how apropos is it for an orange to be here with all of you at Orange uh and I do really appreciate the uh kind of coolest moniker ever the future Hunters so I feel like the Synergy is already there so I am so happy to be here with all of you today we are going to take a very rapid fire view into where kind of the macro Trends are leading what the future is going to look like but before I delve into all of that here's a little bit more about me Beyond just my very familiar last name so here I am free covid skydiving looking clearly absolutely terrified and somewhat eerily reminiscent of a little baby pterodactyl falling at 14 000 feet 14 000 feet with this New Zealander on my back who looks absolutely fine with the entire situation and everything that is going on and why do I look so terrified well of course because I knew on one end what I was doing was very risky but at the same time I knew that everything was going to be okay why because I knew that I had the Safeguard of a parachute and that I ultimately was going to land on my feet so when we think about the future this in many ways is analogous to that because it feels like the risks are compounding it feels like in many ways we are free-falling into this future into the unknown faster and faster than ever before but I am here to tell you today that no matter how fast and how quickly the future seems to be coming at us we always have the Safeguard of our own parachute and we will always undoubtedly land on our feet and this really underscores the shift that we have to make from just focusing on those headwinds and again it's human nature to focus on what those headwinds are those are all of those external difficulties coming at us faster and faster than ever before and I don't need to go into what all of those challenge challenges are because they're manifold and we know what they are but we have to start flipping our perspective and start getting more comfortable with identifying what those Tailwinds are all of those opportunities that are catapulting us forward and creating more momentum and perhaps the most important message in all of this is really the fact that we have to take ownership of this future because we know that we have the ability with these Tailwinds coming up behind us to create our own path and navigate the direction of it now in many ways this is becoming an even trickier value proposition when I was doing this work the better part of the last couple of decades ago it used to be that when you would confront a new reality or a new challenge the future would be bifurcated into you would kind of get to the fork in the road where you would have the trend and its complementary counter Trend and we know that those are two not opposing forces but two forces that work in tandem and you would have a couple of different directions to go in but now this right here is the reality that we are navigating and it feels in many ways like we are operating on speed and we are half schizophrenic trying to figure out which direction to go in knowing that there is not just going to be one future there are going to be multiple Futures and there is not just going to be one reality within it there are going to be multiple realities so what do I even mean by that if we take the average consumer today they can have one life and one Persona in the real world another life and another Persona in the digital world another life and another Persona in the virtual world and we are seeing the seamless integration of more of these different personas and realities and I have long said the definitions of success in the future will be determined by our ability to know what is effective and appropriate for all of these different realities and environments so this is is what we have to get comfortable navigating and in some cases this is a Minefield but it really underscores the values that are so critical for any company today which is that we have to be flexible we have to be nimble and we have to be more adaptive to this ever-changing environment and it really underscores even one more critical thing which is the difference between vision and strategy now so many companies and so many will bring me in and say help us clearly articulate what our strategies going into the future are and I always say that is never enough because we have to start first with vision Vision prompts strategy why because in this environment we have to clearly articulate who we are what we represent what we want to become and that message has to be clearly articulated from the top trickle down throughout the company and then reverse engineer the strategies to help you achieve that vision and we have to start thinking of our strategies like parallel railroad tracks where it's not just about having one whole set of strategies we have to simultaneously plan for the near the mid and the long-term future and have our one track for the six to 12 month plan the two to three year plan the three to five the five to eight the eight to ten and the ten and Beyond and be able to jump on and off those different tracks and re-engineer them when the strategies do not fit where the future is going and keep those Nimble and flexible and this is such a cautionary tale and the re the retail space is one prime example of this this is the one thing that retailers got wrong for so long because it really is about the introduction of new distribution channels they held on to their individual strategies a lot of brick and mortar retailers that when a new distribution channel was introduced digital or e-commerce they then held on to their strategies and lost sight of their Vision knowing that distribution channels are not subtractive but rather they are multiplicative so the mental math around both our strategies and our vision have to start changing so one of the things when we really think about the future I say what I do comes down to answering two simple yet fundamental questions and the first question is the why and the second question is just so what and we'll get into this