 Well, good afternoon to you. It's Johannesburg, South Africa today, and we've got a group of futurists here today talking about a variety of issues. Just for a quick look around, I'm Jack Beining, editor of Mind Bullets, and part of the Future World Network. Gary Leonhardt, I'm Switzerland, the Futures Agency and Futurist. And then Tom Musgrove, joint CEO of Future Worlds Africa, and a partner of Future World International. And I'm Neil Jacobson. I'm the other joint CEO of Future World and a partner in the international business. And what we wanted to touch on now, we've got lots of different themes between our different organizations, looking at different aspects of how the future is changing. There's one particular one that seems to be very successful at the moment. We've called it naked leadership. And, you know, we kind of thought Doug and I offered this theme some months ago. We thought there's a naked chef and there's a naked scientist, and we were sitting one day and we came across the concept of naked government and it came of all places out of China. Because we came across information about a small rural community that had stopped corruption in the municipality by publishing on the internet all the expenditure that was happening. And when the spotlight of disclosure shone on what was happening, the public officials could no longer steal the money. And we thought if this could happen in China, which is hardly a free society, then there really is something fundamental happening around the world. And that's where the concept of naked leadership started to emerge. They're not growing straws for evaluating the title. And of course the key to this whole idea of transparency is the connectivity revolution. The fact that now everyone is connected or virtually everyone is connected. And so there is no place to hide anymore. And there's so many themes that flow out of it. I mean, we've talked about trust before. In a connected world, trust moves to a different place. Trust is not what you hide behind the office doors. Trust is now completely open. Trust is how you did in the marketplace. The marketplace expects to see every aspect of your business. And you as a leader are truly standing naked before the entire marketplace now. It seems to be a shift, Neil, from the world that you come from. You often are judged by what you tell the world. And now it's by what the world tells about you. Exactly. And that shift has taken place. And it's also for CEOs and business people and brand managers and people like that. It's also about engaging with the communities. No good just sending messages out one to many. Now you've got to listen to the crowd as well as involve the crowd in your business. Because that's where the future success lies. We often say it's no longer about marketing to your audience. It's about getting down into the stream of information and marketing with your audience. You have to bother that flow. The hard part there is this issue of controlling the message or controlling the brand. Which is of course an illusion anyway. But this is the illusion that we operate on. So for example in advertising I talk about earned media, bought media and owned media. So when you own your website that you put whatever you want. And then you can buy Google Headwords or you can buy newspaper ads, whatever. You can do all these things. But the earned media, what people say about you, you can't control. And this is the hard part I think about this idea of being naked as a company. Is that you don't, you have to trust the user, the consumer or the partner to say stuff about you. And what we're learning from the marketplace is that the market trusts that information much more than they do the official information. I always say it to companies that understand that the opinion of somebody you've never met on a trip advisor or whoever else it may be actually carries more weight than a $10 million advertising campaign. Because people want to hear what other people are going to say. Rather than what you as the company are saying to them. What's interesting to me is what we've been teaching about leadership. If you think of what's taught around leadership in business schools, even today, leading Ivy Leagues of the world, this is a completely different notion to what will qualify a great leader in the world of tomorrow. Because this is not about imposing a will or imposing a product or a message. It's really about the marketplace sharing a message and propagating that message. So it's you being prepared to make yourself vulnerable and expose yourself. I mean trusting the unpredictability of the outcome and hoping that it's a good one. One that you have not much control over. I think, you know, Kevin Roberts, who's such as such as said that nowadays a great leader is not just a director but also a connector. Absolutely. And this is, I think it's hard to be both, actually. Some people have accomplished, Steve Jobs was obviously more for the director. High leader, whatever. So that's different, but that was still successful. But to be a connector is a different skill. And also I think that is a very large decolony between the fact that you want to be maybe personally private, but as a business person you are actually naked. Absolutely. And this idea of control being an illusion. It's an absolute illusion and not only externally to companies but also within companies. Having a top-down approach, this is the mission and vision and the CEO knows best is actually nonsense in the new world and increasingly say in the future where some of the best ideas might come from way down in the organisation and if they've given a chance to be explored and even some ideas from customers or suppliers given an idea to flourish, an opportunity to flourish can actually be a completely unprecedented success. A liberating idea. But you know you so right that business schools traditionally have taught a different kind of leadership. Very often when we talk about the concept of the end of control you can actually see the anxiety in the room of business executives saying hang on, I'm supposed to be in control. And it's making them understand that you can still be, you still have to control the vision but you have to lead it rather than force it. You can't force it onto the marketplace anymore. The way I try to put it very often is that you have to lead from the centre or rather you have to lead from the front by being in the centre. Now the old days the chief executive was out there untouchable. Now you have to be connected in 360 degrees in the