“How to See the Invisible & Do the Impossible” Featuring ...

“How to See the Invisible & Do the Impossible”

Featuring Daniel Burrus

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Interviewer: Hello and welcome to Soundview Live an interactive conversation that

puts you in touch with today’s top business authors. My name is Andrew Clancy senior editor for Soundview and I will be your host for today’s event. Before we introduce today’s guest I want to remind everyone that our best events are driven by the questions that you submit. To submit a question for today’s guest go to the chat window on your player which should appear in the lower left hand corner of your screen select private, then select leaders and assistance. Type your question in the box below and then click the arrow to send us your questions. Our event today is scheduled to run for 60 minutes, so it is our advice to you to submit your questions throughout the course of the event. If you wait till the end of the program to ask your questions we may not have time to answer it and there is an added incentive for listeners today; the first 15 listeners to ask as a question for our guest today will receive an autographed copy of his book. Again is the 15 listeners, so make sure you get your questions in early. Also we frequently receive questions from the audience during the course of any event about the availability of the slides from the presentation. Slides from today’s presentation are available in viewer only mode. You will not be able to download the slides however if you listen to the conclusion of our program we will have a little message for you about an offer that our guest is going to make that should make up for the fact you can’t download the slides today.

Now for today’s guest; Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world

leading technologies forecasters. He is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research a researching consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients better understand how technological social and business forces are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities . Soundview is very pleased to welcome the author of the New York Times and Wall Street journal best seller Flash Foresight, How to See the Invincible and Do the Impossible. Mr. Daniel Burrus. Daniel welcome to Soundview Live.

Interviewee: It’s my pleasure thanking you for having me here. You know there is a

reason that I did not call this book flash hindsight, frankly we’ve got hindsight down, should have bought Google when it first came out. Well if you didn’t too bad. Should have bought Apple in the year 1999 it’d be doing great today but you know what too bad. You can’t change the past we can learn from it but we can’t change it. The only power you have is in shaping your future. So once you have that power of hindsight except going forward. After all we are going to spend the rest of our life in the



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future; maybe we ought to think about this. Yet most of us don’t all we do is we let one year become the next, become the next, become the next. We crisis manage we put out fires and increasing when we got more things coming in at us that is why the topic is like agility are so popular today. You have to learn how to dodge and react faster and faster because there is so much coming in. But what if you could anticipate all of that, what if you could see that ahead of time. What if you could predict the future and be right. And the answer is you can, you can predict all of it but you can predict enough to do some amazing things.

So what I am going to do in this session today is I am not just not going to give you a bunch of trends and say good luck here you go. But what I am going to do is turn all of you listeners into what I call visible futures. I am going to show you the technique of how to do that, now you might notice on the screen you can see the subtitle. How to see the invisible and do the impossible, Why is that? Well basically everything that humans have been doing on this planet almost everything we do on a daily basis at one time in human history it was impossible. Including having this conference, including having a telephone, including putting a man on the moon as we did way back in the early 70s. Including sitting in a chair at one time in human history you had to find a stump. So how have we been able to redefine the reality ever since we set foot on this planet and the answer is give me a new tool I will change the world. Imagine what it was like when someone showed up with that first wheel. ‘I will change the world with this thing’ of course as you know change was slow, word spread slow. Even when they invented the telephone word spread slow, hey who would you call but today word is spreading first. As a matter of fact it’s whirling around is right now regardless of where you are it’s in what we call the cloud in multiple languages whirling around us all you need is a device to suck it in. in other words when an innovation happens anywhere we find out fast and that creates an interesting dynamic.

We live in amazingly uncertain world right now. In the United States and

this is a global audience today that we are listening to but in United States for example we are asking ourselves what is going to happen with the next elections, what’s going to happen with health care? When are we having all of this fore closed homes going to start getting flushed out of the system and our home values start going up again. We’ve got Wall Street recovery but our mainstream recession is still happening when is that turning around? When are jobs coming? We‘ve got all this uncertainty and



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the more uncertainty we have the less we move forward. It is a block keeping us from moving forward.

