BE PREPARED
10 trends that are changing our world
Introduction:
Trend 1: The Ageing Population: Reinventing Markets
Trend 2: Big is Beautiful: But What to do With All This Data?
Trend 3: Bits and Bytes: Everything is Digitising
Trend 4: Because of Social Media, We’re All in Media Now
Trend 5: Rethinking Need: The New Age of Austerity
Trend 6: Unlocking Future Value: Recycle, Reuse, Re-Commerce
Trend 7: Sharing is Caring: Collaborative Consumption
Trend 8: The Power of a Crowd: Crowd-funding and P2P Lending
Trend 9: Getting a Webucation: The Online Learning Revolution
Trend 10: Business as a Force for Good: The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“To be prepared is half the victory.”
- Miguel de Cerventas
“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
William Arthur Ward
Introduction:
Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell was born on 22 February, 1857 at Paddington in London. He enjoyed a long military career. After his return to London from South Africa after the Second Boer War in 1903 he rewrote his military training manual Aids to Scouting. Scouting for Boys has since sold more than 100 million copies.
Famously, the Scout motto is ‘Be Prepared’. Of this, Baden-Powell explained the meaning of the phrase, in part to mean:
Be Prepared: by having disciplined yourself…..by having thought out beforehand any situation that might occur, so you know the right thing to do at the right moment, and are willing to do it.
The purpose of this trends report is to highlight some of the disruptive shifts that are shaping our changing world and to identify some of the key trends for the foreseeable future so that business owners, leaders of organisations, parents, teachers and students can best position themselves: so they can Be Prepared.
The last five years have been characterised by continued change across all sectors. Disruption in world financial markets, economic and political instability, geo-political, demographic, technological and environmental shifts reminds us that change is the norm.
Because the world is in transition it means that people, companies and organisations have to change to adapt to the new order, they have to change to survive.
Now that’s bad news for many people, because most people do not like to change. But it’s good news for others though because where there is change there is sure to be opportunity lurking about someplace!
In business and in life, being prepared is an essential ingredient for capitalising on new opportunities and establishing a strategic advantage. Innovation and strategic advantage hinge on your ability to anticipate trends and identify ‘the next big thing’. In the government, education and Not-For-Profit sectors it is equally important to be across all of the key trends, being informed and able to respond accordingly.
One’s focus should not be on protecting what you already have, but rather on identifying and adapting to the next big thing.
To illustrate this, in the next few posts we’re going to take a quick recap on the experiences of four global brands from the 20th century: Smith-Corona, Kodak, Encyclopaedia and IBM.
This is the introduction to our 2014-15 Trends Report.
Download the full report here: 10 trends that are changing our world (PDF)
