Blogs

(tap tap... this thing on? There's dust and cobwebs all over the place.)

My apologies for skipping out on posts the last month...I've been working on a very exciting white paper that has entered the wild today: The CMO's Guide to Tweetups.  Nine delicious pages chock full of research, rationales, strategies and tactics designed to help companies launch their own tweetups. 

This year, as the mainstream media focused on the scandals of the day, THE FUTURIST looked at potential “fixes” to big problems awaiting today’s and tomorrow’s young people. Generous members of the World Future Society make that happen.

My friend Brian Horrigan, co-author of the retro-futurism bible Yesterday's Tomorrows, writes a blog for the Minnesota Historical Society called Covering 1968. Brian recently blogged about the cover of the December 14, 1968 Saturday Evening Post. Its headline, "Are We Heading Toward the Day Everything Stops?" is an odd juxtaposition against the colorful (though certainly crowded) world depicted by illustrator Gene Holtan.

There are certain classic responses you will hear from people when they resist strategic ideas about the future. Let's say that you recognize a threat to your current business and suggest a course of action. One of my all-time favorite reactions you are likely to hear is:

"We tried that once in 1980s...it didn't work! So, you know, it can't work now, either."

We take this business of telling people what’s coming pretty seriously. Competitive Futures works with leaders of large, medium and small businesses to help them interpret weak signals in trends and forecasts to help them make wiser, more profitable decisions. There are no guarantees for outcome, only a rigorous methodology that can produce insights.

Special thanks to Alex Lightman for catching this.

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail?

The standard answer to a question like this is that "we all suffer." While that's probably true, it misses the point -- we may all suffer, but we don't all suffer equally. Some nations will be hit harder by storms or droughts than others; some nations will have the resources and technologies to adapt better than others. And therein lies the potential for what may end up as a nasty tool of international competition.

Tom Friedman has an excellent column today comparing the
application of Dick Cheney's "One Percent" Doctrine on terrorism to
climate change.  As Friedman explains, the question is what to do
about potential events that are unlikely to happen, but if they do the
fallout would be catastrophic.

With that in mind, he counters about the downside if we're wrong on climate change:

There was a gem of a quote in today's NY Times coverage of the Obama's state dinner hosting India.  The First Lady, talking to some schoolchildren, said: