Author Archives: Robert B. Tucker

About Robert B. Tucker

Robert B. Tucker is a globally recognized business futurist and president of The Innovation Resource Group in Santa Barbara, California. He has advised clients in 54 countries and authored eight books, including the bestsellers Managing the Future and Driving Growth Through Innovation. Tucker’s insights have guided organizations from IBM, Citibank, and American Express to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Dubai government. As one of the founders of the Innovation Movement, Robert has appeared on Bloomberg, Channel News Asia, Network 18 India, PBS, and was a featured guest on the CNBC series The Business of Innovation. A regular contributor to Forbes.com, Robert’s latest book is Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration.

What the Singularity Means for Business

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What the Singularity Means for Business

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

In 2006, Nokia was the global leader in cell phones, growing by double digits. They were rated the eighth most innovative company in the world, according to BusinessWeek. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, plenty.

In 2006, Nokia invited me to lecture on driving growth through innovation before an elite group of 50 of their “high-potential” managers, who would be flying into Palo Alto from all over the world. A pre-session survey I conducted should have alerted me to Nokia’s future dilemma. I asked about barriers to innovation, half expecting they would leave that question unanswered. Instead: “We are risk averse.” “Our operational mindset dominates” and we suffer from large corporation syndrome.”

I still remember posing a question to this group: “If I work for you and I have an idea, what do you want me to do with it? One manager spoke up and said, “I’d just advise you to forget about it. In this company, you’re just going to frustrate yourself; there’s so much bureaucracy you’ll never get anywhere with the idea.”

I passed off what I’d learned about Nokia as an anomaly: “Rapid growth covers a lot of sins.” But one year later Nokia found out differently. In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone and Nokia began its spectacular fall from grace. They were woefully unprepared for the inflection point that suddenly confronted them.

We are about to face the biggest business and social inflection point in history, and, like Nokia, we are unprepared.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil defines the Singularity as a period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life and business will be irreversibly transformed. We are almost there, and the impacts are everywhere.

Simultaneous revolutions are happening at the same time: in business, in society, in geopolitics, and in climate. Over the next ten years, industry after industry will experience exponential change. Customer needs will shift overnight. New technologies will emerge at record rates. The workforce and the kind of talent that will be needed will be radically different. In my work, I’m seeing a lot of companies caught off guard by the Singularity future. I believe that the single biggest issue organizations will face is the challenge of rapid change. In 10 years, research suggests that forty percent of the 500 largest public companies will no longer be around.

Intel, once led by a CEO (Andrew S. Grove) who wrote “Only the Paranoid Survive” got caught up serving the PC and data center markets. Intel missed the smartphone trend. Ten years later, they missed the AI revolution. But Intel rival saw the opportunity and pounced. Nvidia repurposed its chips designed for video games and began using them to power the AI Revolution.

Boeing faces its own Singularity Moment. Once the company’s commitment to safety and quality were second to none. Their catchword was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” Boeing gobbled up rivals, expanded from jets to military hardware to rockets. The Saturn V rocket that powered Apollo 11 to the moon was proudly manufactured by Boeing.

But then the bean-counters took over. Today Boeing appears in a never-ending tailspin. Two of its 737 Max jets crashed, killing hundreds of passengers all because, as various investigations revealed, Boeing tried to avoid pilot retraining costs.

Two astronauts, riding in a Boeing-built Starliner spacecraft, arrived at the International Space Station on June 6th, 2024. They were expecting to stay for a week. But because of an embarrassing series of technical failures they are still there. They won’t be heading back to Earth until February. NASA calls Starliner “too risky.”

Meanwhile, rival SpaceX is making the most of its Singularity Moment. Their Falcon 9 rockets are driving unprecedented growth and market share. The Falcon 9 was developed at a fraction of the cost it took Boeing to develop comparable systems. CEO Elon Musk’s insistence on a fixed-price, milestone-based payment model pushed SpaceX to adopt a leaner, more innovative engineering approach. Boeing limped along with the traditional “cost-plus” business model.

To thrive and prosper in the next decade, organizations and their leaders need to grapple with the ever increasing pace of change and the need to constantly disrupt or be disrupted.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels

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Hurricane Helene Points to Our Climate Future

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Hurricane Helene Points to Our Climate Future

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Ophthalmologist John Irvine served as chief medical officer at UCLA’s Doheny Eye Center before he and his wife retired to North Carolina to enjoy the good life in the pristine Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville.

But on the night of September 26, 2024, the pristine turned into a disaster zone for the mountainous community.

In a few hours, Hurricane Helene arrived from Florida, turning the Swannanoa River into a raging, deadly debris flow. The storm flooded low-lying areas, ripped out roads, toppled trees, downed power lines and water pipes, and cut off entire towns.

Next morning, Irvine’s neighbor watched as houses floated by, and people clung to them for dear life. Two hundred thirty-four people lost their lives. Untold numbers are still unaccounted for.

In Helene’s aftermath, I flew to Asheville to volunteer with a disaster relief organization focused on restoring damaged housing. I spent time “mucking” (removing muck and damaged floors and walls) with a team of church volunteers recruited by Boston-based Fuller Center Disaster Rebuilders.

Although I came simply to help, what I observed caused me to reflect on the climate future and the adaptation needed in the way we prepare to cope with an increasing rate of disasters to come.

