty. As their disposable incomes rise, so, once their more basic needs are met, will their consumption on goods and services that help them in their quest to find meaning in their lives.

Tankballing might be at the extreme end of the spectrum in finding meaning - it recognises that we weren't always human - but it does represent a desire for adventure that is within modern societies. This desire manifests itself in many ways. For example, those who desire adventure in the form of the Merchant Explorers could be catered for by companies such as Fred Olsen, who operate a Star Clipper service (see http://www.starclippers.co.uk/), where the traveller can sail the seven seas in a Tall Ship. Once the rising consumers in the BRIC nations latch onto this form of consumption, demand is likely to grow commensurately.

This will have quite an impact on resource use and the environment in the future. One could question the sustainability of ever more growth in adventure tourism. A diminishing resource is likely to be peace and quiet when on holiday. Paradoxically, it could become the case that the only way to find peace and quiet is to stay at home!

Demographic Redundancy

We nearly lost a dear friend over Christmas - the Little Chef chain of restaurants. The Times had a piece that gave the facts of the story (View Article), but there is more to it than the financial pages can convey.

We need to provide a bit of background for those who are based outside of the UK. The road sytstem in the UK has been constructed at a number of levels. The primary routes are the Motorways (the 'M' roads). The secondary routes are Trunk Roads (the 'A' roads). Facilities are provided on the Motorways by a series of service stations that are regulated by the Department of Transport. Facilities on the Trunk Roads are not regulated so closely, and are determined by market forces. The Little Chef is a national network of facilities (about 300 of them) based almost exclusively on the Trunk Roads. They normally provide a petrol facility, a dining facility, and a rest room facility.

The emphasis of the Little Chef chain is 'slow'. In a world of instant service and fast food, the Little Chef restaurants provide a counter-balance to the pace of modern life. The chain works on a model of service at the table and the food is cooked to order on the premises. It is almost diametrically opposed to the McDonalds model of food service. They appeal to people like me, who like to travel slowly, who want a bit of company when on the road, and who want their meals individualised rather than mass-produced. Sadly, this demographic is diminishing.

As we rush into the future at even greater speeds, the emphasis is on 'fast'. The Motorways are congested, as people choose this route in an attempt to travel at faster speeds. This is despite having a parallel network of Trunk Roads that are almost empty. We all consume food that is ready to eat as we purchase it, in a restaurant that is designed for 'throughput' rather than comfort. Sadly, this demographic is growing.

The Little Chef chain is in trouble because it no longer provides what the public wishes to buy. It has become a victim of a demographic shift away from the core of its business model. Even though the rescue package has been agreed, we fear that the chain will be saved by becoming more like its nemesis. This could make it even more demographically redundant. We have become used to the concept of being 'technologically redundant' (remember the 'typing pool'), but it may take a bit of time to become accustmed to being 'demographically redundant'.

Perhaps that's one of the costs of the Information Age?

New Year Predictions

The New Year is traditionally a time when the press reviews the year that has just ended and the year that is about to commence. There is a plethora of material in this vein. We normally point people to 'The World In ...' series by The Economist as a reasonably authoratitive source (see magazine link). The World in 2007 has a number of interesting articles - we particularly like Angela Merkel's vision of Europe. This year, we are also recommending a longer article in The Business as being of interest (see article link). In our view, this is a useful reminder that, in the markets, what goes up can also come down again.

The reviews of the year ahead always contain a number of predictions for the future. As futurists, we try to avoid making too many point estimates for the future. It is more interesting to provide a number of range estimates as to what the future might hold. This gives us more material to work with and recognises that the future is not pre-determined. This is one of the lessons that we try to instil into our Interns at an early stage. To underline it, we ask them to take an old copy of 'The World In ...' series and to update us on a number of predictions.

For example, in 'The World In 1997', we were told:

"British voters in 1997 will eject the Conservatives after 18 years and, without enthusiasm, elect a new government under Tony Blair. As a result, Britain will not find a new world role: it will finally cease looking for one. Mr Blair, born in 1953, will be Britain's first genuinely post-imperial prime minister."

At one level, this forecast was wrong - Tony Blair is the most interventionist prime minister since Anthony Eden, who has involved the UK in more overseas adventures than the previous five prime ministers put together. However, at another level, the forecast was right. The entanglement in Iraq is deeply unpopular in the UK and a vast number of Britons have simply lost the taste for an imperial adventure. To us, this is an example of getting a trend right but a point forecast wrong.

We always have to keep in mind this reservation when we read about what the future holds. None of us knows for certain what the future will be - the best we can do is to discuss the ranges in which it might be located.

Happy New Year!

Is the experiment irreversible?

Our current workload includes an examination of the future of the European Union (EU) as a political entity. In many ways, the EU is something of an experiment for Europe - an attempt to integrate the European nations peacefully and voluntarily instead of integrating Europe forcefully. Much of the discussion surrounds the degree to which Europe should be integrated (the Federalists with a tight economic and political Union, the Atlanticists with a close economic Union but a looser political Union, and the Nationalists with no Union at all).

However, underneath all of this high level debate are over 400 million people who are just getting on with their lives. They wake up, go to work, eat, sleep, and dream as people always have done. Individually, they make decisions about their lives in an attempt to improve their situations. Collectively, their decisions reveal preferences that are of interest to futurists. We can develop theories and models of how we expect people to behave, but it is their actual behaviour that validates our theories and models.

Their was an interesting report this week that told us that about 10% of the UK population currently lives overseas, either full time or part time (see News Item ). The top locations are currently Australia and Spain. Within Europe, Spain, France, and Ireland are the top destinations for expatriate Britons. We feel that this is evidence of a big trend that will have some significance in the future.

The more we find Britons retiring to sunshine destinations in France and Spain, the more we find French companies locating in the UK to enjoy a lower tax regime, the more we find Polish plumbers locating in the UK to find a better lifestyle, the more Europe will become integrated from the 'bottom up'.

We can talk about European integration at a high level, but this suggests a presumption that a 'top down' solution will be imposed upon the populations of Europe. This couldn't be further from the truth. What is actually happening is that hundreds of thousands of people are voting for integration by making it happen. Actually integrating into another European nation by living there. As this trend continues, the European experiment is more likely to become irreversible.