so what in a little bit but we have to start with the why because it grounds us in a more contextualized understanding of how we got to where we are in the first place knowing that the one constant today is that exponential rate of change so very quickly let's all rewind back to what happened in around 2005 to 2008 and what happened globally during that time the economic recession right we remember it it was indicative of traditional Ebbs and flows of the global economy we have these microeconomic Cycles many people say that we are entering another one now an inflationary cycle but we paused and we took a step back and we started peeling back the layers of what was actually happening and we could see then that what we were going through was not just a recession but rather what it was indicative of was a fundamental Global transformation and we have been through Transformations like this in the past but the real story that we were being told then and that we still see the threads being pulled into today is the fact that what defined that economy and we call it the meta space economy uh what defined it was a sense of boundarylessness so what do I mean by that if you look at the operating principle or really uh those driving forces behind that transformation and it was all around the blurring of time and space so what does that even mean what that means was that we started seeing the coming together a very disparate ideas and Concepts so we then were seeing the merger between the real and the virtual the tangible and the intangible the analog and the digital in some cases a blurring of that which could be defined as biological and that which could be defined as technological and we're at another inflection point today where we see four other very disparate Concepts coming together and becoming more boundaryless which is the blurring of the definitions between what is real and fake and true and false so this is the reality that we are operating in today and all of this is being catapulted by that exponential rate of technological change right two things are happening to the global economy a lot of these Technologies are becoming more commoditized so they're becoming cheaper and they're becoming more democratized so they are in the hands of more people but the driver here really is one thing and that is time economists Define a luxury as something that is in high demand and short supply and if I were to ask all of you what in your lives is in the highest of demand and shortest of Supply I'm sure many of you would say time because time today really is the new luxury value proposition and it is the new currency and we have to start thinking organizationally of new ways to spend leverage maximize and manipulate time because time is really what is supporting everything here in time is leading to a concept that we call hemplosion now what is templosion this is our term to describe the fact that the biggest of things the biggest of events are happening in shorter and shorter periods of time it's the whole idea that time is being experienced as if it were on steroids and as if it were getting rapidly truncated so we see this playing out in Myriad ways we see that the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company today could be as little as 15 years so we also see that CEO tenure is dropping precipitously alongside of this and one of the reasons for a lot of this is the fact that we see these big unicorn companies those a billion dollar plus valuations these startups seemingly coming out of left field and eating the lunch of the traditional incumbent so it's changing how we do what we do and we also see the rapid truncation of everything from research and development Cycles to strategic planning Cycles to financial planning Cycles so the time frames between everything are getting shorter and shorter but then what we saw in the better part of the last 18 to 24 months was the whole notion of templosion on templosion what kovid did was it acted as an accelerator it took so many of the things that we were seeing come to fruition and shocked them through the cycle where they just went into overdrive so we saw this playing out in several ways as well the first was the rise of distributed hybridized virtual and flexible work that is one of the new normals that is one of the staying and Lasting Trends to come out of the pandemic but this was a drum that I had been banging for so long going back to the early roots of this transformation back in 2008 and so many people would come to me and say you know what we want our people to physically be at an office because productivity is going to take a hit but again we took a step back and it took a global resetting to make us realize that when we can just work on our own terms regardless of time and space productivity in fact did not take a hit we also see across the world migration patterns are starting to shift many people are leaving dense urban urban areas and reevaluating their own sense of purpose what matters to them where they can best get their work done where they want their families to be so we're seeing the growth of new smaller cities and Suburban areas we also see the rapid increase of Automation and artificial intelligence something that was just coming into the frame the better part of the last two decades but that has been accelerating because especially during the pandemic many people were uncomfortable with human to human touch points so they wanted technology to come in and assuage a lot of those concerns and do the work for them and we know that the rise of AI particularly in a workplace setting is just freeing people up to do more meaningful work and allow the AI to do a lot of the drudgery the number crunching and a lot of the data capture that we frankly just do not want to do and we also see the growing importance of design in almost every aspect of innovation we also see that the question a lot of companies would ask themselves which was a very kind of Step lot step wise way to achieving Innovation which