Zakaria - Lucidity, Insight & Imagination

Zakaria, who's new CNN show, Fareed Zakaria, GPS, was recently launched, writes another engaging book about the reality that the new global community represents. As he wrote, "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination. Here is an excerpt:

"During the 1980s, when I would visit India—where I grew up—most Indians were fascinated by the United States. Their interest, I have to confess, was not in the important power players in Washington or the great intellectuals in Cambridge.People would often ask me about Donald Trump. He was the very symbol of the United States—brassy, rich, and modern. He symbolized the feeling that if you wanted to find the biggest and largest anything, you had to look to America. Today, outside of entertainment figures, there is no comparable interest in American personalities. If you wonder why, read India's newspapers or watch its television. There are dozens of Indian businessmen who are now wealthier than the Donald. Indians are obsessed by their own vulgar real estate billionaires. And that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world.

How much? Well, consider this fact. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a year. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa. Over the last two decades, lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once unthinkable. While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term "emerging markets," has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India, two from China, and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa. This is something much broader than the much-ballyhooed rise of China or even Asia. It is the rise of the rest—the rest of the world."

Vidyo - Tele-presence is Here

A major opportunity exists to leverage global orchestration utilizing inexpensive and easily enabled high quality tele-presence. The skype revolution, which suffers from severe quality and participant limitations, is being surpassed by a new technology recently developed and launched by Vidyo. The video below demonstrates the incredible flexibility of the system. Expect new solutions to emerge surrounding this tool in the near future. Bottom line, it will be much easier and more effective for organizations to orchestrate the cooperations of individuals and entities across the world as the result of much higher quality and ease of use. The Revolution continues on.

Computing in the Cloud - The Revolution Comes to ERP

A new dawn has come in the business world and its implications have not yet reached many businesses or industries to date but the opportunities related to this innovation are significant. To the extent that "globalism" and offshore outsourcing has mpacted industries and organizations, hold on to your hats. Recalling days long gone of rhetorical exchanges with arrogant IT professionals who built fences around burdensome technology that kept process improvement from adoption for years on end, one could only dream of a world where ideas were the basis of business process improvements and technologies actually contributed to their more rapid adoption. Those days are here. When more people and business leaders wake up to the reality of what computing in the “Cloud” represents, despite strong opposition from some internal IT people distraught with the concept, a new world is indeed opened. Enterprise solutions  that extend powerful system solutions are available to your business with no hardware investment and quite affordable licensing fees. Want to dramatically improve your business process while eliminating costs? See this white paper on the ins and outs:  Reinventing the business workplace.

MIT's Humanoid Robotics Group - Domo

The development of Robots around the world is occurring more rapidly and diligently than most people might realize. The purpose for this development effort are the many tasks and applications that Robots can be designed to perform. With the number of elderly people forecasted to grow exponentially across the globe in the coming decade the market for in-home assistance that robots could provide is enormous and the return on investment proposition, given alternate care models, will become quite attractive once the technology is proven.

As with many technologies, a large number of engineers are working on various aspects of the robot solution: particularly humanoid robots. For example, engineers at the MIT Humanoid Robotics Group have developed a robot called Domo that can adapt to situations to assist people with everyday chores, everyday life, and everyday work. Cameras inside Domo's eyes enable him to see and adapt to his surroundings. Twenty-nine motors equipped with computer chips run off a dozen computers continuously updating information

Toffler and the Revolution

Lawrence Fisher’s interview of Alvin Toffler, published in Strategy+Business, is an excellent review of the thinking and writings of the futurist and author. His books, Future Shock and its successors, The Third Wave (Morrow, 1980) and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990) were at their best when not making predictions, but when synthesizing an array of disciplines, including science, technology, sociology, and religion, thus providing plausible explanations for happenings on the world’s stage.

In his new book, Revolutionary Wealth (Knopf, 2006), Mr. Toffler and his wife, Heidi, argue that more and more economic activity takes place through processes that do not involve the exchange of currency. The rapid rise of this nonmonetary wealth system has major implications for both the global economy and for humanity in general — implications that have been unmeasured and underestimated.

The interview also recounts some fundamental trends, like education, which this blog has addressed previously. 

Here is an excerpt from the Fisher interview: In the book, you write of education’s failure to move from the industrial age to the knowledge economy. Is homeschooling a “prosumer” response to this crisis?

TOFFLER: Yes, now that you mention it. It is an important and growing form of prosuming. The parents do it themselves, because the market does not supply what they want or need, or for that matter what the market needs.

Think about how we learned to use personal computers. PC use went from zero to hundreds of millions of people who know and use PCs routinely, and nobody went to school to learn how. Instead, chances are you found a “guru,” and a guru was anyone who bought his PC a week before you bought yours. And there were user groups — volunteers passing valuable knowledge back and forth. If you agree that the PC has had an impact on productivity in the money economy, then the fact that people taught each other how to use this thing without money changing hands is another example of what a big impact prosumers can have on the money economy. Add these things together — homeschooling, teaching how to use PCs, Linux, etc. — and you begin to understand this big invisible economic force. People have written about each of these pieces, but haven’t seen them as part of a huge nonmoney economy interacting with the money economy.