Reappraising the Future – Scenarios for 2012, Accenture
Japan’s Uncertain Future: Key Trends and Scenarios. Author: David J. Staley
Cybernomics: Toward a Theory of Information Economy. Author: John Perry Barlow
New World, Old Order. Author: David Rejeski
Questioning Assumptions – Exploring Alternative Business Futures. Author: Ged Davis
Terrorism and the Challenge to Globalization. Author: Peter Schwartz
The World in 2050. The Challenge Network directed by Dr. Oliver Sparrow
Manufacturing Anywhere. Author: Robert Gunther
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Author: Thomas L. Friedman
The Online “Webolution” to 2010. “Future Consumer.Com” by Frank Feather
The Future of the New Economy by Peter Schwartz
B2B or not B2B? Scenarios for the future of e-commerce by David Targett
Industrial R & D in 2008, by Charles F. Larson
American Consumers in 2025: Three Scenarios (Part 1). Gray Knight
American Consumers in 2025: Three Scenarios (Part 2). Gray Knight
American Consumers in 2025: Three Scenarios (Part 3). Gray Knight
Artifact Projections from 2005. Kevin Kelly
The Future Paradigm for Socio-Economics: Three Visions, Richard Hattwick
The Roaring Zeros – Wealth in 2020. Kelly Kevin
The Global Corporation Becomes the Leaderless Corporation. Byrne John A
Future Marketplace: Consumer Heaven? Jennings Lane
Manufacturing in 2020. Morley Richard E
Global Scenarios. The Forbes Group, Island Press, 1998.
The World Economy in 2020, OECD Observer, April, 1998.
Business NOT as Usual: Rethinking our Individual, Corporate, and Industrial Strategies for Global Competition. Ian I. Mitroff, San Francisco: Josey-Bass Publishers, April 1987/194p. Four scenarios of U.S. development into the 21st century.
This future scenario explores the global challenges coming to higher
education and describes various operational models: publicly funded institutions,
privately operated institutions, and virtual universities.
The scenario is set in the fictional country of Globalya. Globalya,
like many countries around the world is trying to address the growing chasm
between the great numbers of students seeking and prepared for higher education,
and Globalya’s limited capacity to enroll those students. Seeing opportunity
due to Globalya’s inability to meet demand, private interests and institutions
are coming into the Globalya and Globalya is experiencing a surge in the
number of private higher educational institutions.
Overall, twelve new institutions have applied for authorization for
operations in Globalya. Six are for profit enterprises; two are non-profits
founded by individual philanthropists; one is a non-profit sponsored by
a local company; and three are branches of foreign institutions. An initiative
is also begun by the government for the Globalya Virtual University (GVU).
Budget problems in the country result in a 10% budget cut for the public
universities. Faculty and students are becoming increasingly frustrated
with having to do more and more with less and less. Plans for the GVU are
scrapped, even after two years of development. Meanwhile, the cache of
having a degree by foreign universities brings students to their doors;
state universities are feeling deserted by constituents.
International Trade and the Doha Development Agenda. Authors: Michael Garrett, Ian Goldin, and Dani Redrik in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, January 29,2003
In this document, the authors set forth four possible scenarios for the WTO’s Doha development agenda.
Best Case Scenario: “A successful agreement results in substantial multilateral tariff reductions. Agricultural export subsidies are sharply reduced and strong disciplines place on domestic market insulation and distorting market support. Textile and clothing quotas are eliminated.
Increased movement of service workers is allowed and trade and investment in services booms. Reform discourages anti-dumping measures and improves the functioning of the safeguard regime.
Developing countries obtain sufficient aid for trade and strengthen domestic institutions. Greater openness stimulates foreign and domestic investment. Success at the multilateral level reduces the emphasis on existing regional arrangements, and new regional structures act as building blocks to non-discriminatory liberalization. Greater market access reduces the risk of macroeconomic imbalances. World market integration, particularly in agricultural commodities, creates more stable prices. Negotiations on the new issues on the Doha agenda are well managed. There are no new disciplines that raise the cost of complying with rules without compensating benefits.
Reduced trade barriers stimulate domestic reform, leading to a substantial increase in world trade, particularly in developing countries.
With a 50% reduction in tariffs, the World Bank model suggests a real income gain for developing countries of US $83 billion or 1%, and an exports life of 14.6%. High income countries see a 0.3% real income gain of US $67 billion and a 2.8% increase in exports.”
Baseline Scenario: “Modest multilateral tariff reforms are achieved including some progress in agriculture and textiles. However, developing countries see many import areas excluded. Resistance to agricultural reform limits reductions in domestic and export subsidies.
Limited progress is made in improving market access for services, but anti-dumping measures and safeguards increase as developing countries apply them unilaterally and retaliate against their imposition elsewhere. Aid for trade is only modestly successful with developing countries reluctant to offer strong or binding policy commitments.
Some progress on regional arrangements helps to reduce trade barriers, but inconsistency makes it difficult to use these arrangements as building blocks for further liberalization. Regional macroeconomic instability inhibits the acceptance of major liberalization.
With a 10% reduction in tariffs, the World Bank model suggests real income gains for developing countries of US$ 16 billion or 0.2%, with exports up by 2.5%. High income countries see a real income gain of US$ 14 billion or 0.1%, and a 0.5% increase in exports.”
Worst-Case Scenario: “There are two worst-case scenarios involving either a poor outcome from the Doha negotiations or a collapse of the process.
A Poor Outcome: Negotiations are concluded, but developing countries sign on reluctantly and only after strong-arm tactics by the European Union and the US. Modest multilateral tariff reforms are achieved including some progress in agriculture and textiles. However, major agricultural exporters capture most gains with many developing countries reaping few returns.
Developing countries are forced to agree to new disciplines in investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation. The impact on growth, particularly of poor countries, is disappointing and the credibility of the WTO is eroded.
Doha Negotiations Collapse: There is wholesale backsliding in commitments to abolish quotas on textiles and clothing, reducing market access for developing countries and the credibility of the system. Anti-dumping, safeguards and product standards are used extensively to restrict imports.
Regional arrangements become inward-looking fortresses. Labour standards and environmental measures are used in blatantly protectionist fashion to reduce penetration by developing countries.
Macroeconomic imbalances reinforce the downward spiral in investment and trade. The integrity of the system is undermined and weaker countries become even more fragile in trade and other global engagements.
With a 20% increase in tariffs, the World Bank model suggests the real income of developing countries is reduced to US$ 32 billion or 0.4%, with exports down 4.6%. High income countries see real income down by US$ 27 billion or 0.l%, with exports down 0.9%.
Either scenario results in a reversal in real income and trade. These results highlight, but understate, the consequences of a breakdown in international cooperation.”
Reappraising
the Future – Scenarios for 2012, Accenture.
http://www.accenture.com/xd/xd.asp?it=enweb&xd=ideas\wef\wef_scenarios.xml
Accenture, a consultancy to businesses worldwide, has developed four scenarios related to the future of globalization and its potential implications for businesses. The scenarios, presented below, are set in the year 2012.
1. Common Ground: “In this relatively stable and integrated world, tensions between different countries and different social groups are increasingly resolved by collaboration and negotiation. Economic growth is relatively slow but steady, and wealth is shared more equally within and between countries. Business is better connected with the rest of society. Most people are more secure and better off, and there is greater tolerance of diversity. But in richer countries in particular, concerns are growing about the high costs of this stability, which include rising inflation, high taxation, and excessive bureaucracy.
Business implications: Global supply chains tailored for local partnering; low cost of capital; new mass consumer groups in emerging markets; emphasis on co-regulation; common international standards and platforms; ethical consumers highly profitable; corporate focus on connecting with society.”
2. Survival of the Fittest: “Free markets have spread to many countries. Regulation and taxation are light and competition is fierce, forcing firms to be efficient and dynamic. Rewards are high for those who do well and many people are better off, but life is hard for those who do not succeed. Inequalities within and between countries continue to widen. The influence of the United States in business and in international security has grown stronger as other countries focus on more internal matters. While the world is in many ways quite stable, resentment of the influence of ‘big business’ and the perceived dominance of US culture sometimes spills over into hostility and violence.
Business implications: High levels of M&A activity; trade and investment liberalization; supply chains truly global; volatile financial markets; high levels of foreign investment; increasing wealth, but inequalities; move to self-regulation; low cost of capital.”
3. Tempestuous Times: “Economic integration and liberalization have continued but at the cost of greater tension as social and economic divides have widened sharply. Effective dialogue between governments, business and the rest of society has ceased. A few people have become more prosperous but many have been left behind. Global corporations take over many services previously provided by governments. Instability has grown and erupted into violence and conflict in many countries, and security has become the prime concern of both business and individuals.
Business implications: Focus on short-run returns; tight global supply chains; devastating customer boycotts of certain brands; minimal government regulation and taxation; conflicting standards and platforms; cost of capital increasing; high expenditure on security; backlash against certain new technologies.”
4. Worlds Apart: Driven by political and economic insecurities, countries have withdrawn into themselves. They still co-operate in a limited way, particularly on a regional basis, but make little attempt to address global problems. There have been sharp increases in protectionism and a partial reversal of market reforms in many countries. Countries with large internal markets have coped reasonably well with isolation and some groups have found cause for cautious celebration in this new world. But overall, economic growth has been slow and uneven and living standards for many people, especially among the world’s poorest, have fallen sharply.
Business implications: Local supply chains and local markets; high cost of capital; skills shortages in key sectors; fragmented infrastructure and standards; import substitution; multinationals focus on localizing their products; government intervention high.”
Urban
Russia At The Crossroads, Russian Cities in the XXI Century: Development
Scenarios. The Institute for Urban Economics
http://www.urbaneconomics.ru/eng/article/20020522.html.
The Institute for Urban Economics prepared three development scenarios for Russian municipalities in the XXI century for Club 2015, a club for successful professional managers in Russia. According to the authors, these scenarios are an attempt to describe the road to development in the medium and long run.
Scenario One: Running East, Running West, or Running in Circles. In this scenario, efforts to serve the interests of political bureaucrats are at the forefront of activity. As a result, significant administrative barriers that hamper development, the quality of public services, and democratic freedoms are held in place. Urban development consists of varying blends of bureaucratic and statehood models.
Scenario Two: Ad Astra Per Aspera. Stable economic growth promotes the corporation model which gradually transforms into a civil society model. “The fledging democratic institutions support efficient local governance and broad public participation…. Moscow and St. Petersburg acquire the features of a "world city", while small and medium-sized cities form a well-branched network.”