So one of the principles that I want to share with you today is that you

need to start with certainty. You see in an uncertain world I have got no power, I have got to ask myself what am I certain about? I will never forget when I met the former chairman of General Motors Rick Wagner a couple of years before the company went bankrupt. And he knew I was a technologist forecaster futurist that kind of a guy. When we were introduced I will never forget what he said, he said ‘well of course no one can predict the future and be right’ and I said well let’s see it’s fall next it will be winter. I think I will be right. Now the point I am making there is there is, there are cycles. There’s over 300 known cycles; business cycles, whether cycles, biological cycles, they’re all cycles. That allows you to anticipate the future and be right. Farmers know all about cycles, they know when they are going to be planting and when they’re going to be harvesting. Astronomers know all about cycles; twenty years from now in March and they will tell you the exact date there will be a full moon and amazingly enough they can and they’ll nail it.

So there are obviously are a lot of things that we can see ahead of time if

we know where and how to look. Economists use cycles to predict `the future but have you noticed that economics have been increasingly wrong. Why have they been so wrong lately because they’ve really been wrong lately? And the answer is there is another kind of change. Another kind of change that is also predictable but they don’t study it because it used to be slow but now it is first. I call it linear change. Once this kind of change happens you are not going back. Once people get a smart phone you know what you are not going back to a damn phone. Once people in China pack there bicycle and get a car they are not going back to the bike. Once people in India get refrigeration for their house they are not going to say hey ‘I don’t need the refrigerator anymore.’ These are linear one way changes that have profound and predictable impacts that allow us to see the future more clearly.

So one of the first certainties that I want to share with you is let’s take a

look at this the future is all about relationships. See we all think about all this technology and iPad’s and Androids and all this stuff that is going on right now but we have to remember it is a human world and relationships still drive not only in the stock market but just about everything else that we do. By the way good relationships are based on trust if you don’t have trust frankly you don’t have a good relationship. And how do you get trust



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well values; honesty, integrity, delivering on promises. Over the last several months I have been around the world several times consulting and giving speeches and talking with leaders and you know the values system actually is the same. Those kind of elements I just named they are powerful no matter where you are. Now the point I am making is that everybody understands that relationships are important and we all know trust is key yet we do things to undermine trust all the time. Companies do it all the time not because they are evil companies it is important to understand it is not full of bad people what’s happening is we are just not considering trust and relationships only make decisions. So I want this group, I want all the listeners to realize that you can solve that problem before it happens. When you are going to implement any kind of change whether be internal or external ask yourself first before you do it where is trust between us, between me and the people that will be impacted by this change and then ask yourself if we implement this change in this way what happens to trust. And if trust goes down don’t do it like that, and notice I didn’t say don’t do it. I said don’t do it in that way, change how you implement that impact that change that you are putting out. Change that to something that will not only hold trust but if anybody in your organization can raise the bar on trust frankly you are going to be doing great because the future is all about relationships.

Now you’ve also know about trends and there are trends that happen and

trends that don’t that is why most of us don’t spend a lot of time reading trends but that’s because based on 28 years of research I’ve come up with the fact that there are actually two types of trends. I call them hard trends and soft trends. They both look good in the present, soft trends might happen hard trends will happen, wouldn’t it be good to know what will happen and separate those two. I am going to show you how to do it right now. Again it looks good in the present let me give you an example of a soft trend or one of my favorite is Elvis Presley; decades and decades ago the rock star Elvis Presley passed away and in the ten years after his death there was an increasing number of professional Elvis impersonators in United States and matter fact you could put it on a chart and it looks like it was just going straight just right along that axis up every year.