was just what can I digitize next it was very linear but now the conversation is starting to shift to that of speed the question is now how quickly can I transform the business so that it's agile resilient and ready for future disruption so let's look at one aspect of templosion that really relates to who the consumer and the worker is of not just tomorrow but really of today so let's really look at how Generations are expressed in this environment so one of the things that really frankly does not make any sense anymore is that market researchers and demographers will still segment the Gen the population into 12 to 15 year age cohorts and when you think about the rate of technological implosion that is happening we are creating these big buckets and these cohorts of people that have vastly different values and attitudes so a more appropriate way to segment them is to redefine Generations into micro generations of two to three years now we talk about a workplace today that is made up of five or six Generations working together at once but we have to start getting comfortable thinking of our workplaces and our consumer base being populated by dozens upon dozens of micro Generations we're working together side by side and also looking at how they differ from a consumer-centric perspective at what as well so as you saw with templation we as a firm like to make up new vocabulary and we do so not because it's fun which it is but also because it really is our understanding that to get the future right you can't just be wedded to existing words so gen Z as we've defined them them uh those born in 1996 or later it doesn't tell us anything about what really matters to them and what makes them tick so we call them hybrids cyber hybrids and we call them cybrids really because this is the first generation ever in human history to truly have a symbiotic relationship with the technology that surrounds them and why they matter they matter because they make up close to 30 percent of the global population around 2 billion people and one of the really defining aspects of this generation is that it goes beyond just a symbiotic relationship with technology we in fact are growing different brains this is the first generation to have different neural wiring than their predecessors now longitudinally we don't know how this is going to play out in many ways this is a generation that's existing in a Petri dish we don't know what those consequences are going to be as they get older but we do know this we do know that old approaches to learning old approaches to capturing attention old approaches to engagement are not going to resonate with this generation it's no wonder that we when we put them into siled and hierarchical organizations they flame out and we think that it is something wrong with them but if their brains are not wired that way we have to get more comfortable reverse engineering the internal processes that we use to actually retain this generation knowing that putting them into systems that were appropriate for an industrialized age economy is like putting a square peg in a round hole so what really defines this generation we know that this is a generation that is highly collaborative very inclusive and highly entrepreneurial and when they get internal to a company they want opportunities to be intrapreneurial they are very purpose value and sustainability driven so they will pay a premium to purchase from companies that actually practice what they preach so Eco messages and sustainability really really matters to them and this is also a generation that is fine being tracked as long as they know how their data is being used and as long as they still retain control over it so what really bubbles to the surface here what matters to them is not just transparency and not just authenticity which are still two very critical things but one bigger thing which is honesty honesty from the brands that they interface with and one of the biggest things will be building trust with this generation once trust is broken they will not come back but figure out ways about how to maintain and really leverage forms of trust and they represent a tremendous amount of buying power in the U.S alone they represent upwards of 144 billion dollars now one aspect of templosion Beyond just what we see from a consumer-centric and socio-cultural perspective are all of the new technologies that are being fast-tracked and this really represents a new area for growth today now I'm sure many of you have been tracking the rise of augmented reality virtual reality their combined applications which are referred to as mixed reality but we now see that those three are combining to really inform what is known out there as XR extended reality and extended reality if you think of it as a Venn diagram it's these three coming together and it is the next iteration of interactive multi-sensory immersive experiences so it's the combination of the real and the virtual coming together and it is also being propelled by human machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearable tech technology and really why this matters is that it is drawing people it is drawing excuse me consumers more fully into the Brand's world that which they are creating in these alternate environments thereby creating greater immersion and greater engagement so it's taking just flat 2D content and making it 3D it is applying facial thinking and spacing spatial content to all aspects of brand and brand messaging so all of this is leading to something I'm sure all of you have uh been focused on a little bit recently because it's hard to escape which is the metaverse right that's one of the new Buzzy things that is being talked about in a lot of tech circles and really what the metaverse is is that this is a future and a lot of people don't think that this will really come to fruition until 2040 at the earliest we are just in the infancy here and again the metaverse in and of itself is not new uh Second Life 15 years ago was an early application