Time to celebrate. Tonight’s not only the eve of the first millennium decade, it’s also the night where the last of Generation Z will be born.

Generation Z covers babies born between 1995 and 2009 and so tomorrow will belong to another, yet to be defined, generation. Generations are like decades. They’re extremely hard to define while you’re in the middle of them. Sometimes it even takes an additional decade to recognize unique trends and characteristics – usually when people make the first moves towards distancing themselves from the fashions of a decade. The eighties, for instance, were highly scorned throughout the nineties; people had bad taste parties and referred to the ghastly eighties.

Australia is a country having put a lot of effort into researching and trying to define Generation Z and the general consensus from down under is that they’re demanding and opinionated – they’re like Generation Y on steroids. As a father of 3 Generation Z girls I would tend to agree

What I want to know from you is this: What do you think defines Generation Z? What are their strengths? Where will they be challenged? How do they consume? How do they communicate? How will they work? What do they expect from life?

I plan series of blog posts on Generation Z in the coming year. I invite you to join in!

In oktober meldden we al dat dit boek er aan zat te komen, maar vandaag is het dan eindelijk zo ver. De auteurs van het boek ‘De toekomst van werk’ – trendwatcher Adjiedj Bakas en HR-professional Marijn van der Woude – bundelden 8 megatrends over de …
Continue reading …

Nice marketing analysis of Apple, Sprint, IBM.  Click here to see some good advice.

Werk bevindt zich in een ingrijpende transitieperiode, vergelijkbaar met het tijdperk van de industriële revolutie. Op 26 november vond de officiële boekpresentatie van ‘De Toekomst van Werk’ plaats. Een trendboek waarin PiCompany-directeur Martijn van der Woude en trendwatcher Adjiedj Bakas beschrijven welke acht megatrends bepalend zijn voor de toekomst van werk.

Here’s 2009 precictions for 2010.

Here’s 2008’s predictions for 2009.

Here’s 2007’s predictions for 2008.

And here’s some past predictions. 

And here’s some more past predictions.

Any conclusions on what was predicted, and what is actually happening?

What’s a megatrend, you ask? It’s something big. I’m talking really big.  Think of a giant unstoppable tsunami of change transforming society as we know it. Think global warming scale — then apply it to mass human behavior. Think glaciers carving the grand canyon of consumer sentiment …

…and brands which embody them.

Regular trends include worrying about the H1N1 flu and/or vaccine, Twitter being considered mainstream and going “green”.

Five megatrends to watch are:

Mass collaboration is powering the new economy

• The brand that gets it: Apple (app store and developer community)

Constant connectivity in an on-demand world

• The brand that gets it: Sprint (the “now network”)

Globalization: Making the world a smaller place

• The brand that gets it: Aliababa.com

Pervasive distrust in big corporations

• The brand that gets it: Ally Bank (“straightforward” is its tagline and some ad copy is: “That means talking straight, doing right and being obviously better for our customers”)

A global sense of urgency to fix the problems of a modern world

• The brand that gets it: IBM (“A smarter planet”)

Five Marketing Megatrends You Can’t Ignore by Adam Kleinberg (blog | twitter)

For discussion: is mass collaboration the answer for pervasive distrust in big corporations? It is interesting that big corporations are deliberately using social media to both seem smaller and encourage that collaboration.

We use the following formula when explaining this stuff to clients:

Engagement = Transparency + Co-Creation

What do you think?

I do not know how to say this simply. I know that America is in a very dangerous place. I am still watching the Ken Burns film The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.  I look at this complicated and difficult story of difficult and complex events and life struggles. Of course it is mostly a story of beautiful places and beautiful creatures being preserved. However, the story was written in the blood sweat and tears of so many and Ken Burns does a good job of setting these things out in a clear and crisp narrative.

We are in a very bad situation and the need for radical change is quite great. However, the chances of having the right changes come into effect are almost nonexistent as far as I can see. Here are some problems which I think come together to make a much larger problem than merely the sum of their parts.

1.We have the river delta of the sixth largest river in the world in this coutry and we do not have abalnced view of it at all. The Mississippi Delta is in a state of ecological freefall and collapse and the consequences for theTexas, Louisiana and Mississippi on the Nothern Gulf Coast have been disastrous. We do have the will power to manage these challenges.

2.We have a huge number of bridges, roads, tunnels and levees that we are not maintaining to solid standards.

3. We consume a huge percentage of the world’s resources and much of it on credit from China where the average citizen ought to be living a higher standard of living.

4. We are almost all agreed to make the coverage of vastly expensive healthcare options and absolute right, not covering undesirable aliens any more than we used to and barely adressing wellness and primary care. This is outrageous and a sign of where we are going to destroy ourselves.