Scenario Three: Our Good Luck. A previously disinterested citizenry creates true local governance and a civil society emerges. Information transparency promotes dialog between city and community members. “A powerful impetus is created for better economic efficiency and social effectiveness of local governance.”
Japan’s Uncertain Future: Key Trends and Scenarios. Author: David J. Staley. The Futurist
From the 1960s to the late 1990s, Japan experienced a period of unprecedented growth and social change. In this article, the author explores the “next period” in Japan’s history, based on three driving forces: the restructuring of the Japanese economy (including the end of lifetime employment), the long-term effects of demographic change, and the impact of the generation the Japanese refer to as “the new breed”, which is more cosmopolitan and individualistic than their parents. Using the driving forces, the author creates four scenarios for the future of Japan in the next 20-25 years.
Scenario One: Entrepreneurial Japan explores the impact of entrepreneurism on Japan’s economy. “Group identification and self-sacrifice were important keys to the post-war reconstruction of Japan, but with the downturn of the 1990s, the Japanese government has perceived the need for more individual initiatives to bolster the economy. An entrepreneurial Japan might take one of two forms. In one version, entrepreneurship remains wedded to the corporate structure, with established companies harnessing the creativity and risk-taking initiatives of individuals for the economic benefit of the company. An alternative version suggests that Japan might develop a “cult of the entrepreneur”, where “the individual is lionized in the popular mind, rewarded for his initiative and envied for his wealth.”
Scenario Two: Japan as Number Two imagines “Japan as a second-tier economy, wealthy and healthy, but not an economic leader. In this scenario, the decline in company loyalty leads to a decline in productivity; as a result, the economy fails to regain its position as number one, even while providing a comfortable lifestyle for its citizens. A noteworthy feature of this scenario is the awakening of Japanese fathers. The time that workers might have spent on the job or socializing is instead given over to the enjoyment of family. Led by the new breed, men take on greater responsibility for raising their children.”
Scenario Three: An Inclusive Society proposes, “As Japan’s population ages and its birthrate declines, many women enter the workforce to fill the need for both skilled and unskilled labor. Japan also addresses its labor shortage by hiring more immigrants to fill job vacancies. Over time, these foreigners are fully welcomed into Japanese society.”
Scenario Four: Cultural Retrenchment and Isolation, “demographic pressures induce a conservative social reaction. Japan resists gender equality and multiculturalism. Women are encouraged to apply their “traditional” skills to care for an aging population. Alarmed at falling birthrates, the government adopts an official policy that encourages couples to have many children.”
Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations: Shifting Networks of Small Firms or All-Encompassing “Virtual Countries?” Authors: Robert J. Laubacher, Thomas W. Malone and the MIT Scenario Working Group. MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century (January 1997)
In this working paper prepared by members of the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, two scenarios are developed for 2015 that focus on a major uncertainty related to the future of organizations: the size of individual companies. Collectively, the scenarios consider issues such as the global business environment, corporate organization, and corporate governance.
Scenario One: Small Companies, Large Networks: In this scenario, the large corporations of the 20th century have become extinct. Instead, “nearly every task is performed by autonomous teams of one to ten people, set up as independent contractors or small firms, linked by networks, coming together in temporary combinations... and dissolving once the work is done.” Independent organizations take the place of large companies, providing opportunities for social networking, learning and reputation-building. “Many are similar to the writers’ and actors’ guilds of Hollywood. They help us save for retirement, and most of us pay a percentage of our income to our “guilds” as a voluntary form of unemployment insurance. Most importantly, we derive much of our sense of identity and belonging from these stable communities that we call “home” as temporary projects come and go.”
Scenario Two: Virtual Countries: In this scenario, large global conglomerates dominate the organization of work. “These keiretsu-style alliances, each with operating companies in almost every industry, have minimal national allegiance. Members of the same family work for Sony/Microsoft or General Electric/Toyota, and feel little loyalty to the U.S. or Japan. Employees own the firms in which they work, through pension plans, stock options, employee participation contracts and other vehicles. And just as the modern nation states ultimately turned to democracy, many of the corporations of the 21st century have moved to representative governance. Decisions are made hierarchically, but every year on election day, we choose from slates of managers who vow to do the best job for the company as a whole.”
Creating
the Future: Scenarios for the Digital Economy. Authors: Ed Boroevich,
Mary Boname, Barbara Gill, Anthony Hempell and Sara Pitman.
http://edie.cprost.sfu.ca/~idea.html
Three scenarios explore the interaction of trends related to the adoption of digital commerce technology (such as smart cards, digital cash and home banking) and their potential implications for Vancouver City Credit Union.
Scenario One: Corporations Rule: This scenario envisions the convergence of financial institutions and technology, with banks developing lead technologies such as microchip cards and smart consumer databases. A decline of government power has created an opportunity for financial institutions to offer “personalized” financing for a wide range of needs, such as day care, health care and education, making them an invaluable part of individual communities.
Scenario Two: Crypto-Anarchy: In this world, “the government disappears on a federal level or is so weakened that it becomes nothing more than a figurehead,” resulting in minimal regulation and a high degree of customer choice. “Digital cash is the predominant means of exchange.... [but] due to its anonymous and untraceable nature, it has become impossible to track the income of individuals. Large corporations have disintegrated and the commercial sector is dominated by highly competitive specialized companies.” The fragmentation of corporations and decentralized cash systems threaten the viability of financial institutions.
Scenario Three: Third Sector Ecotopia: “In this scenario, issues concerning the collective health of the public take precedence.” Environmental concerns and a decline of manufacturing jobs combine to create an economy in which the non-profit sector becomes the lead supplier of social services. As decision-making is decentralized to smaller regional/provincial governments, electronic networks facilitate a more advanced form of participatory democracy. Financial institutions provide an array of services, including e-cash kiosks, daycare facilities and community centers.
Cybernomics:
Toward a Theory of Information Economy. Author: John Perry Barlow.
This paper was published by the Merrill Lynch Forum, funded by the
Merrill Lynch Foundation.
John Perry Barlow states the obvious: we are inhabiting a world, which differs from the one we were born into. Yet, he profoundly illustrates why the world we are currently living in is a co-revolutionary relationship between technology, economy, and society. Mr. Barlow contends that that the effects of revolutionary invention are rarely understood in their own time. Success in the future will depend on an understanding of “relationships, a continuous flow of information, transparency, and a willingness to relinquish control to the unknown.” Mr. Barlow extrapolates the challenges into imagery, and in turn, imagery into challenges. These images of the future make a strong case for humanity to re-visit current assumptions, as we move forward into the 21st Century. This book is good read because the elemental features Barlow poses, stretches the imagination with clearer vision, particularly on how society and economics will evolve.
Scenario One: Relationships Replace Things: In this world, the challenge is to “de-materialize thoughts about commerce – beyond the trading of things.” Ideas and ownership of ideas cannot be physically defined. Economic theory accepts that - unlike things once understood in the Industrial Age - relationships do not increase in value with scarcity. Relationships become an active flow of information—“the greater the flow, the more valuable the relationship, assuming that the flow is being pulled by the voltage of relevance.”
Scenario Two: Context is More Important than Content: In this world, Barlow challenges the reader by asking the question, “what really is content when there is no longer a container for it?” Content becomes less perceived as physicality as context. Cyberspace is context. It is more important. It all started with the advent of electricity. The 21st Century holds the possibility that we will all be connected so that our very synapses travel thousands of miles in a single instance. Cyberspace becomes an environment, not just a medium. Economic transactions will not be “contained” within objects,” but rather, will be a part of the flow of an overall environment.
Scenario Three: The End of Accounting: “The underlying assumption of physical economy is that there is a predictable and tight relationship between inputs and outputs.” As the information economy progresses into the 21st Century, it will challenge us by behaving quite differently. Corporate reliance on predictable results – driven in large part by the constraints of those balance sheets that are the measurement of quarterly success—may be directly counterproductive to long term organizational innovation.” The companies that will succeed will be those that engage in a “gift economy” – a set of practices based on the principle that “what goes around, comes around”. Already, we are seeing the seedlings of this principle within organizations that are seizing a good percentage of this new type of investment capital.
Scenario Four: Transaction Becomes Continuous: “In the economy of life, transactions are in constant flow.” Yet, when we transact today, we think of a deal as something apart from the surrounding flow. In the 21st century, human bandwidth will broaden as exchange deepens in value and trust over time. In this world, “…the more open a system, whether that system is a company or a technology platform, the more likely it is to nourish interactivity and, therefore, stimulate attention.” This is indeed an attention economy.
Scenario Five: Chaos Becomes Opportunity: Mr. Barlow poses quite a startling question: Could neurosis simply be the inability to live with ambiguity? If humanity surrenders to the biological nature of the information economy, then there is a surrender to ambiguity; “…the dream of predictability is no longer a luxury” in this world. To try to predict will be more of a burden and, quite possibly an undoing. “Life is unpredictable in an era of such absurdly expanding (scientific and technological) possibility. Unanticipated consequences are the rule as the (possibilities) increase exponentially…each time we solve one problem, we create several more in the process.”
Scenario Six: Pantheism Replaces Monotheism “If ubiquitous information access does nothing else, it unmasks the mystique of Authority. Even before the Internet, it was clear that the notion of God-given power was in steep decline. In the 21st Century, the workings of “web networked consensus,” in which the Many increasingly replace One, God, (white men) or Authority, emerge more rapidly.”
Scenario Seven: Women Win: “Women will be magnanimous in their victory since they were always more interested in sharing ownership than imposing it.” Cyberspace is all about relationships. “Women understand more deeply than men do.” Cyberspace breaks the glass ceiling of the Old Boy Network, wherein start-up capital was contained in containers with no mind about context. In the context of Cyberspace, the 21st Century is and will more strongly see a business environment where women win.
Scenario Eight: The Southern Hemisphere Rises: “The developing world was spared from the industrial habits of the developed world. The environment of Cyberspace is all about “mind over matter.” In the 21st Century, any individual or organization can place itself on an even footing with the largest IBMs’ or Microsofts’ of the world, “given the right idea properly executed”.
Scenario Nine: The First Shall be Last: The developing world “is ready to join the conversation and they are sick of being regarded as problems…” Mr. Barlow makes a compelling case that developing countries are not so much bothered by chaos or uncertainty as the developed countries are. “They were raised on both (chaos and uncertainty), and the information economy presents possibilities for their harnessing wealth undreamed of before.” “In other words, the disenfranchised can surf.”