As climate change accelerates, experts predict that by 2035, the frequency and intensity of natural disasters will reach unprecedented levels. The scientific consensus is stark: rising global temperatures will increase the likelihood of severe hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and dangerously hot days across the globe.

According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, extreme weather events once considered “once-in-a-century” are becoming annual occurrences.

Hurricanes like Helene and Milton will be stronger, fueled by warming oceans, with Category 4 and 5 storms becoming more frequent. Coastal towns will endure worsening storm surges and heavy rainfall, leading to repetitive flooding and economic devastation.

Inland communities like Asheville, once thought to be havens from hurricanes, face increasing risks as storms retain their energy longer.

Beyond storm disasters, other types of climate-related disasters are also increasing. The number of days with temperatures exceeding 100°F (37.8°C) will rise sharply in regions far from coasts. Cities like Phoenix, Dallas, and even parts of the Northeast are projected to experience two to three times the current number of extreme heat days by 2035, posing severe risks to public health, business, and infrastructure.

The economic implications are staggering. Hurricane Helene alone caused damages totaling $225 billion, representing approximately half of what the Congressional Budget Office estimated would be needed over a decade for such programs.

And then there is the emotional toll of lives torn upside down.

Less than one percent of households in the Asheville area carried flood insurance, so many homeowners will be dependent on NGOs like Fuller and others to rebuild, or houses will mold and need to be condemned. The woman whose modest duplex we mucked received an estimate of $150,000 to repair the damage.

Homes and trailers in low-lying areas have washed away on land that no longer exists. Hispanic and African American residents at an apartment building where a visiting nurse named Cathy and I visited to hand out supplies are out of work because tourism has plummeted.

Yet amidst all the devastation, I experienced a sense of hope and even joy, as volunteers come together in common purpose. Businesses in the community gave out free food and water, corporations such as Johnsonville Foods sent a semi-truck to feed people in need.

Heeding the Call to Serve

For Matthew Daughtry-Grubbs, executive director of Cragmont Assembly Retreat Center, Helene has been a call to action. The father of seven, Matthew awoke on the morning of September 27th to news that nearby Interstate 40 was clogged with thousands of stranded motorists.

“That was the moment I realized we needed to do something to help these people,” recalls Daughtry-Grubbs. Cragmont partnered with Emerge Ministries, based in Beulaville, NC, and used social media to beckon a network of Evangelicals who soon arrived from as far away as Indiana. The quiet retreat center was transformed into a bustling volunteer center, (one of several in the mountainous community), with perhaps a hundred volunteers at any given time manning the foodbank and emergency supplies warehouse, delivering meals, mucking houses, and comforting the afflicted.

“This hurricane was horrific,” observed a volunteer who’s a veteran of disaster relief. “You hold their hand but there’s nothing you can say that will help. You’re here to listen. I would say right now they’re probably in shock. Some are really angry, some are stuck in grief… I lost my husband during Covid and this gets my mind off my own problems because there’s a world of hurt right here.”

Soon, such scenes may become part of everyday life. Climate adaptation strategies will become essential, requiring governments, NGOs, and businesses to rethink preparedness, infrastructure, insurance models, and disaster management policies to prepare for a future marked by intensifying climate volatility.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels

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What Will The World Look Like In 2035?

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The Singularity Is Coming Soon

What Will The World Look Like In 2035?

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Futurist Ray Kurzweil likes to make predictions about technology. He’s been making them since 1963 and has amassed a following in the millions. In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil predicted that by 2045, machines would become as smart as humans. Due to advancing technology, he’s moved the expected arrival date up to as soon as 2029.

When, or if, machine intelligenc surpasses human intelligence, it will trigger rapid and unprecedented progress in all fields. And whether or not we reach the Singularity, as Kurzweil envisions, it’s clear that the rapid advance of generative AI, and the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence, will continue to be major forces of disruption headed to 2035.

As futurist Langdon Morris points out in Hello, Future: The World in 2035, AI is a driving force of change and disruption, but the unanswered question is: will it also be a destructive force, killing jobs by the millions and forcing society into some tough choices?

AI is already fomenting profound and unprecedented changes across human civilization, as the benefits and threats from this technology spool out daily. On the productivity side, AI is answering emails, setting up meetings, and making travel plans. It recognizes images, translates languages, transcribes speech, and plays games like chess and Go at the highest levels of proficiency.

More significantly, important scientific and medical breakthroughs are already being developed using AI, and more exciting breakthroughs are just around the corner. So are 3D-printed houses and clothing, autonomous vehicles are spreading from Phoenix and San Francisco to Austin and other cities, all empowered by AI.

And soon we may have digital companions, coaches, motivators and task-mastering robots that will accompany us everywhere. “These are advanced AI agents designed to replicate and emulate our unique decision-making processes,” notes futurist Amy Webb in a Wall Street Journal roundup of forecasts on AI in 2030.

But some futurists, myself included, are wary on a lot of fronts. McKinsey estimates that 30 percent of the world’s workforce could lose their jobs to AI within a decade, as many as 400 to 800 million people, possibly a worst-case scenario whose negative consequences would be immense. I’m also concerned about the dehumanizing power of AI, as it has the potential to undermine (or possibly overwhelm) the complexity and dignity of human consciousness while it exacerbates societal inequalities, compromises individual autonomy, and erodes moral and spiritual values.