5.In the recent Chicago shooting many saw the crime and almost nobody has spoken to the police and yet this community is seen as equaly desrving of funding and advancement as if it were not a rebel community in arms.

6. Our political theory is insanely simplistic and raw and deluded. None of the nuance and depth that built the best in this country is understood. Calculator democracy and quarterly profits battle in milieu devoid of serious statecraft.

7. We have a huge deficits, huge debt and a slow economy.

8. We have no real sense of justice and proportion in matters related to human community. More or less all forms of real human community (as opposed to state related society or corporate organization) have simply been made ilegal. We have toolittle recognition for Indian Nations and marriage and other than those we have lawsthat effectively prohibit:

A. Native Hawaiian and Samoan near-state tribalism and nationhood.

B. Polygamy is ilegal.

C. Clans, extended families, neighborhoods and monasteries cannot really gain much if any legal recognition of what they actualy are and a structure that supports them.

9. We do nothing really to redefine the narcotrafficking crisis which has contibute to the slaughter in Mexico, to FARC and its wars in Colombia, to the Taliban and it wars including 9-11.

10. We are increasingly isolated form several important sectors of the world and challenged by the European Union and other players which are almost brand new in historic terms.

11. We are unable to manage resources like occupied territories, space station access, nuclear fission technologies and other products of our greatest and most expensive efforts very effectively.

12. Our automobile industry is a major driver of innovation and progress and is in shambles.

13.Subsistence and biodiverse safety first farming is almost nonexistent in this country.

14.Our world is getting smaller in very many ways but for mostly political reasons it is not getting larger in almost any way other than those directly related to population.

In some of my other notes and pages in this site I have tried to show how all of these things went together and worked. I have showedwhat I believe might be some ways out and forward. I will leave it to anyone who reads this to decide whether  they want to explore this blogsite and try to piece together the policy questions and answers in this site. I think that I have made quite a few statements about how bad things seem to me and a lot of that is about personal issues and some is about even bigger trends than the one listed here.

However, I am ready to say that a great deal of my unhappiness is related to these aspects of American economics. We are in my view in a state of advanced entropy right before all the forces reach a zenith of destruction. That right before may not seem so soon to many people even if iot keeps coming. However, for me reversing the trend is the only solution that would bring comfort. I do believe it is possible we will revers these trends but I do not think it is likely at all.  

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One of the more popular, most-read posts I have written on this blog is Dehumanized — A Cause for Alarm in Education, and in the World of Business Books.  It was prompted by, and quoted from, a terrific, thought-provoking, confrontational article by Mark Slouka in the September issue of Harper’s: Dehumanized:  When math and science rule the school. (Note:  subscription required for access to full article).  This piece was about the ascendancy of “mathandscience” and the decline of the humanities, in education, and, in my view, in the world of business.

My brother, Mike Mayeux, CEO of Novotus, read the title, and jumped to his own conclusions about the subject of the article before he read it.  He thought that “Dehumanized” was referring to a world with less and less actual human contact, replaced by human-less technological contact.  So – he wrote a lengthy comment.  It is provocative, and I decided to make it a separate post – a “guest post.”

Mike’s observation reminded me of the John Naisbitt High Tech/High Touch theme first appearing in Megatrends (1982).  Naisbitt warned that the more technology takes over, the harder we have to work at keeping and nurturing a genuine human connection.

Mike Mayeux

Mike Mayeux read the word “dehumanized,” and thought about the ways we are removing the “human” from business.  Here are Mike’s thoughts:

Dehumanizing The Consumer and Job Seeker

The internet and other technologies have increased the cadence in American business that has led to the dehumanization of Consumers and Job Seekers.

Remember when your bank had a “retail banking” division, but when you went to the bank they remembered you by name and were glad to see you. Today it is called “consumer banking” and they greet you like a stranger and only know who you are once you swipe your card and your account comes up and they then ask with a pasted on smile. “Yes, Mr. MayYucks (my name is pronounced MY-You) how can I help you today.” They changed the name when retail customers became familiar with the difference between retail and wholesale, and about that same time technology was getting better and there where new supply chain and transaction ideas coming online. While there has never been wholesale banking, with the advent of wholesale warehouses, and simply as this word crept into our vernacular, retail became a dirty word. It messaged high prices in exchange for some kind of service. We, retail customers, traded convenience for better prices in some categories and the word slipped away.

Ironically, I recently met a banker who wanted to get my business account at Novotus, and he asked me where I did my personal banking and asked me if I had a personal banker. I learned then that banks are offering “Personal Bankers” to wealthier customers and using personal service as an inducement to garner these big depositors. Upon hearing all that a personal banker did, I said “This is fantastic, can I get this for my employees”? He then explained that my employees would have to go through their – wait for it – Consumer (not retail) banking service and have to swipe away.

The business scenario in this example above is simple. Companies understand they can lower the price of a good or service if they lower the expectations of the consumer and increase volume. They AMP up the volume and sell more units (Walmart) and lastly they streamline both the delivery of that product as well as the transaction cost/friction (Technology use – Supply Chain Management and Transaction Automation – Customer Self Service). The negative is that the Customer becomes faceless.

Faceless -- not quite human

Talent Force

I run the largest recruiting operation (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) in Austin, TX. I am familiar with the game described above because we facilitated the hiring of over 1200 people last year with about 15 recruiters and 10 support staff. We have hundreds of thousands of Candidate Customers and hundreds of Hiring Manager Customers. We facilitate hiring relationships between these two huge ecosystems through highly refined procedures, powerful technologies and super smart and committed people. All of these things allow us to do three important things:  increase quality, increase volume, and the best part is that we charge 60-70% less than the typical external recruiting agency. We fight a daily battle to make this a more intimate and personal experience. Hank Stringer and Rusty Rueff explain this struggle in recruiting best in their book Talent Force. In their book they describe the process of nurturing your talent community so that you might increase your companies Talent Brand. This is incredibly important, as next to banking, healthcare, and several other intimate transactions, changing jobs is one of the most stressful and important transactions in a person’s life.
So it’s a new ballgame out there and we are all being affected by it. There are so many wonderful advantages to our highly enabled business world. We need to continue to push these methods and technologies, as there is so much good that can be had. What we need to do also is to continue to find ways to automate with a mindset of doing business with one person at a time.

Don’t get me wrong, I want a great deal when I am buying the family pooch another 50 lbs of dog food, and I will carry it 200 yards in the rain to my car to save that money. I just think that we have to continue to realize that the PEOPLE (Mothers, Daughters, Sons, Fathers, Grand Parents, etc…) matter as much as these new processes.

———-

I think Mike is right.  One way we are becoming “dehumanized,” less than human, is that speed and technology are slowly eroding the human connections that make us, well, human.

Greetings from Key West! We were offline for a while there, but we’re back on again! And what did we see in this morning’s New York Times but an article about how Mastering the Art of French Cooking has become a surprise bestseller, “bringing with it all the butter, salt and goose fat that home chefs had largely abandoned in the age of Lipitor.”

Aside from the spotlight brought back to it by a popular movie, why is a cookbook advocating such labor-intensive, time-consuming recipes, featuring some rather expensive ingredients, that recommends liberal use of cream and real butter in an era in which we are all cholesterol conscious, a bestseller yet again? It would seem to contradict all logic about the world we live in today. But we think we understand this phenomenon a bit. And part of the answer may even be found in a New York Times bestseller from way back in 1982.

In that year, a man named James Naisbitt first published a book called Megatrends, in which he attempted to identify trends toward which our society would move during the next decade. He identified one of these by calling it “high tech/high touch.” It’s paradoxical: The more technological and scientifically streamlined our society becomes, the more popular will become trends in the opposite direction to counteract the effects of all that technology. For example, the wider the variety of mass media entertainment we have available to us, the more some of us will value still being able to curl up with a good book (even if it’s on an electronic reading device!). The more capable modern medicine becomes at diagnosing and treating some of our most challenging diseases with pinpoint accuracy, the more appealing homeopathic remedies become for treating other ailments. And, we would add, the easier the food industry makes it to put meals on our tables that are quick, easy to make and follow all modern nutritional guidelines, the more our bodies long for a good old-fashioned traditionally cooked meal featuring sauces rich in butter and — yes — even some nice crispy bacon. And that’s not just a trend that’s lasted a decade; it’s followed us right into the 21st century.

It may well be that many people are buying MtAoFC “just to buy it”; it may spend more time in most homes sitting on the kitchen cookbook shelf looking impressive than actually having its spine cracked and its pages spattered with oil and butter during a vigorous cooking session. (Although we certainly hope that isn’t true for everyone; the more you try to make these dishes at home, the greater appreciation you develop for what goes into them, and the greater your feelings of accomplishment as a cook, even if you have no ambitions of becoming a chef.) But even those who never actually open their copies of the book (are there such people?) are demonstrating a hunger for the kind of “high touch” that comes from engaging with a truly superb meal, even if it’s at a distance.

Here in Cleveland, we’re lucky — we have a population that appreciates great food and a restaurant community that is working hard to satisfy that appetite. We can do more than just watch Iron Chef on the Food Network; we can actually go to a local restaurant (or two, or three) and experience an Iron Chef’s cuisine. Michael Symon’s success and high profile have helped lift the boats of all the independent restaurants in this area, and we’ve enjoyed being part of that. He’s raised the bar for restaurateurs as well, and with such high-quality establishments competing with ours, and the palates of the local community so well educated, we feel even more keenly the need to not only maintain the integrity of our own offerings but also bring them to a new level.

Here’s another paradox: Even in a recession, and in a city like Cleveland that has operated on a Rust Belt economy for a long time, restaurants that strive to bring truly fine dining experiences to their patrons can survive and thrive. Part of the reason is that recessions that affect even wealthier diners may cause them to choose to postpone an expensive vacation and substitute a series of nice evenings out at good restaurants instead. If your original plan was to travel to Paris this year, and now you can’t afford it, you can still come to the Bistro and enjoy the kind of dishes Julia Child did when she lived there decades ago. Sit on our patio, feel the breeze, order a bottle of wine, and let a bite of something savory soaked in a butter-cream sauce linger on your tongue. For a few hours, you’ll feel as if you’re at a sidewalk café on the Left Bank — but it’ll cost you a lot less.

There will still be some time left for you to take that kind of summer “stay-cation” when we return home and reopen. It won’t even matter that the kids are back in school. (In fact, having successfully gotten the kids back to school, you may be more than ready to treat yourself.) Stop by, and we’ll make you forget you’re only a few miles from home.

Speaking of vacations, though…in case you’re wondering where we are today, our plans include a fishing expedition. The object: landing something delicious for dinner. Check back in later; we’ll let you know what we caught and what we did with it!

By Bakari Akil II, Ph.D.

Nicholas Cage has starred in two movies, Knowing and Next, where he played characters that could predict future events. In both cases, that ability hurt his characters more than it helped. —- However, the next person I want to discuss has also been privy to the future, but his talent has helped him and others enormously.

John Naisbitt, following his daily routine of buying a New York Times from his newspaper vendor, had an epiphany. As he looked around he noticed a lot of newspapers from other cities. He had a sudden thought. If you understood what was going on locally in all these places, then you would understand what was going on in the world. Not only that, but you could predict the future through trends, patterns and events.

Soon thereafter, he quit his IBM job and used his last check to fund a new company. This was in the 1960s. With the help of hired hands, they would comb through 160 newspapers each day and (along with other methods) they would predict what would happen in certain markets, industries or parts of the globe. His talents were so respected that he would go on to have as clients, U.S. presidents, government officials, industry leaders and CEOs. You may have heard of his book, Megatrends published in 1982, where he predicted our shift to an information economy, the focus on a global economy, the increasing role of technology in our lives and “participative democracy.”

In his most recent book Mindset, he provides a nuanced discussion on how he was able to be so successful in determining the ‘future’ without having a shred of psychic ability. 

“Future Embedded in the Present”

I won’t share his entire argument, but I will share some important points. Naisbitt constantly stated that the “future is embedded in the present” and “the seeds (of that future) are all around us.” He elaborated by saying that patterns, trends an present directions are being forecast all the time. But, you have to start developing the habit of looking at the big picture by focusing on many smaller pictures. A similar approach would be the way his organization studied 160 city and international newspapers each day to understand what new developments were just around the bend.

Knowing the Score

Naisbitt also asserted that many people keep up with all the happenings of issues but don’t really know the “score.” He used sports as an analogy to emphasize that in games we play, we keep clear records. If we see the results of a tennis match we can say with absolute “surety” what player won how many games in a set and sets in a match. However, if we try to understand an issue outside the realm of sports, many things become fuzzy. People say they win when they have lost and vice versa. Naisbitt discusses a term used by economists called “revealed preferences” where consumers tell you one thing, but behave differently when you observe their spending habits and purchases. Developing the ability to know the “score” is a talent that can help you measure real progress and can help in a number of ways. 

But what good is obtaining this type of information if you can’t do anything about it?

Well, one of Naisbitt’s final points is that “you don’t get results by solving problems, but by exploiting opportunities.” No, Naisbitt is not saying that we should ignore real issues that have to be addressed, he is stating that if you have a strong grasp on where something is headed you can capitalize by ’setting up shop’ before everyone else. One of his quotes is, “Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.” 

In Mindset, he points out that some things do change but most remain the same and that “almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary.” By understanding what is “constant” and what is capable of being changed (and at what pace) we may be  better able to take advantage of opportunities that could lead to massive success.

“From the moment you teach a child the word ‘tree’ he can no longer fully experience a tree” said Anthony De Mello from India.