And I remember just for fun I took that graph and I charted it out using that trajectory of that first ten years into the future and it showed that by the year 2000 one in three Americans will be professional Elvis impersonators. Obviously that didn’t happen so would anybody in their right mind use soft trends to look into the future? And the answer is oh yeah it happens all the time. Once again in around the year 2000 our own



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federal government here in the United States looked at good numbers unfortunately drew some soft trends and predicted that we’d have a trillion Dollar surplus within a couple of years and we spent and acted as if it was a hard trend it was going to happen. However unfortunately it was a soft trend it might happen which by the way you could have known if you would have known the difference right off the bet. Every state in United States spent money based on soft trends and we ended up what holding the bag because we didn’t realize that was a soft trend. They treated it as a hard trend so obviously we have to pay attention to this. I know what you are thinking yourself alright, alright I got it what’s a hard trend tell me. Alright I will if I knew that’s what you are thinking about now. A hard trend unlike the soft trend is based on something that is tangible, physical, fully measurable and predictable. Let me give you an example and the first example I am going to give you actually has nothing to do with technology. Let’s take a look. It is demographics; this represents an amazing linear change, they’ve got in these country 78 million baby boomers. By the way are baby boomers only in the United States? The answer is oh no actually they are all over the place, Canada is loaded with them, New Zealand is loaded with them, Japan is loaded with them, Australia is loaded with them, Germany is loaded with them, Italy is loaded with them. Matter of fact if you look at most of the developing world after World War Two. The economies that really went crazy after World War Two all of them loaded with a huge number of baby boomers. And we are not talking about emerging nation and emerging economies around the world that have the young populations, we are talking about the well established ones over all these years if that by the way have accumulated a lot of money. We know that if you are 55 years or older you have over 65% of the wealth of the nation; that in other words there are a lot of money up there. Now let’s become visible futures together, lets see how this works. Why don’t we dial a clock a head 10 years, the oldest baby boomer today is 65 heading for 66. Let’s make them now 75 heading for 76. What are they doing to their…what have they done to their savings, their investments. They have adjusted them for retirement and is that a cyclical change or is that a linear change and you know already that is linear. That’s a one way street they are not going to get young all of a sudden and then like grand ma and grand pa and mom and dad they are not going to have a short life span They’re going to actually have a long life span.



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In other words they are going to have to make this money last maybe longer than any generation has ever had to make it last before. And as we start doing that what do we have to look at, they are going to get a little more conservative because we don’t have all those decades to make that money back if we lose it. So if you got that much money and that many people all around the world that are getting conservative and staying that way because it is a linear change. Does that have a direct impact on the stock market? And the answer is oh yeah, quite profound. Is that bad news? No it’s only bad news if you didn’t know about it ahead of time. See if you know what’s going to happen before it happens is actually good news because you can ask a better question like what are the kinds of investments baby boomers will be investing in that will be different than someone who is young and has a lot of time on their hands. And you will find all of a sudden opportunity. Alright let’s talk a little bit of another element to this, let’s just look at the growth between 2010 and 2020 by age brackets. Under fourteen years old growing by 7% during that 10 year period, 15 and 24.8%. Look at that 25 to 44 age bracket is diminishing by 10%. See it is interesting if you look at the numbers of people in this age brackets you get some pretty good numbers but if you look at the growth per age bracket you get some interesting different numbers. Look at 55 and older and the growth that we have that is amazing. So could we actually create companies based on this hard trend you see we talk about job creation where are all the new jobs coming from and of course everyone is uncertain so they don’t start new companies or higher new people but in my mind based on hard trends I could start a thousand companies today, lets just start a couple right now. A lot of people love to boat they love to fish, they love to go [IB] they love to get out on the water but as you get older in your 70s, 80s and 90s it gets kind of hard to launch that boat. It get’s kind of hard to get in that boat. When we create a company right now and create the easy launch trailer for seniors, would that company grow every year just based on the hard trend of demographics? And the answer is well absolutely matter of fact you can look at how many people are hitting that 65 bracket and soon 68 and then 70 everyday, every minute, every second. You will realize that is a huge supply of growth just coming from that hard trend. How about we create a elevator company it only has to go up one flight and retrofit on the outside of a condor or a home. Might that be a drilling company using the hard trend of demographics? And of course the answer is yes. Definitely so we can see the future with it. Let me give you one more here on demographics. For the first time in history we are going to