We already know that AI systems, driven by large language models and recommendation algorithms, can manipulate human behavior on a massive scale. It’s used to affect public opinion, spread misinformation, and even nudge people toward destructive and self-destructive actions, all without their awareness that machines are influencing their behaviors.

As AI systems become more advanced, they will have the capacity to exert even greater control over our choices, reducing human agency and potentially undermining the democratic process. Perhaps this is why historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that we’re at the end of human history. “Not the end of history,” he emphasized in a recent interview with The Economist, “but the end of human history, as control is shifting to non-humans.”

As AI has come to dominate discussion around shaping the future, some futurists sense that no one in the conversation is talking about the simultaneous revolutions now occurring – in science, economics, climate, energy, demographics, geopolitics, politics, and culture and their vitally important impacts on what life will be like in 2035.

“It isn’t just AI that we should be concerned about,” notes Morris, in a recent Navigating the Future podcast. “During the next ten years, the world will go through numerous massive and highly unsettling shifts that will affect every aspect of society. The global economy will be transformed, radical new technologies will be disrupted, and the damage caused by climate change will worsen. The geopolitical situation will continue to be turbulent, with war and the threat of war. And politics everywhere will continue to be highly polarized. The significance of this can hardly be overstated, because just about everything is changing.”

Morris sees signals all around that suggest people are at the end of their tolerance of the pace of change today, much less tomorrow, when futurists suggest there will be more change over the next decade alone than during the prior 100 years. “The whole MAGA movement is essentially an expression of millions of people who are experiencing anxiety because of too much change,” Morris says. “They’re afraid, they’re angry, they’re upset, they want to go back to how it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. The symptoms that Alvin Toffler describes in his 1970 book, Future Shock are what we’re living out in a very public way in society today.”

Morris notes in Hello, Future that while AI has come to dominate so many discussions around the shape of the future, he suggests that we need to engage in a much broader conversation. “It isn’t just AI that we should be concerned about,” he advises. “During the next ten years, the world will go through numerous massive and highly unsettling shifts that will affect every aspect of society. The global economy is being completely transformed, and the damage caused by climate change will worsen. As a consequence of the climate, we’ve already begun shifting the global energy system.”

In his fascinating book Morris examines the social consequences of all this change, and observes that many people have already reached the limits of their tolerance for today’s pace of change, much less tomorrow’s. And yet we know that there will be more change over the next decade than during the prior 100 years.

“The whole MAGA movement is essentially an expression of millions of people who are experiencing anxiety because of too much change. They’re afraid, they’re angry, they’re upset, they want to go back to how it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. The symptoms that Alvin Toffler describes in his 1970 book, Future Shock are what we’re living out in a very public way in society today.”

Nevertheless, change is not going to slow down so we can catch up. “How organizations operate, the course of industries, and even the very social structures of nations and regions are being, and will continue to be altered,” Morris observes. “Looked at from a global perspective, geopolitics, politics, the climate, regional wars, the state of the human population, continuing urbanization, and the transformation of the global economy are all critically important, and just as fundamental as technology.”

As an organizational futurist, Morris works at the highest levels to help companies prepare for the different world of tomorrow. He helped France-based oil company Total to understand the future of the energy industry, which soon led to major shifts in corporate strategy. The company even renamed itself “Total Energies” to reflect the eventual decline of the oil business and the shift to alternative fuel sources. He has also led similar projects for the US Coast Guard, L’Oréal, Kaiser Permanente, and India’s leading corporation, Reliance, among others.

And how does he work with clients to help them prepare when so much about the future is uncertain?

“You need a clear strategy, and the ability to pivot when conditions change, which they undoubtedly will,” he responds. “You need to plan investments, develop your staff, create innovations, grow your markets, and adapt to change. And doing all this well, of course, requires attention to developing strategic foresight.” All this change is coming fast, and you need to be prepared.” And so he asks the pressing question, “Are you ready? And is your team ready?”

To truly become future ready, we must not become distracted by technology and lulled into thinking that when and if the Singularity arrives, it will bring abundance and heightened intelligence. As Morris points out, if we delegate clear thinking and judgment and decision making to technology, we’re most likely not going to be happy with how things turn out.

“As inhabitants of this modern era, we should think about the unique place to which we have arrived. Now that human activity achieves impact on a global scale, there is great value and significant importance to thinking about the future. Human actions are responsible for what happens in and to society, and now to an increasing degree what happens to the Earth. Thus, we understand that today’s choices influence not only what happens to us, but also what happens to Us.”

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Gemini

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Oprah’s AI Special Reveals Where Humanity is Headed

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Oprah's AI Special Reveals Where Humanity is Headed

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

You know that artificial intelligence has gone mainstream when Oprah Winfrey weighs in with a special on the topic. Her primetime event, “AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special,” will air Thursday on ABC, and promises to explore the profound impact of AI and help viewers “navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape.”

As a futurist, I welcome focus on the broader impacts of the approaching “singularity” moment, when machines will become as smart as humans. (The futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts this will occur in 2029.)

Winfrey’s special will feature interviews with some of the most important and powerful people in AI, and fortunately, some of its toughest critics. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, explains how AI works in layman’s terms, and his vision for how AI might benefit humankind. Altman will also discuss “the immense personal responsibility that the executives of AI companies must bear” but this is where I’m hoping Oprah takes him to task. At present the technology is largely unregulated, and AI company leaders must weigh the profit motive against safety concerns.

Microsoft Co-Founder and Chair of the Gates Foundation Bill Gates will lay out the AI revolution coming in science, health, and education. And Gates will warn of the impact AI may have on the workforce and job creation.

McKinsey estimates that 30 percent of the world’s workforce will lose their job to AI within 7 years. And 400 to 800 million people will lose their jobs due to AI by 2030, which means in the worst-case scenario a third of the world’s workforce will lose their livelihoods.

Winfrey will also focus on the impact of AI on humanity, as humans and machines begin to merge. She’ll interview novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson who has previously expressed deep ethical and philosophical concerns about artificial intelligence.

Robinson is wary of the dehumanizing potential of AI, suggesting that it risks undermining the complexity and dignity of human consciousness. She warns against the uncritical embrace of AI, emphasizing that it could exacerbate societal inequalities, compromise individual autonomy, and erode moral and spiritual values.

Robinson often points out that the fascination with AI reveals a kind of technological hubris—a misplaced confidence that machines can replicate or even surpass human wisdom. Her work suggests a need for humility and a broader, more thoughtful engagement with AI, and prioritizing humanistic values over mere efficiency.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, will add to Robinson’s cautionary message. One of the main risks they have discussed in prior interviews is how AI systems, driven by large language models and recommendation algorithms, can manipulate human behavior on a massive scale. This includes influencing public opinion, spreading misinformation, and even nudging people toward specific actions without their awareness. As AI systems become more advanced, they could exert even greater control over our choices, reducing human agency and potentially undermining democratic processes.

I’m also looking forward to hearing from FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose testimony before Congress reveals the terrifying ways criminals and foreign adversaries are using AI. Wray has highlighted several extreme ways in which criminals and foreign adversaries are exploiting AI, emphasizing the growing threat to national security, public safety, and economic stability.

One of the most alarming uses of AI involves the creation of hyper-realistic deepfakes—manipulated audio, video, or images that can convincingly portray individuals saying or doing things they never did. These are being used to spread disinformation, manipulate public opinion, and even blackmail individuals. Foreign adversaries use these technologies to sow discord, interfere in elections, and damage reputations, making it increasingly difficult for the public to discern what is real.

AI is being leveraged by criminals and state actors to enhance cyberattacks, making them more sophisticated and harder to detect. This includes AI-driven phishing schemes that craft highly personalized and convincing messages, automated hacking tools that exploit vulnerabilities at scale, and AI bots that can conduct surveillance, data exfiltration, and launch ransomware attacks autonomously. These tools enable attackers to breach systems more effectively and efficiently, posing a severe threat to critical infrastructure, businesses, and government agencies.

Clearly humanity is entering uncharted waters. The next decade, as we cross the Singularity moment when machines will be smarter than humans, will be fraught with opportunities, threats and surprises. “AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special” provides a serious, entertaining and meaningful way for us to be part of one of the most important global conversations of the 21st century.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pixabay

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The Secret Sauce of Tiger Teams

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Think Small, Win Big

The Secret Sauce of Tiger Teams

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Sooner or later, you will be asked to lead a tiger team. In common parlance, a tiger team refers to a small, highly skilled group of specialists assembled to solve a specific, high-stakes problem or to tackle a critical project, often within a short timeframe. These teams are typically composed of cross-functional members who bring diverse skills and expertise, allowing them to address complex challenges that require innovative thinking and rapid decision-making.

The term originally came from military and aerospace contexts, where tiger teams were used for troubleshooting and mission-critical problem-solving (most famously during the Apollo 13 mission). In business and technology settings today, tiger teams are often called upon for tasks like responding to crises or driving rapid innovation initiatives.

If you’re up to the challenge, this will be your time to shine. The distinguishing aspect of leading a special purpose team is that you’re tasked with figuring out how to do something new, so you and your mates are embarking upon a learning journey. As an innovation coach to organizations, I’ve seen plenty of successes and messes. The decisions you make at the outset greatly impact a team’s chances of success. Here are six tips for forming and managing effective tiger teams:

  1. Follow the Pizza Rule. In Silicon Valley, Jeff Bezos’ “pizza rule” has taken hold: If you can’t feed your team with two pizzas, your team is too big. Lots of research supports this notion. Once a group gets beyond five to seven people, productivity and effectiveness begin to decline. Communication becomes cumbersome. Managing becomes a pain. Players begin to disengage, and introverts tend to withdraw. When it comes to team size, less is more. Think small and you’ll win big.
  2. Pay attention to group chemistry. Carnegie Mellon’s research points to three factors that make a team highly functioning. 1) Members contribute equally to the team’s discussions, rather than one or two people dominating; 2) Members are good at reading complex emotional states; and 3) Teams with more women outperform teams with more men. Turns out the emotional component – how we feel when we are engaged with a team – truly matters and is critical to success. Pay attention to how the people you’re inviting to your team will relate to each other. Assess human factors like trust, empathy, ability to resolve conflict, and seek and offer forgiveness. Acknowledge people’s selfless behavior and willingness to “take one for the team.” Always give credit to your team rather than take credit yourself, and practice empathy at all times.
  3. Calculate people’s Teamwork Factor. Will Wright, developer of The Sims, Spore, and other best-selling computer games analyzes what he calls a person’s teamwork factor. “There is the matter of, how good is this person times their teamwork factor,” Wright told interviewer Adam Bryant. “You can have a great person who doesn’t work well on the team, and they’re a net loss. You can have somebody who is not that great but they are very good glue, and [they] could be a net gain.” Team members, Wright considers “glue,” share information effectively, motivate and improve morale, and help out when somebody gets stuck. Be aware of not only the needed skill sets but who works well together and who does not.
  4. Don’t go overboard with diversity. Cross-functional tiger teams are de rigueur, but can too much diversity be a detriment to team chemistry? Researchers at Wharton think so. Too much diversity of “mental models” can be a drag on forward progress, say professors Klein and Lim. If members of a team have a “shared, organized understanding and mental representation of knowledge” about the nature of the challenge, it can enhance coordination and effectiveness when the task at hand is complex, unpredictable, urgent, and novel. The researchers concluded that team members who share common models can save time because they share a common body of knowledge.
  5. Establish a group process. Every team needs a facilitator, and every tiger team needs a process that spells out how we’ll work with each other. Nancy Tennant led an amazingly successful tiger team at Whirlpool Corporation, but when asked to join an ad hoc governmental team tasked with solving a very big problem, she witnessed a floundering.“They brought a group of people together from all over the world to help them brainstorm,” Tennant told me. “They spent a lot of money, put us in a room, and said ‘Think hard.’ But we didn’t know each other. We didn’t have a group process. And we just couldn’t do it.” A group without a process is like a ship without a rudder. It will have a harder time steering.

    My strong suggestion is: to take the time to establish and communicate team rules at the outset. Address how you’ll treat each other, and how you’ll respect each other. Articulate how much time each member is committing to the team. Effective teams establish clear goals and expectations at the outset and hold each other accountable.

  6. Pay attention to the 3Rs of team effectiveness: Result, Reputation, and Residuals. What motivates teams over the long haul is not money, but intrinsic rewards. Harvard’s Teresa Amabile’s research shows that feelings of accomplishment, that we are making progress, and doing important work are the biggest motivators. As the team leader, keep the three Rs in mind: 1) Result. If you hit your target, you’ll add another accomplishment to your track record; 2) Reputation: your status in the organization rises. Senior management will be delighted. Colleagues will talk you up, praise your contribution, and invite you to join future projects. 3) Residuals: the lasting payout of participating in a successful collaborative team is that you get to see your “product” being used by customers, both internal and external. You know you’ve made a difference, solved a problem, or created an opportunity for the organization, your team, and most of all yourself.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pixabay

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The Singularity Is Coming Soon

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Here’s What It May Mean

The Singularity Is Coming Soon

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

In 2005, the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2045, machines would become smarter than humans. He called this inflection point the “singularity,” and it struck a chord. Kurzweil, who’s been tracking artificial intelligence since 1963, gained a fanatical following, especially in Silicon Valley.

Now comes The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with A.I. where Kurzweil steps up the Singularity’s arrival timeline to 2029. “Algorithmic innovations and the emergence of big data have allowed AI to achieve startling breakthroughs sooner than expected,” reports Kurzweil. From winning at games like Jeopardy! and Go to driving automobiles, writing essays, passing bar exams, and diagnosing cancer, chunks of the Singularity are arriving daily, and there’s more good news just ahead.

Very soon, predicts Kurzweil, artificial general intelligence will be able to do anything a human can do, only better. Expect 3D printed clothing and houses by the end of this decade. Look for medical cures that will “add decades to human life spans” just ahead. “These are the most exciting and momentous years in all of history,” Kurzweil noted in an interview with Boston Globe science writer Brian Bergstein.

As a futurist myself, I applaud Kurzweil’s focus on a bright tomorrow. Kurzweil’s bestseller status is bringing attention to our craft. His well-documented and thought-provoking book urges us to set aside the media-infused doom and gloom of today’s headlines, and instead contemplate the abundance that advancing technology will bring about in the years ahead.

Futurists generally agree on the power of looking back in order to look ahead. Kurzweil overwhelms his reader with charts and graphs to argue that life has gotten better and better over time: longevity and literacy rates are improving. The number of people living on $2.15 per day is decreasing. People are working shorter hours. The internet delivers huge chunks of value for free. Tangible progress is occurring in areas as distinct as healthcare, education and democracy.

And with the Singularity arriving soon, life is just about to become exponentially better.

Yet Kurzweil largely omits discussion of ominous megaforces that are also on the horizon: the baked-in devastation of climate change, the scourge of economic inequality, political polarization, deepfakes and misinformation, the rise of “technofeudalism” and the very real possibility that the future will be controlled by a few monolithic companies such as Google, where Kurzweil resides as “chief researcher and A.I. Visionary.”

Kurzweil has little patience with such discussion. His eye is on the forward march of the human race over time. He wants to eradicate the limitations of todays brain. “My biological brain evolved for a very different kind of prehistoric life and predisposes me to habits that I would rather not have,” Kurzweil confesses. “I can’t reprogram it to free me of fears, traumas, and doubts that I know are preventing me from achieving what I would like to achieve.”