Concepts are fine tools for organizing and communicating our experiences of the world. Concepts and mental models also enable us to recognize what otherwise we hardly notice. Mental models are just that: models of reality. But if concepts become rigid beliefs or we equate them with reality itself, then concepts can imprison our thinking. If we invest our ego in our concepts, they become our “pet concepts” or “pet theories” and close our mind to other or new theories. We stop testing concepts against our experience and the experiences of other people. And we cease to learn. I wrote a blog on “We found the enemy: our own concepts!”

Religious and political concepts can possess and control minds. As a matter of survival, religious and political institutions preserve concepts (e.g. doctrines and beliefs) and impose sanctions on its members against thinking freely and challenging those concepts. As a result, it takes years, decades or even centuries to unlearn concepts that no longer work. Theological concepts can control our thinking and block achievement of the very purpose and essence of religion. De Mello also said,

“The final barrier to your vision of God is your God-concept. You miss God because you think you know.”

In a doctoral defense by a graduate student at the Asian Social Institute, I sat in the faculty panel which included a monsignor (a rank between priest and bishop). At some point in the defense proceedings I pointed to the difference between “God as a concept” and “God as personal experience”. The monsignor’s subsequent remarks revealed to me his surprise at recognizing the difference seemingly for the first time.

A learning conversation is possible when people talk about their experiences, but unlikely among people attached to their respective concepts. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn edited such a learning conversation on “Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue”. Mystical union is a personal experience of God; which is different from theological concepts of God. Do you think a learning conversation is equally possible between a Jewish theologian, a Christian theologian and a Muslim theologian?

Working with mental models is one of the five disciplines of a learning organization, according to guru Peter Senge. Below is a slide from one of my presentations on organizational learning, which lists some skills in working with our own mental models.

Staying too long in a professional area of practice or in an academic discipline or in a type of work poses the danger of being stuck with the concepts in that area or type of work. One way of continuously refreshing one’s repertoire of concepts is to shift or learn a completely new area of professional practice.

It worked for me…several times.

After a bachelor’s degree in physics, I took an M.S. and Ph.D. in physical biology. The new concepts in the life sciences were completely new and different from those of the physical sciences and mathematics. After I earned my doctoral degree I practiced through consulting in environmental management, which added the human and social dimensions. Afterwards, I accepted a position in policy studies in a university think tank, which introduced me to governance and equipped me to later accept an appointment in the Philippine government as Assistant Director General for Policy of a government body that directly provides analysis and policy advice to the Philippine President. For seven years I was immersed in the real world of politics and governance. What a change! In shifting from the academe to government, the learning opportunities opened before me were literally vast! When I went back to the academe, my interests went to development and non-government organizations. I co-founded CCLFI, a non-profit foundation for organizational learning and change, knowledge management (KM) and knowledge-based development. That was 10 years ago, when I practically started KM in the Philippines and at the University of the Philippines. What a learning journey!

I learned to:

• Shift my area of professional practice several times, thus preventing me from being stuck on the concepts of one area;
• Compare, cross-fertilize and synergize concepts of one discipline with those of another;
• See that different principles from two or more disciplines are actually the same principle, e.g. the Weber-Fechner law in psychology is essentially the same principle as the law of diminishing marginal utility in economics, and the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is parallel to Hawthorne effect in sociology;
• Integrate knowledge across disciplines, e.g. see the different forms of capital across economics, ecology, psychology, organizational development, law, political science, etc. and call them “metacapital”; and
• Discern trans-disciplinal patterns, e.g. trans-societal Megatrends #1 (see blog Q14) and Megatrend #2 (see blog Q26), or “connect the dots” across seemingly unrelated facts, e.g. the growing importance of intangibles (see blog F2).

Cheers!

—

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From previous blogs, I tried to show that major world problems stem from our lack of knowledge in the indigo quadrant (lower left quadrant in the diagram below):

• The $50 trillion global financial crisis resulted from loss of business confidence or trust. Using KM language, it is loss of stakeholder capital, which lies in the indigo quadrant (see “Q22- $8.3 Trillion: Cost to Americans of Disinvestment in Trust” and “A Value Driver behind Relationship Capital”).
• The numerous on-going armed conflicts all over the planet and the threat of a global nuclear war are manifestations in low or negative relationship capital, which belongs to the indigo quadrant (see “War: Consequence of Negative Relationship Capital”).
• Weaknesses in KM initiatives often lie in the indigo quadrant (see “Tacit-Group Processes in KM”). Because organizational cultural and behavioral issues need to be addressed, experienced KM practitioners accompany KM initiatives with change management (click “Change Management must accompany KM” in the CCLFI opening page).

When two long-term societal megatrends are combined, we discover (see “Q27- Combining Megatrends #1 and #2: the next societal innovations”) that the next significant societal innovations are expected in the indigo quadrant. In my contribution to the book “The Future of Innovation” (to be published by Gower in the autumn of 2009), entitled “The Future of Innovation Must Be Sought in Non-Technological Spheres” I wrote, in part:

“Mankind has demonstrated that its ability to technologically innovate is far greater than its ability to anticipate, learn and solve the negative social consequences of those innovations…

Innovation in the future will be driven by common threats confronting mankind. Ironically, most of those threats are man-made. Innovation will proceed in the general direction of preventing and resolving conflicts, governance at all levels, advancing human rights and human security, cross-border agreements in preventing and fighting crime and terrorism, eliminating social exclusions and other social ills that lead to poverty, generating consensus on environmental problems and solutions, and value creation.”

In the specific area of KM, this means that tools, technologies and practices for effectively managing relationship capital would be important. Below is a list of such KM tools (reproduced from a previous blog post: “Practical Hint #17: Tools for Managing Relationship Capital”):

• Social Network Analysis (SNA), sociogram or stakeholder analysis: Maps and analyzes frequencies of communication, teammate preferences, perceived closeness of interpersonal relationships, degree of agreement/disagreement, etc. between people in a group, organization or network
• Team building and team learning exercises
• Setting up a cross-functional KM Team
• Customer relations management, business development, account management, or business partnership management: Management of relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, etc.
• Customer clubs and e-communities: strengthens a company’s communication and relationship with customers, allows customers to participate in product improvement or R&D, makes some customers feel special by receiving advanced news or product prototypes, etc.
• “Customer ba”: Part of the task of some Japanese customer relations managers is to create an affirmative, trusting and creative “relationship space” between himself and the customer.
• MBTI, Belvin types and other psychological profiling tests: Assessing potential for complementarity and good mix of thinking and working styles among prospective team members
• Various tools in brand management and marketing which enhance reputation and credibility of the company
• Various HR/OD tools to enhance employee loyalty and morale: recognitions, honors and awards; policies that allow appropriate decision-making to employees; CEOs that listen e.g. allow direct emails from employees; facilities that show the company cares e.g. day-care facilities within company premises for young children of mother-employees, etc.
• Group exercise in mind mapping: Allows members to see and better understand the assumptions of other fellow members
• Professional and personal profiles of staff, Expertise Directory, company White Pages: Facilitates staff in getting to know each other and each other’s skills, expertise and talents
• Face-to-face meetings and SN functionalities among e-community or e-CoP members: Mutual trust in a virtual CoP or e-community is best nurtured through face-to-face meetings, and through appropriate social network functionalities in the website of the CoP
• Visioning exercise: Co-creating and contributing to an organization’s vision tend to enhance buy-in and engagement of members in programs, projects and activities aimed at the vision of the organization.
• Negotiation: collaborative/integrative negotiation training, skills development (thanks to Peter Spence), and related tools in conflict management
• Leadership (thanks to Peter Spence): one that knows and appreciates many of the above.

Accordingly, I have decided that the next blog series will be on “Indigo Learning Practices.” We will call it the L Series.

Cheers!

—

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As I type these words I am enjoying the view of Kowloon across the Hong Kong harbour. Beyond Kowloon I can see the distant mountains in the New Territories. Somewhat to my left are the mountains of Hong Kong Island. I can see the moon-shaped Peak Tower on Victoria Peak over the high-rise buildings in Causeway Bay.

Panoramic views from a high place always bring me to a quiet space within me. Very early this morning, in the twilight zone between sleeping and waking, I again experienced an in-flow of new ideas — a process that happens to me countless times before. I am not sure exactly how the process takes place. After I receive them, my mind then shapes and clothes them into words, paragraphs and figures. Today the ideas came at the right time so that they can find their way into this blog. The middle three diagrams below are explicit rendering of the ideas that came to me this morning.

Following the long-term evolutionary framework in the last blog (see “Q27- Combining Megatrends #1 and #2: the Next Societal Innovations?”), we can see that forms of governance have been evolving also according to the two megatrends (the 3×3 diagram below was first presented to the Futuristics in Education course for Malaysian senior education officers last August 23, 2005 at SEAMEO INNOTECH). Glocality and counter-glocality were discussed in the previous blog on “More Power to Glocals!”

The great American democratic experiment can be viewed as a steady movement towards the lower left or indigo quadrant, the direction of the two megatrends (see previous blog). It remains to be seen how it will further evolve in the next centuries.

Tibetan Buddhism was never a centralized and doctrinaire religion from the beginning; it has been an independent experiential and learning-oriented practice among generations after generations of lamas or monks across Tibet, Mongolia and elsewhere.

