If not for Alvin Toffler I wouldn’t be a futurist. It was reading Toffler, along with Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller and a lot of science fiction in my early twenties that gave me the basis for thinking that there was some profession about the future to be had. “Future Shock” was Toffler’s biggest book […]
As a futurist I look at the world of economics through different filters than do economists. I am certainly not trained as an economist nor as a financial advisor. I write this disclaimer as I am frequently asked about “the economy” and long term investments by people wanting to better invest their money. Dividing economics […]
The word cyberspace is ubiquitous. I don’t think I know of an adult that does not know or use the word. Cyberspace is most often used when talking about all that exists on the Internet, the space/time area of computer interactions. It is a word that has settled into use and understanding around the world. […]
Recently there has been a lot of media coverage on new views of women in the workplace and what is a good work/life balance. The 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Feminine Mystique” and the publication of “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook are primary triggers of this conversation. Another is […]
We have left the Information Age and entered the Shift Age. This new age is an era of transformation unparalleled in terms of the amount of change that will occur is the next 20-30 years. As long time readers of this column know, I have been writing and speaking about the Shift Age since 2007 […]
As many of you who subscribe to my Shift Age Newsletter know, I co-authored a book with Jeff Cobb on transforming education. Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12 Education was published in April by Corwin Press. Now, three months later, I am happy to report that the response from the education community […]
01/01/11 is the second digital New Year’s Day in a row. A year ago it was 01/01/10, also zeros and ones, the two digits of the Information Age of computers. That column, called “The Transformation Decade” seemed to resonate immediately as it was widely sourced in the blogosphere and retweeted globally on Twitter. I created […]
In the Industrial Age we lived with an economy based upon atoms. In the Information Age we created an economy based upon bits. The zeros and ones in the title of this column of course represent the digits upon which the Information Age is based. On 01/01/10 I wrote a column naming the decade 2010-2020 […]
We are ten years into the 21st century. We are entering the Shift Age. We all have experienced rapid and almost unbelievable change in our lifetimes. We sense even more change in the years ahead. Everywhere we look, we see institutions that we grew up with starting to crumble before our eyes yet their replacements […]
What a day! President Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. This will be a day that will go down in history as an inflection day. Today is a day when the United States and the world changes course and move in a new direction. Yes President Obama is the first African […]