If more intelligence is better, and Kurzweil believes that it is, we need simply to create machines that make us smarter. But this is where his argument becomes problematic, controversial even. Kurzweil believes we get to the future by ingesting “nanobots,” microscopic-sized robots that can transport drugs, genes, and other payloads to specific locations in the body, such as diseased cells or tumors. Kurzweil’s nanobots will “go through your bloodstream and develop something in your brain that would talk to the web automatically.”

But will we want to ingest nanobots?

“The Singularity is Nearer did not persuade me that his AI-maximalist vision is coming close to fruition or that it would be desirable,” noted science writer Bergstein. “I see how AI could give our civilization greater intelligence to solve big problems like finding new medical cures. But I’m less sure that a lot of individual people will want so much more intelligence in their daily lives that they’ll implant computers inside their bodies.”

Another reviewer, Becca Rothfeld, writing in the Washington Post, noted a broader limitation, not only to nanobots, but to the Singularity vision of utopia: “Kurzweil is a refreshingly lucid expositor of complex technical concepts, but he suffers from the shape rotators (”engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley”) characteristic deficiency: an incapacity to recognize the limits of his own understanding.”

This article originally appeared in Forbes
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Strategic Value of Corporate Foresight

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Strategic Value of Corporate Foresight

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

All too often these days, leaders of companies hammered by rapid market fluctuations admit to being blindsided by change. “We were focused on firefighting,” admitted one CEO after the company’s stock plummeted 34 percent. “We need to work on our competencies for the future.”

The fact is, in today’s world we all need to. Disruptions materialize so fast that almost nobody sees them coming or understands their severity. Sales mysteriously drop. Jobs are threatened. Draconian measures must be implemented.

Yet amidst this tumult, another set of organizations prospers. They are using a tool called corporate foresight. Recent research by professors Rene Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum confirms the value. “Future preparedness turns out to be a powerful predictor for becoming an out-performer in the industry for attaining superior profitability, and for gaining superior market capitalization growth,” they note in a newly released longitudinal study.

What do these organizations do that gives them the edge? Here’s my boil down of a five-step process you and your organization can use to avoid being blindsided by change — and to discover opportunities in today’s emerging trends.

1. Monitor and upgrade your firm’s information diet.

A good place to start is to ask: what information are you and your fellow managers consuming? This is what I refer to in my consulting work as your information diet. If your diet is composed exclusively of free information, it’s probably inadequate. The human brain can store three terabytes of information, yet this is only one one-millionth of the information that is now produced in the world each day. The modern internet is organized to attract your eyeballs and keep you browsing longer. The result is that a lot of what’s in your newsfeed amounts to empty calories. The valuable, credible insights and analysis are mixed in with chaff, and noise gets blasted as a signal. You need to be extremely careful and discerning of what you consume in terms of the nutritional value of your informational diet.

2. Identify trends, emerging technologies, and possible disruptions coming at you and your organization.

In my studies of innovators across a wide variety of industries, the single most common characteristic they share is that they are trend-trackers. They are like vacuum cleaners sucking up the latest developments. Innovators work at tracking the trends in whatever environment they are in. They read voraciously, take in more information, ask lots of questions, they challenge and update their assumptions. In your reading and your life, throw out a wide informational net. Track not only the trends in your industry or profession but also consumer trends and social trends. Track geopolitical trends, economic trends, and demographic trends – encouraging yourself to keep expanding your areas of interest.

3. Project ahead into the future. Ponder where the trend or technology is likely to go.

If it’s a demographic trend like the rise of Generation Z, for example, this generation will be 10 years older in their prime earning and spending years. If it’s a technology trend apply Moore’s Law which holds that computing power doubles every two years. Technology trends are now happening at an exponential rate so take this into account as you project out ahead. The impacts of the trend, the technology, the disruption ask yourself who’s going to be affected. Who’s going to win? Who’s possibly going to get slammed by this trend?

4. Conduct a DITO Analysis.

In the 1960s, Stanford Research Institute introduced a new tool in which to analyze trends: SWOT, which stands for strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O), and threats (T). The DITO analysis is an update: it stands for direction (of the trend or technology), implications, threats, and opportunities. Because the pace of change has sped up since the ‘60s, it’s now more important than ever to suss out the implications and apparent direction of trends. Let’s say you’re a videography company and you’re seeing the advance of artificial intelligence in your field. Or you’re a home builder, and you’re tracking the 3D printing trend. The DITO analysis is a way of guiding you through a developing trend and setting you up for defensive or offensive action.

5. Embrace the opportunity mindset.

Lay your findings on the table and then get the creative juices flowing. Challenge yourself with a series of questions: how might we capitalize on this trend? How can we add value to our customers? And if it’s a disruption bearing down on you, the question might be: how can we take these lemons and make lemonade in today’s world? It’s all too easy to get blindsided by change but by incorporating this six-step formula into your life and your work, you can be prepared to profit.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Gemini

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What I Learned on Summer Vacation

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What I Learned on Summer Vacation

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

I used to think summer vacations should be a time to not think. Turn off the brain, tune out and drop off the map was the idea. Read a mystery novel or biography. Take a dip in a different pool. And above all, don’t follow the news cycle or get tethered to the goings-on back at the office.

Some of this I still believe (like disconnecting from the office). But these days I have a different take. I now see vacations and travel as unparalleled opportunities to observe trends, and to understand how the accelerating pace of change is affecting us in what is being called the “Age of Acceleration.”