Potala Palace (photo credits to Wikimedia Commons)

The political loss of Tibet to the Peoples Republic of China led to the farther spread of Tibetan Buddhism as a personal practice across the globe; from our framework, this is movement towards the indigo quadrant. What has happened is consistent with what Padma Sambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, prophesied 1200 years ago that the Tibetan people “will be scattered like ants across the face of the Earth.”

However, we see from our framework that the evolution of Christianity was regressive from Pentecost up to the Middle Ages, and then it reversed back towards the indigo quadrant starting with the Protestant Reformation and continuing with Vatican II reforms.

The modern corporation is also evolving (see my blog on “From corporate disregard to corporate embrace of stakeholder capital to socially-embedded corporations”). The advent of knowledge management, organizational learning/presencing, corporate social responsibility or CSR practices, the power shift (see Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell) to knowledge workers/enterprises and a “flatter world” according to Thomas Friedman, are forces that tend to push the modern corporate practice towards the indigo quadrant.

What do you think?

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I introduced trans-societal Megatrend #1 in an earlier blog (“Q14- Naming Trans-Societal Megatrend #1: towards Yin?”). I summarized Megatrend #1 (see blog “KM and trans-societal megatrend #1″) as:

Trans-societal Megatrend #2 (introduced in blog Q26- Information: another Force for Democratization) can be summarized as:

If we combine these two megatrends and again use Ken Wilber’s framework, we have a new way of characterizing major societal innovations and anticipating where the next major societal innovations would be emerging:

Do you agree with the following observations?

1. The combined trend is towards the lower left or indigo-colored Quadrant 4 in the figure above. Using simplistic language, the trend is towards the democratization of religions (Quadrant 1 to 4) and the spiritualization of democracy, free markets and science (Quadrant 3 to 4).
2. There is a mega-tension between Quadrants 1 and 3 which can be seen in the conflict between Western democratic values versus Islamic fundamentalism and theocracy (which underlies the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorist attacks in Europe and North America, and tension between European cultures and cultures of Muslim immigrants in Europe), the conflict between scientific empiricism and religious faith (seen in Matthew Fox’s creation spirituality versus traditional Catholic doctrines, Darwinian evolution versus creationism from Genesis), and the conflict between laissez faire capitalism and various economic models that emphasize the humanistic, psychological and spiritual dimensions (such as “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” by Schumacher, Bhutan King Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s “Gross National Happiness”).
3. Regressive forces are represented by those groups which aim to maintain or go back to communism, dictatorship, theocracy, monopolistic control of national economies, etc.
4. New practices are emerging in Quadrant 4, which I call “indigo practices.” I will write about this in another blog. The interactive practice in double-loop learning that I am proposing in the last blog (An Invitation to Interactive Practice of Double-Loop Learning) is an indigo practice.
5. A most interesting convergence between Quadrants 1 and 3 is happening between Tibetan Buddhism and modern science: the Mind and Life Institute. Tibetan Buddhism comes from centuries of learning, experiential studies and applying consensual corroboration in the inner worlds; while modern sciences comes from centuries of learning, empirical studies and applying consensual corroboration in the outer worlds.

I introduced the ideas in this blog in an earlier paper on “Information Technology and Security in the 21st Century” which I read at the Asia-Pacific Security Forum Conference in Taipei, Taiwan in December 1999.

Please tell us what you think about these.

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What is common among these three events: (i) the Fall of Bastille in 1789, (ii) the invention of the microprocessor in 1971, and (iii) adoption in 1992 by 118 national governments of Agenda 21?

Here are more hints.

Can you discern what is common among these six trends?

• Political: the break-up of the Soviet Union and democratization of Eastern Europe; replacement of military dictatorships with elected leaders in Latin America; fall of dictatorial regimes in Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines and Indonesia; end of apartheid in South Africa; recognition by Israel of the Palestinian Liberation Organization; “people power” revolutions in the Philippines, Chile, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Indonesia and Serbia;
• Economic: the shift from socialist to market economies in Russia, China, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe where decision making by a few central planners was replaced by choices of millions of consumers; global shift of wealth creation from industry to services thereby a power shift from capital and machineries to knowledge and knowledge workers; global shift of market value from intangible (=mostly knowledge) assets than from tangible assets;
• Social: the growth of the voluntary, non-profit and non-government organizations, which mobilize civil society for causes such as human rights, rights of indigenous peoples, women’s rights, environmental protection, etc.; the adoption in the Rio Summit of 1992 of sustainable development as the new mainstream development paradigm; the growing adoption of corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investments;
• Technological: satellite TV, personal computer and WAP-enabled mobile phones which are placing tremendous information, computing power and choice in the hands of individuals and households;
• Religious: Protestant Reformation, Vatican II (“priesthood of the laity”), women in the priesthood, creation spirituality, personal spirituality replacing adherence to organized religions; and
• Organizational: the flattening of organizational hierarchies, growth of horizontal networks and virtual communities, emergence of autonomous intrapreneurial work teams and post-industrial empowerment of knowledge workers.