of the metaverse and this is going back even to the 80s as Tech circles we're experimenting with virtual reality platforms but what this really represents is a future that allows whether it's co-workers families friends who have you to meet and interact in these shared digital spaces that look and feel authentic and it's making us take a step back to really rethink how we Define what human beings are in these new realities it's forcing us to rethink human connection experience purpose meaning and Community But ultimately what it represents are an entirely new slew of possibilities for companies to create value through the creation of new innovative business models and it's the introduction of new ways to engage with both customers and communities so really when we think about the metaverse and all of the different metaverses that it eventually will spawn there are two very specific areas of focus one you have to think of it as both an ecosystem to participate in but also simultaneously the second prong of this which is an ecosystem to enable so the question to really start considering is this how do you position yourself as co-creators of the metaverse rather than just more passive participants now as a company orange already has entered the metaverse because your Luxembourg unit is opening a virtual Center that will teach digital skills in a metaverse environment and it wants to increase user awareness about good practices but also identify the risks in Virtual Worlds and this is so critical and this in many ways should be presented as such a powerful use case because not enough companies and not enough people are talking about the skills the skills and the competencies that are going to be required to navigate these virtual environments and those skills are going to be very different than those which are needed in the real world for even those which are needed in digital environments but also the identifications of risk and the second and third order consequences of the those risks so this is a very important conversation that more companies need to have internally but we also have to understand because we talk about the metaverse as if it's just one big entity and there is the consumer-centric metaverse where we see a lot of the things in uh social media and gaming and entertainment and Brands and shopping but we also know that the industrial goods sector is actually seeing the biggest shake up from the expansion of the metaverse so we see this being bifurcated where we have the consumer-centric side but we also have a type of metaverse that I would call organizational replication and that really is about the growth of the Enterprise metaverse and this is a different animal because the Enterprise metaverse is a digital copy of the physical economy while the consumer-centric one is all around the creation of avatars the corporate version is largely a collection of objects and this is really being propelled by the rise of digital Twins and what are digital twins these are ritual replicas of physical assets and they are connected these virtual digital twins are connected to their real selves and they collect data so for example a change on the shop floor will trigger the equivalent change in its digital twin so the Hope here is that insights are locked through digital mirror worlds can help companies become more adaptable efficient and resilient so one example uh before I go into this next slide of a digital twin is what BMW is doing and BMW realized that there is such hyper customization of many of their models of cars to the tune that there are 400 different versions of BMWs that you can configure so they ran a digital twin to simulate what it is to have three to four hundred different models of their cars running simultaneously through their manufacturing floor and were able to also help keep employee safety up by determining which Roots around the floor were the safest and be able to determine which routes were more efficient and how to drive uh greater Innovation by just understanding Which models were coming out more quickly we also see this being used on the municipal level uh where Seoul South Korea is looking at how to really maximize infrastructure and transportation through the use of digital twins so there are many many examples here of companies and municipalities starting to really rethink how to use these virtual environments in very different ways but it is also really leading to the creation of entirely new business solutions so it's leading to risk reduction by leveraging predictive modeling through machine learning and artificial intelligence you can actually take on less risk uh it's also leading to Greater decision making supporting Nimble decision making through analytics and driving user experience contextualizing data to really help understand what customers really need to improve the overall experience now what this underscores more than anything and I didn't even get into a lot of what is happening in the web 3 ecosystem which is all that we hear now around cryptocurrencies the blockchain the rise of daos the distributed autonomous organizations and nfts non-fungible tokens and really that open source decentralized ecosystem that a lot of these web3 Technologies are creating but when we think about investing in these spaces and really capitalizing on growth we need to take a step back because leaders are going to need the discipline to figure out which of these ever branching Technologies can get them to one the future that they want to create but you don't want to be too early to Market and you don't want to be last so companies are going to need to have the discipline to avoid investing so heavily in these Technologies merely to participate in the land rush this pending era of companies pursuing what I would call these big Tech fueled wins is what we call Enterprises and really those that can reap The Spoils of this those that really are the ones that are positioned to get it right will leverage the special sauce and I Define the Special