centre of your organisation and actually lead from the centre. Neil, I was told that my first appointment as a CEO, a mentor came to me and said Anton you'll have to realise that from now on you will be very lonely. And in fact if you think about it that's totally counter to what you're suggesting is that when you're in the middle of an employee base and a client and customer base you're actually never lonely but you'll never be more exposed. So you're quite vulnerable. But it's what Doug said. The old style of leadership is you assume that because you're the leader you must now make all the decisions and you must have all the wisdom. And the old style of leader says there's wisdom all around me and my ego doesn't supersede what needs to be done. Right, again it's not that although there are threats involved it's also opportunities because you can use that whole wisdom of the crowd the power of the crowd to elevate your business. It's not necessarily purely a negative. That ego thing is interesting because it's such a powerful issue in business and the modern Buddhists talk about it very beautifully. They say it consists simply of three words you and me and the world we come from the you and the me word have been dominant and the world we're shifting towards is a world where the and word is actually much more dominant and it's all about those connections and the engagement and so forth. That ego arises from the and not from the you and me. That's absolutely right. I think one of the... this image I think Don Tapscock talks about when you have to be more naked as a company then you have to look good when you come out of the water. And this is a consequence of the fact that we are more naked we have to actually look better. Take some care of us. I always say that it's basically perpetual WikiLeaks for every company. Whatever you are trying to hide, especially banks for example banks, insurance companies, governments, politicians whatever you are trying to hide is going to come out so you have to take care of of being transparent in the first place for example many airlines hotel companies are trying to hide flaws it's better to actually talk about the flaws when they come out and take them in. This is a very common problem in TripAdvisor. This whole debate about you know you can't be perfect all the time and you can apologise like Zappos is a great example of the same company how they have incorporated Amazon in general. It's a great example of how they have incorporated that being naked as a company and giving delight to their customers. What they've done good is made that an attribute of their brand and their relationship with the marketplace as opposed to something which they pass over to the legal department or the risk department. This is a real central strategic advantage as opposed to some damage control. One of the trends agencies talks about what they call flawsome marketing as opposed to awesome marketing and it's the idea that if you prepare to admit that there are flaws in what you're doing as a company suddenly you have a human face and people are much more inclined to warm to you because they see the company as being human rather than this cold removed aloof edifice. So flawsome marketing is one of the concepts of the future. I like that. And these are some of the lessons that the banks and the oil companies have to learn in the future. Very expensive so if you take the oil industry. I mean what the cost was of remedying the leak in the Gulf. If Ford happened was you know 100 million dollars or something like that but the cost consequence upon not preparing it in advance was brilliant. It's a small spill with a very big ocean. Where can people find out more about this concept? You can go to futureworld.org and there you'll see a tab marked themes and all those themes are listed over there and the details of what it's all about. Some reason the themes and also who's able to deliver these themes either as a workshop or as a keynote presentation. And there are also plenty of mine bullets that touch on the NACA leadership theme which you can also read on futureworld.org or minebullets.net I'm glad to say we keep our clothes on when we deliver it. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you. Good. You want to do a little piece on where we can find literature on each other and once we'll just re-record that snippet quickly. Okay, yeah, okay. Let me... We've talked a lot about the thoughts that we have and the kind of concepts that we have. Where does one find literature and material on the future's agency and on your work in particular? Yeah, my work is... I'm on Google GERD on the internet. I'm number two. The first one is the gastrointestinal reflux disease. So I'm the second one. So if you just Google GERD and Future, then you can see all my stuff. I have an app called Futureist that you can download for Android and Apple. I have a new website going on actually this week called FutureistGert.com and I'm on Facebook, G-Leonard, I'm on YouTube. So I mean, if you just look for Gert on the internet and all my books are available for free and there's only one book you mentioned earlier. I wrote a book called The End of Control that is available for free. Just Google GERD GRD and free PDFs. And of course I'm very heavy on Twitter, G-Leon-H-R-D. GERD on Twitter as well. It's interesting you talk about free. I mean, we've also now released a great deal of our material for free. We have the MindBudgets, which every Thursday we publish this newsletter from the future and if you simply search on the internet for MindBudgets, you'll find it equally there free. You can subscribe to them, they're downloaded to your laptop for free. And then all you have to do is look up FutureWorld on the internet and you'll find us on YouTube, you'll find us on Twitter, you'll find us on Google, Facebook and Google Plus. Google Plus is a website, FutureWorld.org where we run something called Future's Forum, which is a running blog. Every day we're posting ideas, thoughts, things that we pick up a very useful resource to go to to have a look at what's happening in the world to keep abreast of some of the changes that we're going to find. You'll never be bored again with all the stuff you can read. And of course there's SlideShare. Any of you guys from SlideShare? I have 200 slideshows you can download and waste a whole tree on printing. Only 200. Yeah, I'm a layover, it's just really lazy. It's everything you want to know about the future but you're too scared to ask. Okay, thanks very much for tuning in.