Don’t be a Turkey: Prepare to Unlearn
In honor of today being Thanksgiving, I thought I would recount a wonderful story from Nassim Taleb's outstanding book, The Black Swan: "Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly [...]
Futurist Jack Uldrich on Economic Development
In the past year, I have given dozens of keynote presentations to a variety of clients. Below is a short 10-minute speaking demo. If you are looking for an engaging, entertaining and informative keynote speaker for your conference or event, please contact Ned Jovanovich at Leading Authorities at 312-840-8267
A Futurist’s Perspective on Transportation: Cars by the Slice
Recently, I finished reading Clay Shirky’s excellent new book, Cognitive Surplus. One of the points he made which really struck home with me was his discussion of how “more” has a quality all of its own. To drive home the point, Shirky discussed how “pizza by the slice” works as a business model in big [...]
Can the Automotive Industry Unlearn?
Recently, I finished reading Clay Shirky’s excellent new book, Cognitive Surplus. One of the points he made which really struck home with me was his discussion of how “more” has a quality all of its own. To drive home the point, Shirky discussed how “pizza by the slice” works as a business model in big [...]
A Quintillion Reasons to Think About the Future
Earlier this year, I gave you a million, a billion and a trillion reasons to care about the future. Today, there are now supercomputers capable of 1 quadrillion calculations per second and soon, as this Wall Street Journal article explains, sometime between 2016 and 2020, China expects to have a supercomputer capable of a mind-boggling [...]
Unlearning on the Front Page
I don't regularly read the USA Today but whenever I'm traveling I usually pick up a copy in the hotel lobby. Today was just such a day and there were two articles of note on the front page of today's paper. The first highlighted how Baby-boomers are changing the rules for marketing. Surprisingly, in spite [...]
Start Treating Employees Like Customers
Here is a novel idea many employers might want to begin implementing: start treating your employees like customers. Why? Because it can save money. I recently came across this article explaining how Genentech has begun developing apps to help make its sales force more productive. One problem area identified by the company was that sales [...]
A Futurist’s Take on the Role of the Insurance Industry
A few months back while I was flying all across the country from Hawaii to Wichita to Atlanta giving presentations on nanotechnology, genomics and robotics to a variety of different industry associations, I had the opportunity to read Peter Bernstein’s best-selling book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Although it was written in [...]