I love asking people what they like to read while on vacation. This question came up yesterday as I was talking with the CEO of a global trade association that I am going to facilitate a strategic thinking session for. “My wife was reading Kristin Hanna’s “The Women” and I was reading Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Nearer,” he confessed. Both were happy, he reported, adding that he finds it stimulating to read a book about the future on the beaches of Atlantic City because being in a relaxed state can inspire you to think big.

Vacations and time away can help us reflect on changes in our own lives. Normally we cruise, mostly on autopilot, through its seasons but then things hit us. Face to face, we notice and contemplate changes in the lives of our family members and friends, and catch up on what they are dealing with, what’s bringing them joy, and their concerns about the state of the nation.

Vacations can throw us insights that don’t get stimulated otherwise. Tied as we all are to hectic routines – even retired people tell me how busy they are — our regular lives often become a blur of deadlines, duties (get the kids off to school), and decisions (when should I retire, should I get out of the stock market before it crashes, who can restore America, should I get my MBA, etc.). Vacations can, if we allow them, become a pattern interrupt.

This summer my wife and I visited our nephew and his family in suburban Washington, D.C. While this was not really a vacation (I was on my way to a speaking engagement), I never miss the opportunity to visit people in their homes and seeing how they are living their lives. On their refrigerator were five or six wedding invitations – a Millennial trend. “That’s all we do is go to weddings. Our vacations this year are all destination weddings,” he tells me over a beer.

This summer my wife and I also visited dear friends from our college days. They’d just returned from a three-week trip to Italy, Scotland, and Ireland. When I asked Bob, who has been a pal in high school and a roommate in college, what he enjoyed most about their journey, it wasn’t the Colosseum, The Forum, or wandering the streets of Dublin, all of which they enjoyed.

Instead, it was a 13-month-old “bundle of joy” nestled in a baby backpack on the shoulders of a young couple in their group. There were four or five generations on the trip, Bob observed, and that made the conversations much livelier than with a group of all retired folks, who tend to talk about aches and pains and how hard it is to get a good night’s sleep.

“The Italians love babies and families, so we got attention everywhere we went,” he added.

Politics is another fun conversation to have with people, but you must be careful. My wife and I were relaxing in a bubbling jacuzzi at a roadside motel when we struck up a conversation with a 60-ish couple from Redondo Beach, California. They were both high school teachers, and were planning to retire in three years. “Then we’re moving to Colorado where we can live less expensively,” said the husband. “Even Oregon and Washington are getting too expensive,” his wife added.

Were it just idling conversation, such insights might go in one ear and out the other. But because I’d recently heard an economist at a conference discussing the exodus from the Golden State, I realized they were part of a growing trend. How many more retiring Boomers will leave the state over the next decade and what will be the impact?

Not only do we need to look ahead of the curve, but we’ve also got to think and act ahead of the curve, to adapt to an ever-shifting reality and thrive.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels

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Six Smarter Decision Making Strategies

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Six Smarter Decision Making Strategies

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

On average, you make 700 decisions daily, most of them of little importance. But some decisions are worth examining because they are of great importance. These choices determine the course of your future. They become who you are.

Should you accept that promotion and transfer to Denver yet risk making your family unhappy? Should you invest in that real estate deal with your brother-in-law or park your money in an index fund instead? Should you retire and move to a lower-cost state more aligned with your political leanings? Perhaps you’re weighing such an important decision right now. If so, it’s time to ask yourself: what’s been my process in making this decision? Have I been methodical, or am I approaching the decision the way I approach the many less consequential decisions I make daily?

In ten years or less, we’ll likely have a personal A.I. avatar to help us make big decisions. For now, the task falls on our shoulders. Most of the decisions we make – even the important ones – are made on the fly, while multitasking, made because there’s a deadline, made because that’s the way we’ve always done it in the past. In short, the need for a sound decision-making strategy has never been greater.

Below are six strategies for making sounder, smarter decisions.

  1. Define the decision to be made. Take the time to think through the issue underneath the decision. For example, whether to accept the promotion or turn it down may not be the only option so clarify whether the decision is binary or multiple- option, or open to further negotiation. Should you buy this house or keep looking? Spell out the steps you need to take to make the very best decision possible.
  2. Develop a process. Ben Franklin used to make decisions by running a line down the page and listing the pros and cons. Former treasury secretary and CEO Robert Rubin relies on his yellow pad to map out probabilities.
  3. Broaden your options. Instead of Options A and B, what about C or even D? A technique I use in working with client organizations is to set up a “challenge statement” that inevitably reveals multiple possibilities to be decided upon. I’ll have small groups of four or five people take 10 minutes to list all the options without discussing or critiquing them during the exercise. Frame challenge statements thusly: “In what ways might we accomplish X?” “In what ways might I invest this money instead of putting it into this risky option” opens the decision to innovation and creativity.
  4. Gather information on various options. The effective decision-makers I have studied all seem to have a common trait: an intense appetite for information. They are consummate researchers and voracious readers. They are curious, they track trends, constantly looking for patterns. Before you’re ready to make a big decision ask yourself: have you done enough research?
  5. “Futurize” the decision and project out ahead. To “futurize” is to look ahead three, five, and 10 years and ask: what will the environment be like at that point? If you’re in your early ‘60s, do you want to purchase a three-story townhouse and climb all those stairs? Futurize also before purchasing that beachfront home on the Gulf of Mexico by projecting out ahead. How might climate change affect property values should you need to sell? To futurize is to project out ahead and think through the implications, ramifications, consequences (and unintended consequences), and threats that might need to be factored into today’s decision.
  6. Listen to your gut. Intuition is knowing something without knowing quite how we know it. All of us have it, but in a data-driven world, listening to it becomes harder. Before making an important choice, one executive I interviewed gathers information, weighs all the facts – then takes time to stop and listen to what his gut is telling him. “When a decision doesn’t feel good,” one executive commented, “It feels like a stomachache. And when a decision feels right, it’s like I’ve eaten a great meal. If I don’t feel good in my gut about a decision, I don’t care if the numbers say we’re going to make a billion dollars, I won’t go ahead with it. That’s how important intuition is to me.”