New
World, Old Order. Author: David Rejeski
David Rejeski, formerly of the Council on Environmental Quality. (Mr.
Rajeski is currently with the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC.)
2001
Are international institutions that are as old as our grandmothers likely to be as effective at protecting the environment in an increasingly globalizing economy? What role will multinational corporations and transnational advocacy networks play in a New World order? The rapid pace of change unleashes sustainability challenges that are unheard of today. "The challenges of sustainability simply overwhelm the adequacy of our responses," wrote United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan in his Millennium Report. "With some honorable exceptions, our responses are too few, too little and too late." In this highly academic and distinguished paper, Rejeski interviews a number of noted environmentalists and economists. He concludes by illustrating Four Future Paths – A Look at Four Leading Concepts that measure conceptual visions of the types of organizational structures that would best perform in an age of “challenges of sustainability”.
Leading Conceptual Scenario One: Global Environmental Organization. “Some prominent voices have called for the formation of a powerful world environment organization. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and President Jacques Chirac have called for creating one global environmental agency to pull together and push forward many environmental agreements. Germany, Brazil, Singapore, and South Africa have called for such an organization. The idea was even backed by Renato Ruggiero in 1999, when he served as executive director of the World Trade Organization.
The idea has been pushed for years by a network of people from academic institutions led by Yale's Prof. Esty, who prefers calling it a Global Environmental Organization, or GEO. A group convened in New York City by Esty's Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy claimed a GEO could cure the fragmentation of policymaking between the United Nations Environment Programme, The United Nations Development Programme, the Commission on Sustainable Development, and the diaspora of international bodies that oversee environmental compacts, each in a different city. "The global environmental governance structure is inadequate for the pollution and resource challenges the world faces today," the group opined. Calling the current regime "weak and performing poorly," participants concluded, "The growing recognition that a number of serious pollution control and resource management issues are inherently transboundary in their scope makes the status quo unacceptable and the need for improved global environmental governance urgent." Esty contends that a GEO would provide more leadership and focus on international environmental issues. An overarching organization could also boost the exchange of ideas between the staffs of various secretariats, he says. A single location would make it easier for less-developed countries to staff negotiations and meetings, which currently are dispersed in time and place. And it could serve as an advocate for advancing environmental treaties that have run aground. If headed by a prominent figure, a GEO could "lead governments toward reaching agreements," says Yale's Speth. Others look to it to pressure the World Trade Organization to give greater weight to environmental agreements. GEO critics decry another bureaucracy and say it might distract from the important drive to get existing organizations to integrate environmental analysis into their decision making. Others say it may achieve little in a world where consensus develops slowly. Harvard's Juma, for instance, says that the failure to make environmental progress may have caused the proliferation of conventions, rather than the other way around. He doubts that proliferation undermines implementation. In response to critics of big, clumsy bureaucracies, Esty argues that a global environmental organization needs not be hierarchical and centralized, and might operate more like a network. "It might be decentralized and might even be virtual," he said. "You want a structure that encourages those that have a role to play to come and play it." Some GEO backers had hoped that the Millennium Summit of the UN in September 2000 would grapple with environmental governance and propose new solutions. But the hundreds of speeches barely touched on the subject. Instead, Esty looks to the tenth anniversary of the Rio Summit in 2002 as the next forum where nations can consider a global environmental organization.”
Leading Conceptual Scenario Two: Boost UNEP. “The governments of Germany, Brazil, Singapore, and South Africa are among those that have called for revitalizing UNEP to serve as some kind of global environmental organization. UNEP's leadership sounds amenable. In late 2000, UNEP Executive Director Klaus Topfer called for the world's nations to strengthen UN institutions at the UN's Earth Summit in 2002, on the tenth anniversary of the biodiversity conference in Rio de Janeiro. "All of us must urge our leaders at the Summit to renew their commitment to the UN and to equip it with the necessary tools and resources to meet the unprecedented challenges of the New Millennium." Topfer said UNEP stood ready to work with all parties to catalyze a new regime of environmental regulations, policies, and partnerships that could address the negative aspects of globalization. But even while Topfer is credited with strengthening UNEP, many observers doubt that it is capable of playing a strong, leading role. Critics blame its charter, budget, structure, past leadership, and even its Nairobi location. UNEP's budget is smaller than that of some U.S.-based nongovernmental environmental groups. Developing nations feared it might become a global agency that would deter their development in the name of environmental protection. They founded it as a creature of the UN General Assembly, which is dominated by less- developed countries, and put it under the direction of an unwieldy, 58-state governing council. Given a general charter to solve environmental problems, UNEP has dissipated its efforts in all directions. To be a strong advocate and coordinator, its critics say UNEP would need a coherent and manageable mission, more funds, more independence from the General Assembly, and a more streamlined leadership system. Some observers suggest merging UNEP and the much larger and better-funded UNDP. But that combination might face some of the same concerns that have restrained UNEP; poorer nations would want assurances that development programs would not lose any resources to environmental programs or be constrained by them.”
Leading Conceptual Scenario Three: Clusters/Environmental Alliances. “Calestous Juma, a Harvard professor and former UNEP official, argues that a global environmental organization is unnecessary and may get entangled in bureaucracy. Saying that a global environmental agency would be "too cumbersome to work," he notes that centralized, hierarchical UN agencies are widely regarded as inefficient, and that UN agencies are increasingly relying on networks of other parties. "The strength of the treaties lies in the fact that they give more power and authority to governments and citizens, not to centralized UN agencies," Juma wrote to the Financial Times of London. Juma's lack of confidence in the United Nations is widely shared. Oran Young, a Dartmouth College professor and director of its Institute of International Environmental Governance, notes that post-cold war euphoria about UN leadership is "giving way to mounting skepticism about the capacity of the United Nations to cope with an array of pressing problems." Currently, each environmental agreement is overseen by a conference of the parties, which delegates duties to a secretariat, scientific advisory body, and other organizations. Instead of a new hierarchical organization to coordinate these bodies, he calls for greater coordination between them in what he calls "environmental alliances" or "clusters." Bodies implementing the Convention on Biodiversity, for instance, already work closely with those in charge of the Ramsar Convention on wetlands of international significance. Those two conventions could work with CITES and other conventions to draft consensus standards for sustainable uses of land. The clusters or environmental alliances have many supporters. Dartmouth's von Moltke, for instance, prefers them to a single, new organization for environmental issues. The U.S., he notes, does not give all environmental authority to one agency. Rather it spreads that authority around among several. Internationally, "five GEOs might be a good idea, dealing with different environmental issues," says von Moltke. Clusters and alliances have been widely discussed, with some advocates calling for various environmental agreement bodies to be brought together physically in one location. One advantage of these, some advocates say, is they could reduce the need for negotiators to fly around the globe from one site to the next for interrelated talks, which can be particularly difficult for small nations with limited budgets. Co-located secretariats could also share information and techniques for solving problems and work out potential conflicts. But clustering and alliances are ill defined and face some of the same resistance as a GEO. Any effort to pull together many staffs into one organization will face bitter resistance, Juma notes. Employees fear losing influence or even their jobs. Conference members would lose authority. And a host of questions entangle the idea. For instance, how would the clustering of secretariats and new alliances with others be structured and promote cooperation? One cluster or alliance might combine multilateral environmental agreements dealing with atmosphere, such as the Kyoto Protocol on climate change or the Vienna Convention for Protection of the Ozone Layer and its Montreal Protocol. Forestry, biodiversity, and wetland agreements might be joined in a cluster. Chemical pollution issues might be clustered, as might marine issues or land-use issues. However they are arranged, clusters and alliances are sure to overlap. Climate change, for instance, can greatly affect biodiversity; forest and land-use choices can influence climate, desertification, and agriculture. How should clusters cooperate? Should they have common staffs to coordinate them? Who will serve as the advocate for new negotiations? Clustering advocates have many questions to answer.
Leading Conceptual Scenario Four: Clusters/Environmental Alliances. “Inertia alone may make major structural changes difficult in the near future, and some observers say that may not be such a bad thing. A new, global environmental organization may make little difference, said a report from London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs. GEO proposals, wrote Joy Hyvarinen and Duncan Brack, "have suffered from a significant lack of detail and a failure to explain why the creation of a new global environmental organization would make any difference to the underlying problems of a lack of resources, a lack of political will, and inadequate policy integration." More effective environmental agreement implementation and better communications may be more important than structure. Some observers argue that reform efforts are better expended on making existing institutions work better. Many voices are calling for strengthening the enforcement and implementation of existing multilateral environmental agreements and new scrutiny of government subsidies, including export credit loans and water rates, that lead to environmental damage. Both are easy to say, hard to do. Others say environmental analysis should be integrated into existing bodies. Rather than setting up a new organization to lobby nations, trade and multilateral banking agencies, David Reed of the World Wide Fund for Nature argues that those institutions would respond better if their own bureaucracies acquired expertise on environmental issues. "The World Bank should increase its capacity to collect environmental data, to monitor trends in environmental performance and issues, to share information with the broader public, and to help develop strategies for addressing environmental problems," contends Reed. No other international institution, he says, "is better positioned or in command of such an extensive range of resources" to address environmental problems. The WTO, IMF, and the multilateral banks also need to integrate environmental considerations into their project planning and evaluations, critics say. And this will happen, some say, only if member nations first integrate environmental analysis into their own trade and aid policies and negotiation strategies. Real progress will be difficult without a strong commitment by the United States to multilateral environmental agreements. In a globe with diffuse environmental authority, the importance of the world's dominant economic and military power is hard to overstate. And to win developing countries' cooperation and support, any new thrust toward environmental agreements will have to be greased with aid from the developed countries to those countries that can least afford short-term sacrifices and new technology needed for sustainable economic development. One way to make that integration effective is to open national and international proceedings to scrutiny and participation from private sector organizations. The United Nations has been moving in that direction. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has praised "global policy networks" of governments, civil society groups, and corporations as "the most promising partnerships of our globalizing age." He looks to them to help lead the world community of nations toward sustainable development.
"They work for inclusion and reject hierarchy. They help set agendas and frame debates. They develop understanding and disseminate knowledge. They allow for stronger, broader consensus on new global standards. They help implement and monitor those standards once they are agreed. They raise public consciousness and speak to our conscience." Such multifaceted networks are, Annan said, "one of the ways we can strengthen the bonds of our global community."
