 Hello, this is Gerard Leonhardt. Welcome to another edition of Meeting of the Minds. Today I have with me from Sydney, Australia, Ross Dawson, futurist, author, strategist and a good friend. Some of the massive trends that are shaping our world. I think one is that just we will be more and more and more connected. Everything, everywhere, in all ways, data being able to flow. Another really critical one is the interfaces between man and machines. The ways in which humans and machines are starting to merge. They are getting the technologies through the thought interfaces, through all of the current ways which we can grow. But on a business level, one of the most important themes is what I call distributed value creation. So instead of organizations being creating value and then being able to sell things and create products and services and send out invoices and so on, we are seeing where value has been created across organizations, across individuals, across boundaries of all time, of all place. And so this is where we are starting to get the mechanisms to be able to say, well, who has created the value and how can that value then be allocated. So this is part of this economy of individuals. The unit of value creation of the economy today is no longer the organization, it is the individual. So these are some of the important trends which I am seeing in the world moving forward. So some of the key trends I see for the next, say, ten years include this one that I think we are going from this idea of companies or countries or people being empires to being networked. So the idea is that it is basically what is happening now is that you can't be successful as a business if you are a monopoly. And until now that was entirely possible. Look at the music companies or countries for that matter. As China is finding out, you can't own everything and still prosper by connecting with others. It's basically becoming an interdependent world, not an independent world. And this is a huge issue for Switzerland here where I live. You have to be interdependent now. And so part of that is, of course, the technology is along the consumerization of IT that everybody has this massive computing power available now. But also then you have trends like the Internet of Things where you are essentially creating connective networks of sensors, of traffic lights, of cars, of smartphones, of thermostats and all these things which creates potential for huge surveillance schemes and fears of that. But it essentially forces us to hyper-collaborate rather than hyper-compete. And I think that basically spells the end of capitalism in the same way that we know it because capitalism is based on me having more and you having less because the pie is limited. So the future is, in my view, is going to be a larger pie, a more lateral development so that basically we can have scenarios where we all gain something but I can't own all of it myself. And so this is part of my forthcoming book from Ego to Ego where I'm talking about how that is forming a new paradigm of capitalism which has been called sustainable capitalism or natural capitalism or whatever you want to call it, but not this idea of profit and growth at all costs. And you can see that everywhere as a paradigm in the car business, the banking business and of course politics. So those are some of the key trends. Most of it is of course influenced by technology which influences how we live and how we actually interact. I think one of the other major trends beyond the technology trends is the social trends and in a way if we distill all of the social trends it is of increased expectations. People expect more, they expect greater opportunity, they expect the excellence in everything around them, they expect to be able to use their sensors and have greater sensory refinement, they expect education, they expect to have media and have access to things at all times, they expect freedom. So in no way are those expectations ever going down, those expectations are always increasing and that is helping to drive the combination of the exponential technologies and the greater expectations together merging to create a world where there will certainly be disappointment of those expectations but also those expectations driving changes in social structure, changes in governments and political parties and also absolutely shifts in how we use technologies and how we can apply them. I think that one of the key trends for the next 10 years will also be the fact that this idea of consumerism, our consumption driving economies and that we all want more and faster and better and we all want to be Americans in the end. This idea is essentially evaporating because what happens when we do this essentially is that we're using up all of the resources that were already used in other places before and creating this giant ballooning thing that can't possibly actually be true for seven or eight or nine billion people, we can't all be home owners. So part of that is going to lead to what I call asset lightness that we're doing stuff like we're renting stuff rather than owning it. We have virtual working relationships. We have telepresence commuting and we can live in spaces that have a lot smaller footprint which reduces ownership essentially. So our economy in 10 years cannot be driven by consumption because consumption eventually either will consume all of it or we're running out of resources to support the consumption. For example, if eight billion people have tablets all the precious materials we need, the actual components of these devices don't even exist. We can't make that many devices. So we're depleting stuff and I think eventually that means that something has to be done to either invent something that sidesteps it but also changes our consumption patterns. For example, shared cars which are different consumption patterns shared armies rather than having armies for each country. You know, you have a global military and things like that. So that is sort of a trend that I see is definitely going to happen in 10 years. So Gerd, of all of these emerging trends, which are the ones that you would really like to see come to pass? Well, I tend to be an optimist in this. So what I would like to see is basically I think there needs to be a system that runs economic affairs and business more like a biosphere. In the sense, for example, like in an ocean you can be a big fish but you don't own the whole ocean. And so what we have for example now with data driven economies or so is that we need to have a public benefit and a private benefit at the same time. So what I would like to see happen is that we create a system that's much more transparent and equal and creates scenarios that basically help everyone and to solve global problems like food or water or terrorism. You need a global approach. So to create basically an understanding of what we want to achieve so that we can solve these large scale problems. In comparison, for example, if you look at what's happening in California or in the States in general, is the idea of inventing some miraculous technology that a company can own that everybody else can buy that solves the problem. For example, I want to build a space elevator to get energy from the solar system or so. But this is all owned by companies and individuals. And I think what we need to see is basically there's collective problems to which we need collective answers. And that is a huge challenge in the system where you get paid by what you make. So my preferred future would be more collective in the sense of collective problems or collective intelligence rather than based on the individual rewards. And how about you? Your preferred futures? Very similar in that I think that there is a this idea of distributed value creation. How do we find ways in which individuals can contribute through their ideas, through their energy, through their insights, and to be able to get rewarded for that. And so we need some more mechanisms, mechanisms or structures where we can say these are the problems, these are the opportunities. Who has the ideas? What are efficient ways to be able to bring these all together to be able to create problems and solutions? So one of the challenges today is that pharmaceutical companies only invest the enormous amounts required for blockbuster drugs, ones which have tens or hundreds of millions of potential users. Those that only have a small potential audience aren't developed. Yet if we can develop ways to be able to bring together the insights of the energy or the research around the world to be able to create that, there's probably ways where people can be very well rewarded for doing that and addressing problems creating better life for all of us. So I think this world where we can have this distributed value creation and insights and ideas coalesce to address problems and to create new opportunities is something which we really need to work hard to create. Yeah, I think that there's this constant battle between open and close and between control and trust that we're seeing and this is basically quite clear that control is very costly if you want to control things and it won't solve a lot of problems. For example, the pharma companies are realizing if they stick with the control mantra and the patent periods and all these things, they'll be way too slow to get to market with stuff that's needed now and they can't cover the rare diseases which are not worth paying attention to. So GlaxoSmithKline already put some stuff into public domain to solve the issues of tropical diseases and stuff. So it's a trade-off between control and trust and open and close is not either or, but as many companies like Google have proven that if you open a certain point it's great because it gets things to move and then you monetize by fencing off a little piece of it like the algorithm, search algorithm. And this is I think an ongoing discussion but my theory is that we're being forced to be networked because everything else will fail the speed that's required. So anything on thoughts on that? Absolutely. The network is we've discovered just in the last 20 years the networks are the fundamentals of so many layers of biology, of the world around us, of society, of ideas and those network structures are the ones that will be able to solve the issues which we have. So this brings us back to this idea of I describe as network leadership as in if we want to coalesce value across a network there are certain characteristics of people and organizations that can do that which amongst other things believe in shared value and demonstrate the behaviors of creating value across a network and this is a very different mentality in ethos that we see in a lot of organizational behavior until today. We're talking with this, the economic theory like the idea Adam Smith kind of invisible hand free markets kind of concept basically means that free markets will take care of it if there's a need for it to exist in the first place but I think we can safely say the free market have completely failed to solve a lot of the large issues like climate change. There's no free market force that's going to change, climate change because people don't make money with those other things, they make money with oil. And so the free market has failed with music, with the digital content economy, with publishing, with oil and energy. To me that basically means this idea of the invisible hand free market fixing it is not going to work here because of speed and exponentiality. So you need a smarter approach to this that is actually suited to the speed of how things are developing in technology because technology is going like this, it's exponential from 4 to 8 to 16 while the human speed of law, for example, laws are crawling along at the bottom. So we have a real disparity, I think this is a real issue for the economic framework. I get paid only by what I make for myself, not for what you make but the reality is you can't distinguish the two. One of the big issues is the degree to which we make this happen across national boundaries. So currently nations is where the value is created and shared. Whenever we see that transcend national boundaries or what is looking beyond what is currently the nation state. Same debate in Europe. Either we're going to have the United States of Europe which I think is inevitable or everybody goes their own merry way and that really doesn't really exist. Either we're all going to come together on these issues and solve them together and that's that. To me that's one of the key trends of realisation is that if we're not networked we're probably going to evaporate because being by yourself basically means you're insular. So Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria in terms of their positioning in the banking and stuff, that's just totally unsustainable because it creates a vacuum. Either we're going to be in the same platform or we're not. You can't only be half pregnant. So this concludes today's episode of Meeting of the Minds. Thanks very much to Ross Dawson for being part of this today. If you want to know more about the show you can go to meetingoftheminds.tv. We're also taking questions and inputs for the next show. Just use the Twitter hashtag meetingoftheminds and we'll be responding and trying to work your comments into our next show. Thanks very much for joining us.