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Gemini

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Don’t Get Left Behind By Disruptive Change

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Six Navigational Skills That Ensure You Won’t

Don't Get Left Behind By Disruptive Change

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Last week I attended the Lead Where You Stand conference with New York Times columnist David Brooks. As always, Brooks was insightful across a range of topics including providing us with recipes for lifelong growth, speculating where human consciousness may be headed, and revealing how he knew he wanted to be a writer at an early age.

The tone of the conference was hopeful, friendly, and upbeat. One of the speakers got our attention with a remark in response to a question about the rise of Christian nationalism. Dr. Gayle Beebe, president of Westmont College in Monticito, California, and author of The Crucibles That Shape Us: Navigating the Defining Challenges of Leadership, observed that, “we are entering a new dark age.”

Beebe’s observation was much discussed. He may have articulated what many are feeling. Everywhere you go these days, you hear words like “doom,” “existential threat,” “dark days ahead,” and “dystopia.” They seem to spring from people’s intuitive processing that we are at an inflection point moment, and not all bodes well for the future.

In our personal and professional lives, in our politics, and especially in the organizations we lead, over-arching and influential forces – pandemics, geopolitical ruptures, climate-fueled disasters, artificial intelligence, and political polarization – are driving disruptive change. They are bringing out the best and the worst in people. They are creating massive amounts of uncertainty, as the rate of technological, social, political, workplace, climatological, and other types of change rush toward us.

The latest edition of The New Yorker carries an article by Rivka Galchen reporting on a new course at the University of Chicago titled: Are We Doomed? The class features guest lectures by computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton who told the students that, because of generative artificial intelligence “things are going to go terribly wrong real soon.” Eighty-six-year-old Jerry Brown, former California governor, warned, “We’re in a real pickle… you’re young, the odds of a nuclear encounter in your lifetime are high. I don’t want to sugarcoat it.”

I’ve been writing books and speaking about business disruption and innovation for 30 years. I’ve never witnessed anything close to what is occurring today. As a futurist, I predict that there will be more change over the next 10 years than occurred over the past 100. We are simply not ready for massive and highly disruptive changes ahead.

How to prepare? When you’re driving at 90 miles an hour, it’s important to look farther up the road. Similarly, when you’re headed into a firestorm of change it’s important to adopt new skills — what I call Navigational Skills. Here are six of them:

  1. Learn to spot the signals of change buried beneath the noise and the distraction.
  2. Focus on broadening your understanding of a variety of types of change: demographic, social, technological, climate, regulatory, economic, and geopolitical.
  3. Work on improving your information diet. You are what you read, experience and absorb. Informational junk food is rampant and seductive. Be aware of sources. If you’re getting information for free, it may be free of value to you as well.
  4. Disrupt yourself from time to time. Self-audit your changeability quotient and shake things up. Avoid ruts and challenge your assumptions.
  5. Focus on building and deepening human relationships. Focus on empathy, integrity, kindness, and projecting optimism in the face of negativity, misinformation, and naked self-dealing.
  6. Value comes from values. Honor your core values even when offers come along that require loosening them to get in on an “opportunity of a lifetime.” Come what may, you still have to face yourself in the mirror every morning.
  7. Look back to look ahead. There is some wisdom in Winston Churchill’s quip: “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.”

This list is not complete, but the new era we are entering requires that we approach it with new mindsets, skillsets and toolsets. These new frameworks are just now coming to the fore.

Are we entering a new dark age as some suggest? Quite possibly. The 21st Century is rocky, and November’s election could throw us into chaos.

Or might we be on the cusp of a new age of shared prosperity and problem resolution brought about by a change in human consciousness? Could emerging technologies such as A.I. be harnessed in such a way as to lead 4.5 billion people out of poverty and begin to mitigate the climate crisis in our lifetime?

“Seeing is believing,” as the expression has it. But what about the reverse: Believing is seeing. In other words, if leaders believe that our problems are solvable, what would they do? If we rise and adopt a “we can fix this” mindset versus a “we are doomed” fatalism, we can create an inhabitable world.

I am personally optimistic not because our problems are less serious than we thought because they certainly are not. I am optimistic because of humankind’s proven ability over the centuries to surmount challenges and innovate our way out of situations. I take encouragement from the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who observed: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

The mindsets and belief systems we adopt today will determine the future. The choices we make today will decide if this is the start of a new dark age or the beginning of an age of abundance.

Nothing about the future is written in stone; the future is what we make it.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: 1 of 1,300+ FREE quotes available for download at http://misterinnovation.com

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