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have four generations in a workforce all working together and we need to be combining talents. You see there is actually a war between the young and the old right now, for the young think the old don’t get it. And you know what they are right and the old think the young don’t get it and guess what they are right too. We got to end this war because we have a perfect fit here. See first of all with all those 78 million baby boomers getting older and taking their knowledge and wisdom with them, smart companies are starting to come up with plans on how they can retain employees. How they can keep some of those people instead of working 40 hours weeks or whatever using technology to allow them to work the kind of hours they will but so they can still tap in to other expertise and their talent that has taken years to develop and to create strategic mentoring programs for young people. See they are starting to think and solve problems before they happen. So with this generation we got a war between the young and the old and we need to end the war. Let me tell you very quickly about my younger brother Jack and his oldest son Ethan. Ethan is in high school and I know what Ethan was doing this morning before going to school. He was playing his X-Box 360 video game. And what is an X-Box 360 really? An X-Box 360 is an advanced photo realistic assimilation machine with inner space of three dimensionality. And he likes to play strategy games on this. I asked Ethan recently when he got a new strategy game I said “Ethan do you study this games every time or you just start playing them” he said “oh uncle man I study these things” I said “You are studying them, what do you study?” he said “I got to learn how to work all the virtual tools and virtual machines and all the stuff in there before I play hey I like to be good I am good” “I said how long did you study your last game before playing?” “He said I studied that probably about 20 hours” I said “wow! 20 hours?” and he said “yeah and I am good too.” [IB] do these kids take notes? No don’t tell me they can’t memorize. Can these kids focus? Oh yeah like a laser light. The reason you think they can’t focus is because they don’t like to focus on your stuff. So what is…and by the way when Ethan is playing one of these strategy games is he playing alone? No he’s got a team and guess his latest team is international team. He’s got somebody outside of Paris, somebody in Toronto, somebody in South Korea. There is always somebody in South Korea they love to play games. So Ethan knows something and so do his friends that most business don’t know. There is a difference between corporation and collaboration. You see a lot of companies say they are collaborating but in reality they are really cooperating which is a much lower level activity. Cooperation is based on scarcity and you do it



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because you have to, collaboration is based on abundance and if you are doing it because you are creating a bigger pie for everyone. When he is playing with his people with trying to achieve a strategic goal with an international team it doesn’t sound a little bit like business doesn’t it. What is he doing he is not just typing, he is just not texting, he’s got a head set on and he is using the universal language of business and gaming English. Is he just talking and typing and all that no, no, no. He’s got full video conferencing; you see Ethan knows the difference between video conferencing and visual communications. Video conferencing is where you have a very expensive room the executives are always in there and it is always booked doing video conferencing. Visual communication is something you can do with a phone, a smart phone. You can do it with an iPad or a tablet; you can do it with your laptop when you are in your hotel room and when you want to see a loved one who maybe a thousand miles away. By the way why do you do that? Because you have a better connection, you can see what they are thinking, you can adjust your communication too be more relevant based on their facial expressions. Why aren’t we doing that with business? Ethan and the kids know this maybe we ought to wake up. By the way how expensive is all of that? And the answer is actually it’s free even better yet. So when the Ethan’s and the Audrey’s stop playing their games and go to school, what do they do? They are going into a time machine backwards in their mind, how motivated are they? And we got kids all over the world going to school for the first time, coming out of the rice paddies and so on and they may not be a hi-tech school but in their mind they are going into a time machine forward who is motivated. And when the Ethan’s and the Audrey’s of the world graduate from school and get a job for you, what’s happening in their mind? Now for the most part they feel like they are going into a time machine backwards, how motivated are they? A lot of people right now are trying to attract talent who say there is not enough talent and it’s hard to get good people and the answer is why aren’t you doing the kinds of things that make them find you? It looks like you are a 21st century organization instead of one that’s kind of fading into the sunset. Now you are one that sees the future based on the hard trends and are growing, the kind of company that young people would want to be part of. As a matter of fact a lot of us are having strategic meetings filled with baby bloomers trying to figure out the future and we don’t have any young people in there helping us see this well. Let’s end the war.