Sauce as having a sense of foresight so strategic foresight knowing where things are moving and viewing things as one interlocking Venn diagram knowing that there are Ripple effects through the economy there are Ripple effects happening through Technologies knowing where things are moving not just in the short term but the long term having the right resources how much can you invest in these Technologies how much risk are you going to take on because perhaps the third variable is the most important which is timing how do you get the timing right how are you uh introducing this new technology to Market are you don't want to be first to Market you don't want to be last to Market what is that right time to play in this ever-growing ecosystem so I talked a lot about time I talked a lot about technology and even technology uh even generational growth but I want to take a step back and put a bow around a lot of these things because outside of time as a luxury there are two other very critical luxuries emerging today and I call these the three T's and it is the Confluence of time truth and trust and in many ways trust today is the ultimate luxury we are living in a world where trust in our systems trust in our organizations trust in each other trust in our Technologies is starting to disintegrate we also have this increasingly smart ecosystem populated by a lot of the technologies that I just talked about alongside the rise of cloud cloud computing and data mining and the internet and intranets of things and we are living in this world where we are just being shown all of these different realities and we do not know who or want to trust anymore so what really becomes so important today and moving into the future more and more is knowing that one of the greatest future challenges will be delivering messages that people can trust but what becomes an imperative is that companies are going to be held more highly accountable and to a higher standard so we are seeing the renewed importance despite the rate of technological change of trusted human intermediaries the re-evaluation of human to human relationships because that is not going away and that is becoming even trickier when we introduce the third T into this which is truth truth I go back to what I said about the boundaryless nature of our world today and that we are seeing it coming together of what is real and fake and true and false but I liken this to navigating the world through a Hall of Mirrors we are seeing the rampant rise of MDM myth dis and Mal information and it is getting harder and harder to know that what we see what we read what we hear or what we are being told is true and layered on top of this which is creating an even kind of more muddled ecosystem is the fact that it is getting harder to prove that which is true so we are navigating this world where all of these different versions of reality are coming at us on a kind of near-constant basis in a battle to see which one gains our momentary attention and it feels like we are living in a fun house with all of these different versions just coming at us so what really matters knowing that this in many ways is going to be one of the existential challenges of our time it really is about what values start matter I talked about time but when it comes to truth what bubbles up here it is honesty it is fairness how to always operate from a place of fairness and I talk a lot about the rise of the CEO the chief ethical executive officer how to operate from a place of Ethics authenticity and transparency and when it comes to trust human oversight human judgment operating from a place of integrity and really valuing human relationships no I know I threw a lot out at you guys so to put a bow around the bow what are the six key takeaways here the first is that we know that the world is becoming more boundaryless so any strategies and approaches that we make about the future can no longer be linear we also have to start thinking about how to tap into intangible resources like attention and creativity as these are becoming more valuable I just talked about the fact that time trust and Truth are becoming new leverageable currencies so think of ways to spend them and tap into them and future proofing takes on new urgency covid and the covet accelerator effect really exposed the limits of short-term thinking we know that the rise of MDM will continue to pose threats so the sixth and perhaps the most important thing here is how do we place a new emphasis on ethics fairness honesty transparency and human judgment but we'll end on this note and this is an adage that I love which is a diamond is merely a lump of coal that did well under pressure and I love this because this really underscores the difference between Innovation and Imagination much of an innovation is just stepwise it is linear thinking it is going from A to B to B to C and we think that we are innovating when really we need to take a step back and think of how we truly imagine and reimagine how we do what we do how can we take that lump of coal something that is just in plain sight that we think might not have a lot of value at its core and really apply the pressures of time and compress it through the lens of imagination to really create something that has value to create that diamond to create that thing that is unique to create something that really is the most critical thing for the future which are future proofed opportunities how can we take that which we thought we know or knew or those assumptions that we made and transformed them into something that will get us to this bright future that we know awaits us it is just up to us to rethink and reimagine what it looks like and how we get ourselves there so on that note thank you so much for your time today it was a pleasure joining all of you uh here is me if any of you have any questions after the fact but I will kick it back to my friends over at Orange this orange will kick it back to Orange and again thank you very much for your time today
2022-12-02