Questioning
Assumptions – Exploring Alternative Business Futures. Author:
Ged Davis, March 13, 2002.
Ged Davis is Vice President, Global Business Environment, Shell International
Ltd. Swedback Conference, Stockholm.
This is the latest set of Shell’s global scenarios – completed in mid-2001, with an outlook to the year 2020. These highly detailed scenarios explore the driving forces of globalization, liberalization, and advancing technology, as well as a number of highly detailed forecasts of energy futures. From a social standpoint, these scenarios are of particular interest because the narrative and illustrations explore in detail, the social consequences of these very powerful global forces. A quote from Shell’s prescient introduction: “Soon after Shell finished them (the global scenarios) the shocking events of Sept 11th illustrated both the reality of global integration and the reaction it can provoke.”
Scenario one: Business Class: Growth of the Global Elite: Volatile Growth: Describes a world of highly powerful, networked business. Business becomes the “Matrix” (as in the movie), of the entire world. “Is Business Class good for international business? Well, it’s certainly no picnic. Grinding competition in open, transparent, global markets - aided by new communications technology – brings commoditization and university benchmarking. There’s no room for mediocre performance and rents are under constant pressure. Business success depends on the relationship between the value creating “core” and the rest – more and more of which can be, and become, outsources. The need to find and sustain elusive competitive advantage drives a relentless search for efficiency and innovation . Speed is essential for seizing fleeting opportunities. In increasingly volatile markets, this has to be combined with resilience and superior risk management.”
Scenario Two: Prism: “Describes a world shaped not by what we have in common but by the interplay of our differences. People find their values in roots. They pursue their own versions of modernity by reflecting cultural values and practices more. This does not reject the markets or modern technology. But it is emphasis on the community. Governments are expected to deliver more and better universal welfare and maintain social cohesion, as well as delivering economic progress. Developing countries continue to pursue their path to growth and European Union is strongly coherent. “New European Way” – responds by finding an economic rationale for welfare. Is Prism bad for international business? It is clearly a world in which being local matters. Multinationals must compete in many different markets, each with their own values, rules and requirements. Customers favor ‘local’ suppliers. Access depends on relationships and reputation. Choosing the right partners and recruiting and developing good local staff are vital skills. But it is not just a matter of responding to local conditions and meeting local needs. Multinationals must add value – delivering global best practices and cutting-edge technologies. And doing so in a way that suits the local conditions.”
Terrorism and the Challenge to Globalization. Author: Peter Schwartz, Red Herring Magazine, December, 2001.
In this article, Mr. Schwartz reviews the globalization debate – a pretty clear schism, between the globalization ‘haves’ - those believing it is good for everyone (raising all boats at the global marina); versus the globalization ‘have nots’ - those believing it is not so good, because it “drives the power of global corporations toward economic hegemony and a fall-out will be the result.” Mr. Schwartz reviews the theories of Paul Hawken, Kevin Kelly, and Benjamin Barber to glimpse into the future and forecast scenarios against today’s political realities. According to Schwartz, it may be possible to take a glimpse at where the geopolitical future is headed.
Scenario One: Radical Islam: “If radical Islam is the new Communism, we may be in for a long and ugly war. This scenario involves a world of perpetual conflict with no winners. As atrocities on both sides feed on each other, the dividing lines become deeper and wider in an ever more-terrible cycle of violence.”
Scenario Two: Better International Institutions: “If Mr. Hawken and Mr. Barber are right, there are at least two possibilities. In the best of all possible worlds, democratic governance would begin to emerge globally. Existing institutions would become more transparent and democratic. New institutions would be created to better regulate common elements like the air and the oceans, and to establish appropriate global rules of behavior for corporations.”
Scenario Three: American Hegemony: “But one has no trouble imagining another scenario, in which the United States refuses to surrender any sovereignty and acts unilaterally in its own interests. In such a rogue superpower scenario, the reception for U.S. companies around the world will become chilly indeed, as the world lines up to resist American hegemony. Sympathy for any new horrors inflicted upon the United States will be very limited, and cheers will be heard in Paris and Rome, as well as in the back streets of Gaza and Karachi.”
The
World in 2050. The Challenge Network directed by Dr. Oliver Sparrow.
Dr. Sparrow frequently appears on television and is an accomplished
futurist, GBN member, and radio performer.
The Challenge Network provides a scenario of the world in 2050, starting with five ruling forces that have formed the world in 2050. These five forces that shaped the world of 2050 are known as “Quincunx.” In this world, infant induction software imprints the Quincunx on every newborn mind. The five forces of Quincunx are:
1) ‘Infrastructure’: “This once meant physical transport and housing, energy supplies and crude telecommunications, the management of resource flows and waste products. By 2000, it had come to imply the then-unprecedented web of capability and skill on which business, in particular, could draw. There was great excitement at the turn of the century as this new infrastructure began to lift growth rates and suppress waste. Few could have seen what it means today: a reservoir of knowledge and capability, functionality and finance, all mapped together on demand to serve a volatile need. The unceasing eruption of knowledge and insight accelerates the shocking, discontinuous tectonic processes of creation and destruction.”
2) ‘Options’: “Life, for the majority, was once focused chiefly upon convention and necessity. ‘Options’ once implied something unusual: choice. Today, we have the world’s capabilities at our hand. We can extend our life spans in ways limited only by our personal finances and by the rights, which we have, each won through public service. We can engineer our personalities to meet transient needs. We can choose our social milieu from an almost infinite spectrum, or mix examples of this to taste. The capabilities inherent in the infrastructure afford us the means to envisage limitless possibilities, and to do so in conjunction with simulacra of consumers, partners and those who might object to what we do. We can define an offering, have it given life and put it to market in hours or days, and – in the established world, at least - only those without imagination or taste need to be excluded from this.”
3) ‘Best practice’: “Is both our constraint and our spur. All can choose, and none willingly choose anything but the best. Every enterprise and political entity survives only through the constant satisfaction of volatile public choice. The choice which each agent exercises – on how to present and differentiate itself, on how best to balance complex competing demands – fills the time which delegation of operations to infrastructure and automation has released. The interests of each such agent is interwoven with many others, al exercising expert choice, each instantly critical of actions or policy which does not attain these high standards. In this expert arena, are the key task of area-based governance has shifted from operations to issue harmonization and dispute resolution. The $17 trillion cession by the Anglophone Domain of its major systems management to the Shell-Greenpeace-Cisco hegemon (SGC) is an example of how far this will now go. Four hundred million people have handed over the management of the core – but boring – aspects of their daily life to a transpersonal hegemon, which knows each as an individual and is now a petty deity in their daily lives. Politics, within the para-statals making up the geographical political representation, now focuses on how to tackle issues, and which issues to address. Best practice drives us all forward at a gallop. Stable responses are found in equivalent rates of innovation and in differentiation. The latter has proven a powerful tool, and few regions or activities do not now strive actively to be different from every other agent. A wave of differentiation has swept across a world once seemingly doomed to uniformity. No one of the 12,000 UN-registered para-statal entities is much like any other, and all strive daily both to differentiate their offer from that of their rivals, whilst also harmonizing their interface with everyone else. The rejectionist states that have retained uniformity, which have imprisoned their populations and closed their frontiers have, regrettable, doomed their 3 bn citizens to, at best, poor choices and majoritarian tyranny. It is to be hoped that hegemonic influences in Greater Germany and Japan will bring both from their ‘retirement home’ out to face the world in all its richness.”
4) ‘Connectivity’: “Once meant the ability to link remote agents together, point by point. Now, it implies a shifting, constant pattern of immersion. It offers us a new universe to inhabit. Similarly, those who one dreamed of artificial intelligence saw the natural home for this as the machine. Few recognized what commercial organizations and the fusion of military systems had already achieved until, at least, the first hegemon came spontaneously into existence. The story is too famous to recall in detail: a vastly complex issue fought between two hugely complex and competent adversaries, a sea of data visualized by arbitration software: suddenly, many people saw the same thing from many perspectives and a completely new way of acting came into existence. Knowing what we now know about cognition, we could have anticipated this spontaneous achievement. Indeed, the result – although a true meta-consciousness, capable of making decisions and conducting conversations – is obviously primitive when compared to contemporary interfaces. Simulations of pre-hegemony activities suggest that at peak creative potential, a team could – for fleeting minutes, when confined to a single room – achieve the flickering of what now burns bright and continuous in every home and place of work. Those who have participated in the SGC fusion will know the elation of seeing, in detail, all aspects of the entire Anglophone domain in a single perspective. For many, there is no higher pleasure.”
5) ‘Exhaustion’: “The complexity which these four members of the Quincunx have created could, if ill-managed, paralyze the machinery by which we survive. Each possibility throws up a myriad stakeholders, each armed with ideas, objections, alternatives to consider. This brings us to the last – and most multifaceted - of the five forces in the Quincunx: exhaustion. World systems are known to have exhausted their limits of natural resilience in the ‘teens of this century. Human-created systems reached the same state somewhat sooner. Pre-hegemonic financial systems, for example, attained a degree of integration in which dynamic artifacts - oscillations and other unexpected outcomes – began to set profound limits as to what could be done with them. The European crash of 2007 was as directly attributable to these as to the social forces of the times. The water wars of the Tigris-Euphrates and Arabian Peninsula marked the beginning of resource difficulties. The Gulf Stream instabilities of 2020-2030 brought our collective attention to planetary engineering. Solving these issues required enforced give and take, and political decision-making was required to appease a range of stakeholders, which then-current systems of governance could not at all manage. Hegemons and related knowledge management tools – the so called ‘civil engineering’ of the knowledge economy - helped to drain many of these swamps. Firm, directive leadership by the wealthy nations was also fortunately able to survive the fragmenting forces of the 2007-2013 periods. We of the established world have been fortunate not to fight a major war, as it would assuredly be our last. Intelligence and active data-mined oversight has allows us to control the people capable of developing so-called "garage" weapons of mass destruction. The general spread of dangerous technologies did and does, however, seem certain to lead to a self-propagating accident. Providentially, those which have occurred to date have been contained or cauterized.”
Manufacturing
Anywhere. Author: Robert Gunther
Robert Gunther, a freelance business writer based outside Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
Full narrative and graphic’s to Gunther’s writing available on RAND
website: <www.rand.org>.
