I think Groundhog Day (Feb 2) officially marks both a) the last day of the year you should really say to anyone "Happy New Year" and b) the last day you should worry about last year's predictions for the year you're in.
But, that being said, I was busy on Groundhog Day, so I'm just getting around to posting this now.
There was a recent article in The Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine called "2018: What will Canadian business look 10 years from now?" It contains vignettes of Canada's short-term future by noted luminaries like Heather Reisman of Indigo, Peter Munk of Barrick Gold and Robert J. Sawyer - sci-fi author and blogger.
I found this piece a really amazing read ... unfortunately not all of the vignettes are online, however, my two favourite ones are. The first is by Margaret Wente, a Globe columnist, entitled "Women will be the new men." From the vignette ...
Back then, no one foresaw how big the gap would get. No one predicted
that women would become vastly better educated than men. Nor did they
foresee the rise of an underclass of angry young males who feel they
are virtually shut out of large parts of the labour force. "When 75% of
university graduates are women, and men make only 60% of what women
make, it's obvious that we have widespread systemic discrimination,"
said Jason Harmer, chair of the Royal Commission on the Status of Men.
...
The feminized economy is dominated by the services and non-profit
sector. Virtually all the new jobs created in the past 10 years are in
health and wellness, education, food services, high tech, recreation
and entertainment, and most of the workers in these fields are women. Women now lead most of our biggest public institutionsâhospitals,
universities and social services of all kinds. Their management style
is perfectly suited to organizations that require strategic, inclusive,
pragmatic leadership and a focus on team-building. No wonder today's
bestselling business books have titles like How to Succeed by Thinking Like a Woman.
..
Of course, not all men are doing worse than womenâonly about 80% of
them are. The aging feminists from the 20th century are right when they
argue that the alpha males still rule the world: Men are still the
leading politicians and the CEOs of the biggest private enterprises.
They are still the biggest entrepreneurs, risk-takers and wealth
creators. Wherever ambition, aggression and ruthlessness pay off in
personal rewardsâmoney, power and prestigeâthe world still has a
masculine face. It turns out that all those people who believed that
gender would one day cease to matter were wrong. Gender matters as much
as ever. It just matters in different ways.
Obviously intended to be polarizing and controversial, the full piece discusses the improvement of women's lives through enabling technologies as well as a radical shift in how women shop for the family. A powerful vision that made me stop and think.
The second vignette that really caught my eye was Chris Turner's (whose new book Geography of Hope I am really looking forward to reading) piece, "Canada's Oil Capital Will Go Green" ...
Lots of people point to that fateful summer of 2009, and the drought
that all but dried up the Bow and Sheep Rivers and left the Athabasca
so shallow that half the tar-sands operations had to shut down for want
of water. They talk about the ranchland invasion of that now-infamous
fringed sageâthe CO2-fed shrub too woody to feed even one steerâthat
nearly destroyed the cattle industry. More than that, people talk about
how the provincial Liberals merged with the Greens to form the
Sustainable Centre Party, the big tent that finally unseated the
Conservative dynasty. And about how, in particular, the first thing the
SCs did was start dumping 50 cents from every dollar in fossil-fuel
royalties into the half-dormant Heritage Fund, and then funneled the
interest and a chunk of the principle into a clean-tech R&D program.
...
Remember how Enmax, heretofore the city's quiet, competent municipal
power company, started spinning off renewable-energy start-ups like a
Silicon Valley research lab circa 1995? That brought Canada's first
decentralized green-power program to the mass market, throwing up
50,000 micro wind turbines and then 100,000 thin-film solar roofs atop
big-box warehouses and suburban McMansions alike. Sure, the solar-cell
sheets came from California, but it was the whip-smart number-crunchers
in Calgary who built the slickest software for managing those dispersed
power plants as a single, efficient "energy Internet."
Two things .. I wonder what Rick Mercer would have to say about the merging of the Liberals and the Greens. And second ... WOW, what an amazing vision for the potential of Western Canada! Is there anyone with the foresight, will and momentum to make that happen?
All of the vignettes in this article are really worth a read - it's nice to take that step back and imagine our future, not in terms of what will be cool on the Internet or as a marketing tool ... but how we want to live in ten years and what kind of vision that will take now.
Speaking of trends and predictions, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a recent piece in Marketing Magazine that I contributed to: 10 Really Big (Consumer) Trends for 2008 (not sure if open access or not). My predictions include a rise in focus on local production and buying (think farmer's markets, the 100 Mile Diet and eretailers like spud.ca who make it easy for customers to make decisions about purchasing locally grown and produced items) and the rise of the barter economy with sites like OurThreads.com. My third prediction (which didn't make it to print - I blame Mitch Joel and Collin Douma, fellow trendspotters, for hogging all the space!) focused on "Expressing our Individuality" ...
Expressing Our Individuality
With manufacturing methods becoming more accessible and the ability to do "one-off's" easier than ever, consumers will look for ways to apply their own design sense to typically mass produced products. Several mainstream manufacturers allow individual customization whether for laptop bags, bedding or even creating a unique blend of tea or wine. Also, fab labs" like Ponoko will also continue their slow steady growth where budding artists and designers can outsource the production and manufacture of their designs and then subsequently sell those designs on niche marketplaces like Etsy.com.
So, there you have it .. no more prognostication! Until the cycle starts again for 2009 which will be, oh, about St. Patrick's Day?!?
Photo Credits: ~Sage~, eszter, ecstaticist and mica2tw