Alright let’s go on to another one real quickly. Government regulations is another hard trend. Yeah it’s amazing, you think that it’s all bad news, no.



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When the government passes the law there is opportunity written all over it. Years ago they passed the law that said, emails are official cooperate documents that need to be stored. The minute that law is passed if you would have invested in storage companies you would have made a fortune because all those stocks went up because of all of a sudden they will sell this stuff to the store. So whenever there is a law that is passed pay attention to it and look for the opportunities you will see them. I am not going to spend a lot of time on that right now because we’ve only got so much time and there is some other key points I want to make before we go on to the question and answer time. Let me go into the technology trends as another hard driver because when technology gives you full predictability. Look we just had Steve Jobs pass away recently and there is a lot of uncertainty around Apple. Will Apple be able to keep doing the kinds of things that they’ve done albeit without Steve as their visionary to move forward? Well uncertainty doesn’t give me any power. I have to ask myself what am I certain about? For example you thought you were getting iPhone 5 but you didn’t. They didn’t put that out yet. Will there be an iPhone 5? The answer is yes, of course there will and no one is talking about the iPhone 6, nobody is writing or talking about it at all. Nobody has left that in a[IB] yet. So let me ask you a question, do you know anything about the iPhone 6 with certainty? The answer is oh yeah. Let me ask you this, do you think it will have a faster process than the iPhone 5 or the iPhone 4 and the answer is yes and are you certain? Of course you are. Will there be stability to store more stuff like MP3 files and so on in that device? The answer is of course. Matter of fact we will be able to store more and more in the cloud, already think the cloud is not getting full. The answer is the cloud is not getting full, we are going to be putting more in the cloud as well. And we’ve got 3G wireless now, we are starting to get 4G wireless, is that it? Or might you be able to predict what they are going to call the next one? And of course the answer is yeah, they’ll call it 5G. As a matter of fact for 28 years I have been grasping the power of bandwidth and you can actually tell exactly when 5G is coming out and what it will cost. Just like people predicted 4G just like they predicted 3G and 2G and 1G is all out there for us to see, most of us are just too busy and aren’t looking. So let’s take a look at another little angle here. These are what I call technology driven trends. They are the major drivers and they are increasing every year and I had better tell you I got to get upfront with you right now I first published this in 1985. So why am I showing you an old list or anyone who has read my other books Techno Trends or read the Techno Trends newsletter that I have been publishing for almost three decades now knows that I talk about things that are getting more powerful over time, not obsolete networking. Wireless and wired, I think



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it’s pretty clear to see that’s going to continue to increase at an exponential rate. So let’s not talk about that one so much I think you all get that. Let’s go to the other ones very quickly. Dematerialization; you can make things smaller. I was at a hospital recently and they had something two years ago, there was a surgical tool that was the size of a trunk. Now it’s the size of a cigarette pack. By the way it’s greener to manufacture, costs less to manufacture, so now clinics can get it instead of just hospitals. You can make things smaller you can virtualize. We’ve got virtualized desktops. You’ve got a Mac and you want to run Windows on it, no problem. As a matter of fact I can go over and visit a friend of mine and use his computer and see my entire desktop or in other words I’ve got my desktop virtualized on his. It used to be to launch any servers, you had to buy the serves and provision them and get them all set up and then you put them in there and you are probably using, 25% to 30% of that [IB] any given time. But now we’ve got over half the servers being deployed this year, are virtual servers and you are only paying for the amount that you are using. That virtualization is huge. As a matter of fact what we did is we e-enabled the enterprise in the last 15 years, e-content management, e-call center and help desk, just about everything you can imaginably add an e to it. What are we about to do? About to v-enable everything. The virtual supply chain, virtual logistics, virtual purchasing, it’s a huge increase and it’s all there for us to see. You just need to take the time to look. Let’s talk a little bit about product intelligence. You can make things smarter, you can make everything smarter. As a matter of fact we are about to make your business card smarter. We are about to put a little biddy microchip on there that allows it to communicate with the other devices and other business cards and if it can do it so cheaply that it’s easy enough and cheap enough to put another card. I remember decades ago when I started talking about you had to have a web address and an email address on your business card people laughed at that and of course it happened. Well here we are, we are doing it again except we are making your card intelligent. Yeah I remember quite a while ago I got my first card that had smart tires but they weren’t that smart, they didn’t tell me what tire was going flat although today’s cars do tell you. As a matter of fact today’s cars you can even have your tires twit you and let you know that it’s tire is going flat. So let’s invent something right now; let’s start another invention right now. It is a multimillion dollar idea because we make all batteries smart so