What will be the impact of the diffusion of manufacturing on the environment? Where will the new environmental leverage points be in a world of manufacturing anywhere? Environmental policies in the manufacturing sector have traditionally focused on the end-of-pipe by-products and emissions from the production of large factories. But the pressures of regulatory policy and public pressure - especially in Europe – is calling for manufacturers to take environmental responsibility for products “across their entire life cycle”. According to the author, Robert Gunther, it means that, “Of necessity, the future of manufacturing will be more fluid and diffused.” Already, we are at the precipice of a major global trend in manufacturing: a trend encompassing dispersal, powerful networking technologies, supply chains that cut-across not only the regional level but also the global level. Among the many images of the future this author illustrates in this article, he includes an entertaining scenario created by Susan Helper of Case Western Reserve and John Paul MacDuffie of the Wharton School, offering two possible images of how the Internet could change relationships between customers and manufacturers in the auto industry.
Scenario: buildyourowncar.com. “It is April 27, 2010, and Kate has decided she wants to buy a new car. Out of many sites that her Web Pad brings up, she narrows her choices to two: Ford.com and Buildyourowncar.com. Ford.com: On Ford.com, she settles back with a cup of coffee and reviews a list of options. She has given the Ford site permission to look at her demographic data, so it knows she likes to windsurf and take her 4-year-old nephew on outings. Ford also receives full body measurements for her and her nephew. The site starts with available models, listed in order of potential appeal. She picks the low-end Focus, and a model is displayed with a roof-rack specially configured for windsurfing boards. She selects it without hesitation. A little further down she is presented with a Lego car seat, filled with Lego building blocks, perfect for her nephew. Based on her height of 5 feet 3 inches, she is offered extra high seats. She then explores other options, including global positioning, and subscribes to a service that allows two-way interaction with local businesses. She then clicks through to get a final price for the custom-configured car, which could be delivered to her driveway in three days. She decides to pay the extra $35 for a test drive from a local dealer. Dealers now make their money selling assorted travel services while her repairs are handled by a local shop. But before clicking on "finance your purchase," Kate saves her Ford Focus configuration and looks at a new site, buildyourowncar.com. Buildyourowncar.com: This site lets her pick components from any manufacturer and assemble them into one car. She likes the styling of the Ford Focus but the reliability of Honda engines. She also would like a Bose sound system that wasn't available at the Ford site. She has a few worries, however. Buildyourowncar.com assured her that all of these parts would fit together perfectly, due to standard interfaces agreed upon by manufacturers in 2008, but Consumer Reports still cites quality problems with these "mix and match" vehicles, as well as ambiguity about who covers warranty costs. Also, there is no physical dealership or opportunity for a test drive. The site does generate a video image of Kate in the car she has configured, showing how easy it is for her to reach controls. She tries out the driving simulation on the site, and plugs in a new BMW engine to get a feel for a high-performance engine in the Ford Focus body. Kate, a little tired from having spent a couple of hours looking for cars, takes a break to think about her options. She doesn't really believe her parents when they say they used to spend days or weeks looking for new cars, and still not end up with one they really wanted.” According to Gunther, “The Internet is expected to move the auto industry to a build-to-order model, as it has in computers (such as the Dell Direct model where you can custom order your computer directly from the company, eliminating any retailers). But how this evolution occurs, and how quickly, depends on major changes in the industry. A mix-and-match car that combines components from different manufacturers would require a level of standardization that has yet to be achieved in the industry.”
The
Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Author:
Thomas L. Friedman Farrar Straus & Giroux; (June 2000)
Author Thomas L. Friedman has two Pulitzer Prizes and one National
Book Award. He has worked for many years for the New York Times.
Thomas Friedman brilliantly captures globalization’s history, trends, and major tensions between global forces through the use of metaphors, a literary form that illustrate difficult concepts more visually. Friedman writes about the history of globalization, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (“the wall”) to the world of “the Web” of globalization in 2000. The trend Friedman foresees as gaining to a level of momentum and perhaps, critical mass, are the various “threats and opportunities that increasingly derive from whom you are connected to.” Globalism is the triumph of free-market capitalism. “The technologies driving globalism are computerization, miniaturization, digitization, satellite communications, fiber optics, and the Internet, which reinforce its defining perspective of integration.” Friedman uses opposing metaphors to create a powerful play of ideas. In addition to metaphors in his book, Friedman recounts many stories; stories that tell of a clash, conflict, or contradiction, that reaches a crisis point and is resolved through the structure of two opposites and their struggle to reconcile. The following represents the central metaphor and plot line of his book. A Globalization Metaphor: The Lexus. “The Lexus stands for speed, modernization, movement, luxury, and globalization.” A Globalization Metaphor: The Olive Tree. “The olive tree stands for everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us, and locates us in this world – whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion, or, most of all, a place called home.” The Interplay Between These Two Worlds: Friedman sees the world, the nation, the town, and even the person as divided between building the Lexus and disputing who owns the Olive tree. “If the Lexus is driven too heedlessly, the Olive Tree will block its path. Those who download for a living will find themselves confronted by those with a bullet hole through its center – the standardized treatment for all suspect packages. Of course, so-called free markets have their rules. Friedman calls this “The Golden Straitjacket,” a one-size fits-all requirement that squeezes and pinches some, but accelerates growth while shrinking politics and diminishing left-right polarities. He wants to unleash the creative chaos of capitalism on a global scale, but create a safety net to catch those mangled by the Lexus careening through the Olive Tree grove.” (New York Times)
The Return to Depression Economics: 2010. A scenario from the book, “The Return to Depression Economics” by Paul Krugman, published in 1999, WW. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, NY.
“Surely the Great Depression could never happen again. Or could
it?”
Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology wrote the book, "The Age of Diminished Expectations" which
was called "perhaps the best little book on economics in the past ten years."
(Boston Globe). In his recent book, "The Return of Depression Economics",
Krugman argues that in 2010, we will see a return to literally, depression
economics; which "means that for the first time in two generations, failures
on the demand side of the economy--insufficient private spending to make
use of the available productive capacity--have become the clear and present
limitation on prosperity for a large part of the world. " It's the same
problem that was at the root of the 1930s depression. And while it took
a world war to solve that problem, Krugman sees solutions that are far
less dramatic, but that require a willingness to chuck obsolete doctrines
and think about old problems in new ways. Krugman draws a scenario of China,
which Krugman calls "corrupt, croney-ridden, with terrible banks, but saved
so far by its inconvertible currency. Scenarios of China in 2010:
"Could China go the way of its neighbors? Possibly: but the
crisis would look a bit different because of the capital controls and the
absence of large foreign-currency debts. One scenario would involve
massive domestic bank runs---with the government hesitant to provide the
huge injections of cash needed to stop the runs, for fear that putting
too much money into circulation would create such an incentive to swap
yuan for dollars for the currency controls would prove ineffective.
The other Scenario of China in 2010 would involve a sort of Japanese-style
slowdown in domestic spending, which the government is again unable to
fight effectively, not because the interest rate is zero but because rates
can go only so low before, once again, causing capital flight that swamps
the controls. In both cases the crisis story builds on a real problem:
China's banks really are a mess, and the country does have flagging private
investment and consumer spending. Back to the present: The good news
is that the Chinese government is well aware of these risks and is trying
to combat them through massive public investment spending, a classic Keynesian
remedy. There clearly is significant capital flight from China despite
the controls, but it is a steady leakage rather than a torrent, and the
country's immense foreign exchange reserves are still intact. Summary:
The clear and present danger is not that China itself will collapse, but
that --- as it perceives the pressure gradually increasing - it will choose
to devalue its currency. This would not lead to catastrophe for China,
but would endanger whatever recovery is taking place elsewhere in Asia.
The Online “Webolution” to 2010. “Future Consumer.Com” by Frank Feather, published July 2000, Warwick Publishing Company, Ontario, Canada.
The author makes an excellent case that by 2010, the Internet will gobble
up 31% of consumer spending, “leaving most brick-and-mortar retailers in
rubble.” In this book, Feather portrays a history of Internet, webonomics,
multiple perspectives of the Internet; who will shop online, what they
will buy; branding, and e-marketing strategy. The author in the foreword
presents a scenario of "Webolution" of Shopping to 2010: “The
Web takes shopping out of the shops. By 2010, the Internet will gobble
up 31 percent of retail spending, leaving most brick-and-mortar retailers
in rubble. The head-spinning Internet Revolution hurricane, or "Webolution,"
is not east to forecast. However, before it's done - around 2018
- it will reverse and unwind virtually everything that the Industrial Revolution
put into place. It will smash the mass consumption economy to smithereens
and re-center it on the home. The Webolution is so big that
few grasp its significance. Doubtless, the plodding plowman didn't
"get it” when the first steam train puffed past his field. Likewise, the
metal-bending blacksmith didn't "get it" when the first "horseless carriage"
sputtered past his shop. … But this Webolution will rock the world, again
utterly transforming life and commerce. And the rewards will accrue
fastest to those who embrace it first. Click-happy shoppers are flocking
online and will stun shortsighted brick-and-mortar retailers who stubbornly
insist that people will always come to their stores. Online sales
will kick in big time during 2000 - 2002, growing rapidly throughout the
decade to top $1 trillion by 2010. By then, the Web will be 100 times
bigger than today - a tidal wave, drowning those who can't or won't surf….
Around 2005, online purchases will reach 10-15 percent of total sales in
most categories, wiping out the profit of most retailers. By 2010,
online shopping will grab 31 percent of retail sales - 43 percent if you
exclude the automobile and education categories. All but the most savvy
will get killed. Most strip malls and many shopping malls,
along with half the department stores, supermarkets, retail chains, banks,
and local shops, will vanish without track ad click-and-buy e-tailing takes
over. Who needs thousands of banks, bookstores, supermarkets, hard
ware stores, drug stores - or any other kind of store - if you can buy
everything from a few Web Sites? ... By 2010 a majority of Americans will
live what Bill Gates calls a "Web Lifestyle" and will do at least some
e-shopping. Most of them will do most of their shopping online.
Already, people are buying everything from luxury automobiles to the drug
Zantacs over the Web, and in the near future the question will be, "What
isn't selling online?" For 2010, sights such as Amazon.com
and EBay will have served as living laboratories of the future. In
2010, the end user's list of bookmarked favorites will determine the winner
verses loser and, it will be a simple as that. From 2001 - 2010, expect
a major shakeout in retail. The debate on who will win - pure bricks,
pure clicks, or bricks and clicks - will be a matter of vying for consumer
attention. “
And that's the story.
