November 2007

The following is a summation of a presentation I gave to the Calgary CFA Society in Canada last April.

The concept of ‘the future’ is a dangerous fantasy because it implies simplicity, and this is particularly true of the future of energy. Energy is at the very center of our society, and is tied up in everything we do. As a result, it is enormously complex, involving so many different aspects of the economy, and of supply and demand, that it’s almost impossible to talk about in its entirety. As a result, what I’m planning to do in the time I have today is to focus on selected aspects of energy, and then make some broad generalizations. And since all generalizations are false - including this one - I’m under no illusion that I will deal with all aspects of this enormously complex subject.

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May 2007

The following article was written at the request of a Canadian education magazine. All of the details apply to the United States, except for the population projections. In 10 years’ time, U.S. schools will have roughly 2 million more students than they do today. Other than that, though, the attitudes and situations will be about the same.

Ten years is both a very long time, and a seemingly short time. For many educators, ten years encompasses a big chunk of their working careers. Yet, at the same time, 1997 doesn’t seem all that long ago. I went back to columns I wrote for Teach magazine ten years or so ago to see what the concerns were at that time, and how things have changed, and I was both surprised and discouraged.

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June 2006

What follows is a summary of a presentation I recently made for the ‘2006 Life Sciences Industry Summit,’ co-hosted by the Long Island Life Sciences Initiative, and the Center for Biotechnology.

The Life Sciences Century

When we look back, later this century, we’ll identify the completion of the Human Genome Project as the time when we hit the knee of the exponential growth curve, even though there’s much more to the life sciences than genetics. We are now experiencing the beginning of a period of growth rates in this industry that are beyond anything that humanity has experienced before, possibly eclipsed only by the explosion in computers and communications. Moreover, the effects of this research on our daily lives is going to be even more dramatic than that of IT, and will change our society and the world in fundamental ways that we find hard to either foresee, or believe.

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April 2006

What follows is adapted from a presentation I gave to a joint conference on the futures of farming and alternative fuels.

There is no future in traditional agriculture, and those who persist in hoping that there is will go down to defeat and bankruptcy. But there is a remarkably prosperous future for new approaches to agriculture, with non-traditional products and markets, and non-traditional ways of addressing these markets. Let’s start by looking at why there’s no future for traditional agriculture.

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September 2005

Have you ever gotten really lousy service, then wondered how the restaurant, phone company, Internet service provider, or store that gave it to you managed to stay in business? The answer, unfortunately, lies in Darwin’s poorly understood theory of natural selection, driven by the rising tide of competition produced by globalization and technology.

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May 2005

Consider the following premise for a science fiction story:

As humans moved beyond the stone age, they gradually started developing and using tools. Fire was discovered, and added considerably to their ability to defend themselves, and make life comfortable. Over time, people added more and more sophisticated tools to their toolboxes, and started to change and adapt the environment to their convenience, albeit in a crude and clumsy fashion.

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February 2005

Only perverted parents would feed their children food that they knew was poisoned. Yet, many parents poison their children physically, emotionally, and spiritually through inaction and indifference, and are sometimes even aware that they are doing so. Nor should we blame parents alone, for we are all responsible for permitting the emergence of an environment which fosters unhealthy children. Let’s deal with the physical side first.

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August 2004

Innovation is the hot topic of the 2000s, and with good reason. An organization’s success at innovation will determine whether they pick up market share and thrive, or shed customers and go bust. It is the key to both survival and success. But much as ‘total quality management’ became the management buzz word in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, ‘innovation’ is in danger of becoming a fashionable management mantra, endlessly repeated, but poorly understood. Accordingly, let’s examine both the importance of innovation, and then delve into some of the techniques of innovation.

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October 2003

I’ve often found that telling people what tomorrow may be like is not as clear or as effective as illustrating what I mean with a vignette or story set in the future. What follows is one of the vignettes that I originally wrote for my newly published book, Who Owns Tomorrow? 7 Secrets for the Future of Business (Penguin, Toronto: 2003). Unfortunately, as I had to edit out about 40,000 words to pare the manuscript down to size, this vignette wound up on the cutting room floor. It illustrates many of my thoughts about the future of retailing, but also of the living, watching world that will surround us, and that we will take for granted.

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July 2000

Just for some summer fun, I thought I’d answer some of the questions I get along the lines of: ‘What happened to the glorious future we were promised 25 years ago?’

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May 2000

‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ - ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats

Shortly before Christmas, 1999, I was contacted by a reporter for a Dallas newspaper. His ‘beat’ was religion and spirituality, and he was doing an article on the future of morality. He’d seen some of the articles on my website, and an article written about me in a magazine, and called me to ask if I had any thoughts about the future of morality. As it happens, I’ve given this quite a bit of thought, and was able to reply right away that the future of morality was self-discipline.

He seemed surprised, both that I had a ready answer, and that it was something so simple as self-discipline, so I explained.

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April 2000

The anti-gravity economy: Are recessions a thing of the past?

There are three major structural changes in the U.S. and global economies that will change the patterns of recession and recovery, and that have significant implications for you and your business.

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