If you said “democratization” (or any of its synonym), then YOU ARE RIGHT!

Democratization is a trans-societal megatrend because it cuts across political, economic, social, technological, religious and organizational domains.

The people side of this megatrend picked up speed over the last three centuries, while the technological side jump-started about half a century ago (see diagram below). Indeed, the information revolution is another force for democratization. Together, the telephone, the personal computer and the Internet is a powerful and empowering combination.

Do you think that it is reasonable to expect that this global megatrend — democratization — will continue to permeate all aspects of life and society throughout the world for the next centuries?

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Photo credits to Wikimedia Commons for “The Storming of the Bastille” by Jean-Pierre Houël and the picture of a Hitachi HD6803P microprocessor; thanks to the UN Division for Sustainable Development for the cover page of Agenda 21.

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Spezielle Weiterbildung nur für Ältere bieten wir nur im Ausnahmefall an. Ein Beispiel hierfür ist das Projekt „Fit für die Zukunft im Handel“. Dieses Programm richtete sich speziell an ältere Mitarbeiter ohne eine handelsspezifische Ausbildung.

Beim Ausscheiden von Wissensträgern wird eine frühzeitige Nachfolgeplanung vorgenommen. Ziel: der Wissensträger kann den Nachfolger noch eine Zeit einarbeiten und begleiten. Des Weiteren hat die METRO Group ein systematisches Programm zur Sicherung des Erfahrungswissens(„Keep Experiences“ (KEX) ) im Konzern entwickelt, eine systematische Plattform zur Übertragung des Wissens im Konzern.

Sensibilisieren der Führungskräfte für den demografischen Wandel und die damit einhergehenden Veränderungen zu . Beispiel: „Zukunftswerkstatt“ mit 50 Manager und Mitarbeiter zur künftigen Zusammenarbeit sowie den Know-how-Transfer zwischen Jung und Alt.diskutiert und neue Projekte diesbezüglich angestoßen.Die Ergebnisse der Zukunftswerkstatt werden in einem Demografiereport veröffentlicht.

Megatrends für die METRO Group wurden entwickelt.

Handwerkszeug, um den demografischen Wandel für die METRO Group zu managen: Ältere Mitarbeiter sollen nun beispielsweise darauf angesprochen werden, was wir für ältere Kunden tun können .

Wie müssenDemografie- Projekte aus Kennzahlensicht ausgestaltet sein . Wichtige Kennzahlen für Personaler sind z. B. Mitarbeiterfluktuation, Renteneintrittsalter etc. Hierbei stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit die Steuerung demografiebezogener Maßnahmen über Kennzahlen überhaupt sinnvoll ist.

Aus: Pro 50 – Arbeit mit Zukunft: Ist Ihr Unternehmen fit für den demografischen Wandel? Hg. PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, Frankfurt am Main, Dr. Rosina M. Gasteiger, Dr. Heiko Lorson und Holger Leckebusch 1. Auflage August 2008

Prof. Dr. Jutta Rump, Leiterin des Instituts für Beschäftigung und Employability (IBE) und Vizepräsidentin der Fachhochschule Ludwigshafen am Rhein, in: Pro 50 – Arbeit mit Zukunft: Ist Ihr Unternehmen fit für den demografischen Wandel?

Megatrends in der Arbeitswelt: demografischer Wandel, rasante technologische Entwicklung, Globalisierung, Wissensgesellschaft, Bedeutungszuwachs von Frauen sowie der gesellschaftliche Wertewandel

Konsequenzen für Unternehmen und ihre Mitarbeiter:
􀀁 die Alterung der Gesellschaft und der Belegschaften in Betrieben
􀀁 der sinkende Anteil von Nachwuchskräften
􀀁 die Verlängerung der Lebensarbeitszeit
􀀁 der Bedeutungszuwachs von Wissen und Kompetenz als Wettbewerbsfaktor
􀀁 der steigende Bedarf an Fachkräften
􀀁 die weitere Verdichtung von Arbeit
􀀁 die zunehmende Komplexität
􀀁 die steigende Veränderungsgeschwindigkeit und sinkende Halbwertzeit von Wissen
􀀁 die zunehmende Teilhabe von Frauen am Erwerbsleben
􀀁 die Berücksichtigung von mehreren Generationen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt und der damit
verbundenen Wertevielfalt