The Future of the New Economy. Red Herring, July 2000. Author: Peter Schwartz, chair, Global Business Network.
The author asks profound questions about what is it that really drives
an economy? With the recent and tremendous "explosion" of companies and
new industries, the future - boom or bust - new economy or old economy
- it is literally, "up for grabs". It comes down to something very
fundamental - our beliefs. Three typologies of popular economic theory
have emerged in support of the scenarios: the new economy theorists acknowledge
the potential growth of a more quickly moving and rather accelerating economy
with more reliance on brains than brawn; the network effect theorists acknowledge
the "new, new thing", but for some businesses and industries, growth will
occur in spurts; for others, success becomes a stair-stepping process,
primarily because markets become so efficient, that anyone with a good
strategy can compete; the third set of theories questions the "hype" of
the new economy, with tensions running deep on a real definition of the
age old question of productivity, newly shrined by the prism of IT. Based
on these theories, the author presents three scenarios and completes the
article with investment strategy implications. Scenario
1) New Economy Scenario: “First is the new economy scenario. It's a
world of mostly winners. Incumbents fall, and there are many new kinds
of players in the world economy. This is a world where education is at
a premium, and knowledge workers have the higher value-creation potential.
It's a world of a dispersed global workforce, with an increasing proliferation
of skills. And it's a world where all the value-creating units are linked
together in virtual value chain. It's a world of global electronic markets
that create trade in goods, services, jobs, education, and finance. It's
a world where liquidity is inevitably global, as is investment. And it's
a world that relies intensively on the information technology infrastructure
expanding and accelerating. It's a world where skills and knowledge matter.
Where intellectual property rights are critical. Where information and
data stores have intrinsic value. And where we use networks for interchange
and transaction of values. It is a world where rewards are more often measured
in equity than cash, and that equity in turn is based on intellectual capital
more than physical capital.” Scenario 2) Incremental Scenario:
“The second scenario is an incremental scenario. It's a world of a much
more modest transformation. We eventually get to the new economy, but much
more slowly. Here, the incumbents recover and mostly win. There are many
winners and many losers. It's a world that resembles today for quite a
long time.” Scenario 3) An Illusion: “The third scenario is
a world where the new economy is principally an illusion. It's a world
that leads inevitably to two tiers, where there are few very well off,
and many that have fallen far behind, unable to compete in the IT-driven
economy.
It's a world where there are some of the old winners, and very few
of the new. Most of the new players crash and burn along the way. And tomorrow
resembles today in most important respects.”
Scenario 4) The Crash: “The fourth scenario is the crash. Like
Icarus: we fly too high, and crash and burn, or burn and crash. This is
a world where almost everyone is a loser. It's a world where the leverage
finally crashes the stock market, and brings down the average consumer.
Most of the technology turns out to be hype, and it really isn't nearly
as productive as we all imagined.”
Scenario learning: A powerful tool for the 21st Century planner. Journal of Financial Planning Denver Apr 2000. Authors: Jeff Ellis, Steve Feinstein, and Dennis Sterns.
Scenario learning is a technique - like scenario planning - that predicts possible outcomes. Increasingly, it is being utilized by financial planners helping clients understand their personal financial futures within the context of the macro environment. The real strength in the technique is the bonding between financial planner & client and the learning that comes from the exercise. This article explains two different approaches to scenario learning and demonstrates ways to develop these possible futures for financial planning. Based on the following assumptions about the US economy, the following three scenarios were developed by the authors in a series of workshops. The assumptions were: technology stocks revive in first decade of the 21st Century; index funds outperform most passive managers; Internet won't impact high-touch financial planning; and baby boomer trend brings prosperity. Scenario 1) Boom Times: " The baby boomer wealth effect (championed by Harry Dent and others) will create tremendous prosperity for the next ten years, followed by a period of lower equity growth as boomers pull money out of stocks, instead of putting it in. Technology stocks continue to flourish, with portfolios of 50-70 percent high-tech allocations becoming common. The wealth effect continues to balloon vacation properties and all sorts of upscale consumer goods. Spending stays high through traditional retailers and Internet shopping malls. The client embraces the good times, spends lavishly and saves less as investment returns seemingly make saving unimportant. The good times help pay down the national debt substantially, causing a high demand for bonds and a resulting decline in interest rates. Just as boomers start retiring, they are forced to stay with a high percentage of stocks, liquidating a bit each month for cash flow, rather than rotating to low-paying bonds. " Scenario 2) Margin Bust: ”This scenario assumes "that the Internet severely compresses profit margins for many goods and services, which has already happened in a number of sectors. As margins become squeezed in 2003-2005, corporate earnings for many companies flatten out, causing further erosion in price/earnings ratios. Technology stocks still have momentum, but profit "accidents" become much more frequent as certain core non-technology businesses cut information technology spending to prop up anemic cash flow. As the stock market sputters to a stop in this scenario, the wealth effect shifts into reverse. Baby boomers begin to panic, with their retirement in sight, and double-digit returns no longer are the norm. Reduction in spending compounds the margin problems, creating a downward cascade effect. We will call this scenario the "Margin Bust." Scenario 3) Return to Sanity: ”This combines the other two scenarios with entirely different possibilities. In this third scenario, "speculative excess is rung out of the economy in a recession that lasts for almost a year. It doesn't cause a meltdown but actually refocuses on sound financial planning principles of diversification, saving and more modest expectations. The baby boomer megatrend pulls the economy along but not until many of the dotcom frenzy dies off and marginal businesses are forced to merge or go out of business." The authors agree that while this third scenario is not as extreme as SC1 or SC2, it is useful. It is similar to the modeling of wild fluctuations common to financial planning -over two to three year time segments such as Monte Carlo simulations, which is critical to viewing this future realistically.”
B2B or not B2B? Scenarios for the future of e-commerce. European Business Journal London April 15, 2001. Vol 13 Issue 1. Author: David Targett
The objective of this article is to review the past fifty year history of information technology and its development, picking up lessons on the way. The premise is the increasing recognition that scenarios are useful in an industry that is nearly impossible to forecast - IT. After defining e-commerce, including B2B, B2C, G2C, G2B, and G2G, and reviewing the history, and muliplex-odium of recent published forecasts, the author brings the reader to a set of three scenarios on e-commerce & e-business. He reminds the reader to remember that e-commerce is simply this: buying, selling, and marketing on the Internet. And, e-business is simply this: the same thing embedded into business processes. Scenario 1): Gold Rush: “In this scenario e-commerce growth is at the low end of current expectations. It is characterized by the following features: The Internet is in widespread use for study, personal information and entertainment. This is almost inevitable given present trends. B2B grows but never reaches the highest predicted levels: there are too many cases of deliveries going wrong; too many products prove to be not amenable to this sort of trade. E-marketplaces run into problems over anti-trust and monopoly legislation. B2C is a minority interest: customer confidence is lacking, people use mobile telephones for telephoning and digital TVs for viewing a wider range of channels but not for accessing the Internet. G2C is a minority activity: the government does not get its act together, too few people have access or are interested in using the service. This scenario carries a number of implications. Children will have to be able to use the Internet to avoid being disadvantaged in their studies; businesses should identify whether they are in the 20% or so who must trade on the Internet if they are to survive. The sure winners will be companies supplying Internet equipment and services. This is the reason for the name: Gold Rush. In the 1840s Gold Rush a lot of money was made but not from gold. It was made from selling picks and shovel, and food and accommodation. Likewise under this scenario the people making money will be the Internet equipment suppliers.” Scenario 2): New Labour: “In this scenario e-commerce is making a significant difference to many, but not all, aspects of business. Personal Internet use is widespread, even more than the previous scenario. B2B grows to the levels indicated by the more optimistic forecasts, 40% or so of total trade. The Internet becomes the normal way of doing business in most industries. B2C grows but is by no means a dominant factor in retailing. Some of the present obstacles to growth are overcome but others are not. G2C grows to levels commensurate with Internet use and B2C; the government gets its act together: people can access government services on the Internet ... if they want to. The factors promoting e-commerce and the obstacles tend to favour B2B. And the lower costs have immediate impact on the bottom line. So, it is quite feasible that B2B will move ahead while B2C lags. The implications for scenario two are mainly for business and the need for them to get up to speed on B2B. They will have to adapt to it or die. The reason for the name New Labour is that it might seem that under this scenario a lot is going on but the expected significant changes to our lives do not materialize. Which is the odd one out - the early nineteenth century factory, the passenger railway or the telephone? All are technologies that made an impact not just on business but on society as a whole. Railways made long distance travel a real possibility for ordinary people. The telephone changed the nature of communication, making it much more personal and direct. However, the odd one out is the early nineteenth century factory. The first mass production technologies changed the whole structure of societies. Previously textiles had been manufactured in literally cottage industries by extended families. New technologies, such as the spinning jenny, were not affordable, especially as larger machines meant increased economies of scale. And the new machinery needed water for the steam power. The cottage industries disappeared and production moved to factories. The machine age and the division of labour came about. Towns grew up around the factories and the nature of society was radically different. The final scenario relates to significant social change.” Scenario 3): Second Industrial Revolution: “The third and final scenario presents the case where there is universal access and use via a range of technologies. Personal Internet use, B2B, B2C and G2C are the way things happen. The result is radical social change. What might this change look like? We might speculate as follows. Internet companies dominate global business. People with the technological and management skills to work in them are the elite of the workforce. They can move around and they owe their loyalties to their own groups and companies rather than to national governments (Angell, 2000). In his book Angell likens the new knowledge workers to the barbarians arriving at the gates of Rome. Nation states diminish in importance. International power structures change. Social divisions increase in magnitude. There is a digital divide. Transport and logistics structures change. Goods are delivered rather than collected. People rarely travel on business: they use enhanced video-conferencing perhaps via mobile phones. Sainsbury's car parks become adventure playgrounds and Heathrow's second runway is planted with flowers. Housing changes, becoming much more self-contained, especially for the 'haves' rather than `have-nots' of society. Under this scenario the implications are vast for both people and businesses. Governments will have to move speedily, perhaps more speedily than they are able, to protect society, economies, the environment and businesses from the many negative impacts of these changes.”
2020 Vision – The Next Quarter Century in Management Consulting. Report of the Association of Management Consulting Firms, Industry Insider. 01/01/98.
Discussions by members of the Association of Management Consulting Firms
(AMCF) and their guests at the association’ s Annual Fall Meeting.
