Burning Man has become a meme.  A fast moving, rapidly expanding, global meme. That was my take away from being at Burning Man this year.  It has moved beyond the San Francisco Bay area word of mouth organic growth of the 1990s and the 2000s and blown up into a phenomenon. I first became aware […]

In two recent columns, here and here, I wrote about two of the three consumer economic trends that are and will dramatically change consumer and buyer behavior well into the 2020s.  In this column I address the third major consumer economic trend, moving from an ownership to a rental society.  This trend as with the […]

Since 2010 I have been speaking about what I see as three new consumer economic trends that will alter consumer behavior in the developed countries of the world.  A number of aligning forces are significantly increasing the influence and impact of these three trends. In a recent column here, I wrote about Conscious Capitalism, one […]

In 2010, I made the decision to write a book about the New Health Age.  Along with my co-author, Jonathan Fleece, we realized that the discussion about health care in America was being driven by fear, ignorance and manipulated by politicians.  Any discussion with these three components is a stupid conversation.  We decided to write […]

[This column was first published in Shift Age Newsletter #22] One of the three major consumer trends I have been speaking about during the past few years is conscious capitalism.  Conscious capitalism is when a company takes on an altruistic cause, charity or practice and applies revenue to that endeavor. Initially this behavior was mostly […]

The politically delayed confirmation of Chuck Hagel to become the Secretary of Defense could well be a pivot point, and an essential one, for the future of the Department.  It is time for this most important arm of the government to become more aligned with 21st century realities. Much of the thinking in the United […]

In a recent column I listed the Five Contexts of the Shift Age.  As stated there, while the true cliché of the Information Age was “content is king” the true cliché of the Shift Age is “context is king”.  We live in an increasingly contextual world.  The context in which we receive or consume information […]

Since the beginning of the Transformation Decade in 2010, I have been saying that education at all levels will undergo transformation by 2020.  The book I wrote with Jeff Cobb, “Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12”, published in early 2011, called for nothing less than transformation.  Reform is an outdated word and […]

[ This first appeared a week ago in my Shift Age Newsletter.  ] In the first eight months of 2011, I made some economic forecasts relative to the global economic landscape.  As a futurist, that is part of what I do, as people always ask me about the future, particularly economics.  It is only fair […]

The Eurozone is a mess.  Mathematics, common sense, recognition of a changed reality, and, yes, democracy have all taken a back seat to a deep-seated, ego-related loyalty to a broken idea from the 20th century.  This is one of a number of situations today where legacy thinking from the last century is propping up institutions […]