The members felt that the next quarter century will see massive and ever-accelerating
change in management consulting. A first look ahead toward the Year
2020, from Richard Armitage and Ted Gordon, examined the environment for
management consulting created by international relations in the post-Cold-War
world, as well as the globalizing economy and developments in technology.
Richard Armitage believes that historians and statesmen looking back over
recent years have devoted too much attention to trying to discover or define
a “new world order.” The post-Cold-War, no longer bi-polar world, with
an increasingly globalizing economy and new patterns in international relations,
is and will be disorderly. Yet some patterns and trends are emerging. The
fundamental international challenge is to reinvigorate and renew international
relations in terms appropriate to the post-Cold-War era. The biggest international
challenges will be in China, Russia, the Mid-East, and the Kashmir-Pakistan
area.
New demands within the business environment create a range
of possible scenarios for the future. These were presented at the conference
by four consultants: Scenario 1: the role of information technology and
business strategy; Scenario 2: the business of “business intelligence,”
Scenario 3: the causes and effects of privatization; and Scenario 4: possible
crises and risks for management consulting in the near-term future.
Some of the lessons learned by the scenario exercise include - consultants
in the future can supplement the capabilities of in-house staff; deliver
bad news when necessary; apply special skills when needed in the short
term; act as an independent source of information; and anticipate as well
as help to develop strategies for anticipating and managing risk, as well
as coping with ongoing change.
Industrial R & D in 2008. Charles F. Larson, Research Technology Management, 11/01/98.
Changes in industrial R&D will accelerate over the next 10 years.
Scenario planning indicates that there are several drivers of change, the
most prominent of which are information technology and globalization. People
in the industrial R&D laboratory of 2008 will be more risk-taking and
business-oriented, with skills that are constantly being upgraded. Technical
intelligence will be fully integrated throughout the firm and far more
comprehensive than today. Technical work will be more efficient and effective,
utilizing a wide variety of outside resources. Flexible organizational
structures and true enterprise integration will capitalize on a new era
of creativity for growth and competitiveness. Leadership and skillful management
will be critical elements of these evolving processes. Five scenarios
were developed for potential changes in R&D management, technology,
and innovation due to evolving "forcing functions" or drivers over the
next 10 years, which included information technology, globalization of
technology, growing diversity of the work force, integration of technology
planning and business strategy, partnerships and alliances, and customer
power. The scenarios were characterized as follows: Scenario 1. Cyclical
Change: This scenario assumed that the current paradigm in R&D - to
carefully control costs and to do more with less-is a cyclical change that
has occurred before. Thus, while the environment for R&D will continue
to evolve over time, there was no fundamental, long-term change taking
place. It also assumed that different industries were in different phases
of the cycle. Therefore, it was recommended that business sectors that
lead the cycles be identified as early indicators, that techniques for
adapting to change in these sectors be described, and that these techniques
be disseminated for the benefit of trailing business sectors. Scenario
2. Globalized R & D: The prediction in this scenario was that as companies
continue to become more global, the R&D function will gradually spread
throughout the world. Of course, globalized R&D is already a reality
in many companies, such as Procter & Gamble and 3M. The thought was
that teams will function through electronic networks and that management
of the R&D function could be directed from remote locations. It was
concluded that many companies had already globally integrated their R&D
efforts more than other business functions. In a recent survey of 308 CEOs,
the Foundation for the Baldrige National Quality Award found that "globalization"
was judged to be the most important trend currently affecting U.S. companies.
Scenario 3. R & D Through Partnerships: In this scenario, it was assumed
that technology will become increasingly complex and more expensive to
develop. Therefore, many companies will choose to maintain their key competencies
only in selected core technologies and obtain additional capabilities through
partnerships and alliances with other companies, government laboratories,
universities, and contract R&D organizations. Moreover, various R&D
support services will be integrated with other corporate or business-unit
functions, resulting in some R&D leaders managing virtual laboratories.
An example of this trend is the contracting to outside vendors of information-technology
and human-resource-development functions. Scenario 4. Innovation Function
Absorbs R&D: This scenario envisioned that the future focus of most
firms will continue to be on revenue growth through creation of new products,
processes, or services, and through the development of new markets. In
response to this intensified emphasis on innovation, the R&D function
will merge with marketing, and R&D leaders will become business managers
as well. Many companies have already initiated efforts to address new customer
expectations through improved integration of marketing and R&D, as
well as through direct interaction of R&D with a company's external
customers, i.e., "4th generation R&D". Scenario 5. Networking
Counts: In this scenario, it was assumed that networking with peers through
organizations such as IRI will become more important.
Changing conditions in the R&D environment will be accommodated
so long as opportunities exist for sharing best practices through a growing
variety of electronic techniques as well as in traditional, face-to-face
gatherings on specific topics. All R&D managers are becoming "information
managers," and all companies are now "information machines," regardless
of what products they sell. Most Likely Scenario: The author believes that
the most likely scenario is a composite of the scenarios outlined above
in what he outlines as the “Laboratory of 2008.” See original article
for more details.
American Consumers in 2025: Three Scenarios (Part 1). Gray Knight, Journal of Advertising Research, Nov/Dec 99, Vol 39 Issue 6, p 71, 8p, 3 charts.
Scenario planning is a way to help think about and plan for the future
in spite of the inadequacy of the normal research tools. Scenarios are
not predictions about the future. They are simply stories about an
imaginary future world. They allow us to set out a range of possible futures,
which then can be used to develop and evaluate strategies. Most importantly,
scenarios help to identify at least some of the driving forces that are
likely to shape the future. Scenario 1. Li Ping’s Story – Orlando, Florida,
February, 2025. “Li Ping waits at the loading dock as the boxes of
groceries coming off the end of the conveyor belt are placed into his truck
by his coworkers. It is early in his shift, the sun just setting, and this
is the first of three times that he would be here today at the warehouse
in Orlando.
Ping works for WalMartExpress, the largest retail bundler in
the United States. WalMartExpress had formed from the merger of Walmart
and Federal Express two decades ago. With the growth of on-line ordering
of lower-priced consumer products, marketplace advantage went to the company
that could deliver goods to consumers' homes most efficiently. By combining
orders into large bundles of goods, shipping costs could be spread over
more items, offering savings to the consumer and providing a cost advantage
to the most efficient bundler.
In fact, shipping charges are no longer listed as a separate
item on the consumer's bill. What the consumer shops for is the minimum
total delivered price for the bundle of goods purchased, including the
shipping charge. On-line agents have long since made finding the minimum
price for a bundle of hundreds of goods fast and easy.
Consumers do not need to invest time in making price comparisons.
Agents simply do that for them. Perfect price information drove out price
differences across bundlers and meant the end of coupons and discounts
for individual products. The price of the bundle is all that matters and
WalMartExpress's software provides that answer instantly.
A few decades ago, when commercial use of the net was new, the
common wisdom was that companies who controlled the on-line ordering process
would dominate every consumer market. This turned out to be true where
the product itself could be delivered over the net, as with music and movies.
When the supply chain required the delivery of a physical product into
consumers' hands, however, the winning business model was based on efficient
logistics, not on software.
The speed of the Internet was critical to giving the advantage
to the bundlers. After a slow first decade or two, the Internet had finally
gotten fast enough to be truly useful. There were no real tricks to on-line
ordering software or developing on-line agents that were not understood
in the 1980s, so there was no lasting proprietary advantage in the electronic
ordering and management of the customer relationship. If a company didn't
have a system, it could buy one, or buy a company that did.
Once the net became fast enough, some of the early mover advantages
went away. The cost advantage of efficient delivery systems overwhelmed
established on-line equities and partly offset the advantage of well-populated
consumer databases. Speed in the movement of information in and out of
homes and processing speed made all the ordering systems equal.”
See original article for more of the scenario.
American Consumers in 2025: Three Scenarios (Part 2). Gray Knight, Journal of Advertising Research, Nov/Dec 99, Vol 39 Issue 6, p 71, 8p, 3 charts.
A continuation of the article above. Outlines three scenarios of American
consumers in 2025. Scenario 2: One Scenario of U.S. Social Change
to 2025 (for scenario 1: Li Ping’s Story – Orlando, Florida, February 2025,
see summary above). “In hindsight the future is always obvious,
and it's true that the signs were all around us back at the turn of the
century, if only we'd paid attention. But a quarter century ago, almost
nobody was writing about how "time-shifting" and "age-bending" would rewrite
the "rules" of the life cycle--or of American society as a whole, for that
matter.
Sociologists and marketers had spotted the phenomenon of kids
"getting older younger"--girls giving up their Barbie dolls at earlier
ages and many kids being more technologically savvy than their parents
and teachers. And everyone knew the aging Baby Boomers were doing their
damnedest to stay younger longer. By the turn of the century, the age at
which women were having babies was being stretched so far in both directions
that it wasn't unusual to see a 15-year-old mother proudly carrying her
first newborn, followed closely by a 45-year-old woman in the same situation.
In evolutionary terms, the image was no less than stunning, but hardly
anyone would have noticed it. After all, in 1999, the Rolling Stones and
Bruce Springsteen were still fighting it out at the top of the charts as
50-year-old Boomers and their kids both snapped up their albums.
Even so, very few people realized that these clear signs of
"time shifting" and "age bending" were merely a prelude of things to come.
Of course, the Baby Boom generation played a pivotal role in this story.
Shortly after they burst on the scene after World War II, the Boomers pioneered
dramatic changes in each stage of life as they passed through it--from
practically "creating" the concept of the modem teenager to trailblazing
the challenging path of the two-career family to soundly rejecting the
biological limits of menopause--with a little help from modern biotechnology.
After all this, it was common wisdom that the Boomers would
redefine what it meant to grow old. Little did we know, however, that they
had their greatest trick of all saved up for last. In close conspiracy
with their offspring--the upbeat millennial generation--the Boomers not
only redefined the later stages of life; they recreated the very idea of
the life cycle itself.
Here's how it happened. The foundation was laid by the most
primal of forces: the increasing ability of people to exert ever-greater
control over the processes of birth and death. Today, the average life
expectancy of Americans is pushing 90 years for women and 85 for men--hardly
the stuff of science fiction, perhaps, but a stunning gain of more than
a decade of life in just a quarter-century. One in five people make it
to their 100th birthday party today--and that number is rising.
But technology changes fast, while people change slowly. These
changes took a long time to wind their way through the collective psyche.
We would never approach our lives in the same way again.” See original
article for more on this scenario.
American Consumers in 2025: Three Scenarios (Part 3). Gray Knight, Journal of Advertising Research, Nov/Dec 99, Vol 39 Issue 6, p 71, 8p, 3 charts.
A continuation of the article above. Outlines three scenarios of American
consumers in 2025. Scenario 3: Susan Cohen, 1990s Child – Detroit,
Michigan, March 2025. (For Scenario 1. Li Ping’s Story – Orlando,
Florida, February 2025, see summary above; for Scenario 2: American Consumers
in 2025, see summary above). Susan Cohen stared at her monitor
screen as though it might suddenly jump up and make a suggestion on its
own. "Let's see," she said, "how can I get 34 hours into a 24-hour day?"
"That is illogical, Susan. You are suggesting a task that is
by the parameters of its definition impossible. If you insist on pursuing
such activities, I'm afraid I can't possibly be expected to help you,"
the voice-activated screen said. "Sorry, sorry," Susan said. She
had been born in 1991 and was 25 before full human-computer verbal interface
had become common. It still struck her as strange that she could actually
engage in conversations with a screen instead of just talking to it. But
it turned out Ray Kurzweil was right back in 1999 when he predicted that
a $1,000 computer would be essentially as smart as a human by 2019. (Actually
the breakthrough had come in 2017 but most people forgave Kurzweil a few
months here or there.)
Of course, her daughter found it strange that her mother found
the whole process of human/machine interface strange at all. Born after
"The Kurzweil Effect" became a reality, young Susan increasingly found
it difficult to relate to her mother and grandmother. Intergenerational
strain was the least of Susan's problems. As a single woman with MGDs (or
multiple generational dependents) Susan found it difficult to keep up with
the basics of life. Her mother constantly told stories of the joy
of going to the grocery store and actually playing hide and seek with that
night's dinner, but Susan, who remembered her mother chasing from store
to store and cursing every minute she stood in line, viewed such talk as
evidence of either early onset of Alzheimer's/Dementia or just another
attempt to justify her increasing reluctance to fully participate in life.
For Susan, shopping was both easier and more difficult than
it was in her childhood. The basics of life were essentially all taken
care of. Thanks to embedded technology in her kitchen, laundry area, and
pantry those products that weren't on CHR (continuous household replenishment)
essentially ordered themselves whenever they ran low. CHR products, including
paper goods, personal toiletries, and pet food, arrived like clockwork
two or three days before they were needed. Even the accounting for the
transaction was handled in a transparent way. Every payday a certain percentage
of Susan's check was forwarded to Cybergrocer. Orders were then debited
from the account, and if Susan, Jr., managed to break the encryption codes
(which she did on a frequent basis to order more ice cream), Cybergrocer
extended a limited amount of credit.” For more on this scenario, see original
article.
Artifact
Projections from 2005. Kevin Kelly, Philips Website.
www.philips.com/design/vof/.
In the past, Philips Company has had some global successes in innovation
(CDs) and some terrific flops (CD-i). If the company learned anything,
it was that “social trends and cultural preferences are as important to
inventions as technological advances.” The company assembled
a team of sociologists, graphic designers, cultural anthropologists, engineers,
filmmakers, ergonomists, and futurists to develop an abstract framework
of cultural and technological trends. The team probed such intangibles
as our shifting sense of time, multiple identities on the Web, nature awareness,
and browsing patterns. From this profile, together with a sense of technical
options, Philips came up with more than 300 scenarios, or short stories,
about future products and services. From those 300, Philips compressed
the possibilities to 60 clearly defined but interlocking concepts, which
it crafted into a set of actual models.
The company took these models, immersed them in real environments,
and made a video "commercial" about each, including how the proto-gizmos
interacted with each other. For more on the actual scenarios and
this project see www.philips.com/design /vof/.
The Future Paradigm for Socio-Economics: Three Visions. Richard Hattwick, Journal of Socio-Economics, 1999, Vol. 28 Issue 4, p 511, 22p, 2 charts.
Presents visions of three different paradigms that might define the
socio-economics of the future. This was the result of a three-day conference
held by The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In this paper, the three paradigms for Socio-Economics (SE)
are envisioned as being nested rather than adjacent or overlapping.
Vision 1: "Psychological Socio-Economics" (PSE): “In this vision SE retains
most of what is currently found in mainstream academic economics but replaces
the assumption of economic man with the richer concept of psychological
economic man. The full body of academic psychology is made a part of the
field of study. However, this version ignores significant portions of the
knowledge base found in transpersonal psychology and clinical psychology,
just as academic departments of psychology tend to pay less attention to
them. An excellent recent survey of the potential content of this vision
is found in Hugh Schwartz' recent book Rationality Gone Awry? (Schwartz,
1998). Peter Earl's earlier survey also spotlights much of the content
that would fit here (Earl, 1988).” Vision 2: "Sociological Socio-Economics."
“This case incorporates all of the first vision, but adds a strong emphasis
on issues of equity, justice and community as well as a focus on social
institutions and their impact on the economy. This vision brings a large
amount of the discipline of sociology into the paradigm. It is tempting
to suggest that the likely future content of this vision is summarized
by Amitai Etzioni's The Moral Dimension (1988), his The New Golden Rule
(1996), and his Essays in Socio-Economics (1999). However, Etzioni's writings
do pick up some of the important additional features introduced by the
third vision, so his work cannot be fully captured by Vision 2.”
Vision 3: "Humanistic Socio-Economics" (HSE) or "Humanistic and Holistic
Socio-Economics." “In this vision a large number of the issues dealt
with in the humanities and in biology are incorporated into the paradigm.
History and even spiritual matters also become legitimate topics of Socio-Economics
analysis. History is important because it is needed for the study of evolution
and dissolution. The spiritual-self help literature is useful because it
helps us understand the images or mental models underlying human behavior
in various historical contexts. Books that come reasonably close to illustrating
this approach are Robert Solo's Economic Organizations and Social Systems
(Solo, 1967) and Manuel Castells' three volume work entitled The Information
Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998).” See article
for background, methodology, modeling.
The Roaring Zeros – Wealth in 2020. Kelly Kevin, Fortune, Sept. 1999.
The good news is, you'll be a millionaire soon. The bad news is, so
will everybody else. No bubble, no crash; instead, a decade or more
of continued good times. What if the Dow doesn't fall to 3,000, but
zooms to 30,000 in four years? Scenarios are all about “what ifs”.
What if we are just at the beginning of the beginning of a long wave of
ultraprosperity? Picture 20 more years of full employment, continued stock-market
highs, and improving living standards. Two more decades of inventions as
disruptive as cell phones, mammal cloning, and the Web. Wealth
in 2010: “The market fluctuates daily, but by 2010, the Dow will
soar past the 50,000 mark. In 2020 the economy, for the first time,
reflects four forces at once: demographic peak - the largest, best-educated,
most prosperous generation that has ever lived is entering its peak years
of productivity, earning, and spending; technology rush - the largest deployment
of novel products and services, labor-saving machines, and life-changing
techniques; financial revolution - money itself is undergoing a revolution.
The velocity of money - how often it changes hands – continues to increase;
global openness - the spread of democracy, open markets, freedom of speech,
and consumer choice around the globe accelerates.” Fast Forward to
2020: The Dow at 100,000: “After two decades of ultraprosperity,
the average American household's income is $150,000, but milk still costs
only about $2.50 a gallon. Web-enabled TVs are free if you commit to watching
them, but camping permits for Yellowstone cost $1,000. Almost everyone
working has signed up for a job that does not exist (at the moment); most
workers have more than one business card, more than one source of income.
Hard-hat workers are paid as much as Web designers, and plumbers charge
more for house calls than doctors. For the educated, the income gap narrows.
Indeed, labor is in such short supply that corporations "hire" high school
grads, and then pay for their four-year college education before they begin
work. What the rich have in the year 2000, the rest have in 2020: personal
chefs, stay-at-home moms, six-month sabbaticals. The personal private foundation
has become the status symbol of wealth. People magazine features its annual
list of the world's most charitable donors. Although tax rates have lowered,
the amount of money flowing into state and federal budgets is awesome.
Social Security has ample funds, and hundreds of thousands of schools,
hospitals, and libraries have newly opened. Ambitious, large-scale public
works are all the rage; there's a scandal over whose corporate logos appear
on the space suits of the first manned mission to Mars. The majority of
Americans are heavily invested in the stock market, so market quotes are
as ubiquitous as pop music. The abundance of cheap appliances and gadgets
has devalued possessions. The most affluent consumers boast of having less
of this or that, but in the end they spend a larger percentage of their
income on services and products that attempt to define their identity.
In the age of ultraprosperity, it's easy to make a dollar, but hard to
make a difference.
Indeed, money gets dull quickly, and that becomes the greatest
challenge in the age of ultraprosperity - to make money mean something,
or to find meaning outside of money. If we handle prosperity properly,
it should focus our attention on the other ingredients of wealth: friendships,
relationships, values, character, charity, justice, and thinking about
the long-term future. What better use of prosperity than to prepare the
wealth of seven generations hence? Whether in fact we'll be responsible
with our prosperity in 20 years is too hard to predict. But here, in some
detail, are a variety of consequences that seem possible, should this ultraprosperity
happen.” See article for full scenario.
The Global Corporation Becomes the Leaderless Corporation. Byrne John A, Business Week, 08/23/99. Issue 3644, p88, 3p, 1c. Section: 21 Ideas for the 21st Century
The trailblazing corporate superstar will become a thing of the past. And follow-the-leader is a game companies will no longer play. The path to success will be paved by teams made up of the best and the brightest, with their egos checked at the door. Success will belong to companies that are leaderless--or, to be more precise, companies whose leadership is so widely shared that they resemble beehives, ant colonies, or schools of fish. The Leaderless Corporation: “Companies increasingly adopt work groups with no designated leader. The trend intensifies - future generations of people getting to the top with more team experience--and being more willing to use it once they get there.' More and more, CEOs like Cisco empower those directly under the top with greater autonomy, because the CEO can't possibly keep up with every detail of the work. In the 21st century, the all-powerful CEO may not be powerful at all. Companies that thrive will be ``led'' by people who understand that in business, as in nature, no one person can ever really be in control.”
Future Marketplace: Consumer Heaven? Jennings Lane, Futurist Nov/Dec 97, Vol. 31 Issue 6, p9, 3p.