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that they tell you exactly 24 hours before they are going dead. Like your car battery, your motorcycle battery, any battery, the answer is sure. Nobody has done it yet. Well you know what, could we? Yeah. Will we? Yes because what can be done will be done. You see how easy it is to think about new ideas and to invent the future and create new products and services of markets and careers just by looking at these things? It’s amazing. Let’s talk about…by the way you can make cement intelligent. The new bridges they are building have smart cement so they can tell you when their cracks are developing. We are about to make this about everything smart. By the way that’s one of the reasons we want a smart grid, an electric grid. Why? Because if everything else is smart and the grid is stupid things don’t work. [One little] thought here, smart grid is going to be smarter next year, Smartphone will be tomorrow’s dumb phone. So what we really are going to have is smarter phones and there will be low indolence and high indolence just like the first Apple iPhone is not as smart as the latest Apple iPhone because we make Smartphones smarter. Let’s talk about mobility and interactivity a minute. Interactivity, why haven’t we had interactive TV yet? We have been waiting for that for decades. We have been talking about it, it’s not here why? In an IPTV but now with IPTV well we’ve got a major innovation taking place and is cable ready for that? Tell you, why do you have 500 cable channels and nothing to watch? Simple you don’t have App TV but you will just like if you’ve got an iPhone right now you’ve got half a million apps to chose from. So it’s not an iPhone it’s a myPhone designed by me for me, customized based on the types of apps that I have installed. We are going to do the same thing with a television set. You are going to walk very soon into that room and of course there will be a camera on that new television set, not just for video conferencing or what I call visual communications, you can talk to your friends and family from your television living room or wherever you might be but it will also have facial recognition so that when you walk in it knows that hey, it’s George walking in and it self configures to George so that it’s giving you your collection of viewing apps. It’s all there for us to see. Let’s talk about mobility. We’ve got a revolution taking place, the apps revolution, apps for sales, apps for marketing, apps for purchasing, apps for logistics, apps for supply chain management, all of these apps that haven’t even been created yet. I was just with, last week 1600 CEOs of IT companies and I said “how many of you have apps for purchasing logistics



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supply chain right now that you are using that you develop?” and out of 1600 people I had five people raise their hand. And then I asked them a question based on the hard trend and I said “two years from now if I asked this group how many people have apps for those things, how many in this room think that over 75% of the room will raise their hands?” All of them raised their hands. They all agreed that within two years that many of them would have apps that they’d be doing this thing, then what did I say? “Then why aren’t you doing it now.” If you know something is going to happen before it happens why are you going to be the last one to do it, why don’t we get going. And once again do I want you to be on the bleeding edge? No I want you to be on the leading edge. How do you lead without bleeding? Well look outside of your industry and see where they are already doing the bleeding, where they’ve already come up with the innovation, they already got it working great and then bring it into your industry and be the hero and lead without bleeding. A couple of other things very quickly, globalization, well, you can be a small entrepreneur with two employees now and be global very easily. We’ve go many different levels of globalization and of course technology is enabling that. I won’t spend too much time on that right now, I want to get into convergence very quickly and that is when we can converge speakers and functions like we did with iPhones and androids. But we can converge industries and as a matter of fact take a look at this. You’ve got the telecom industry converging with the computer industry, converging with the media industry and the entertainment industry. As a matter of fact that would have given you more but the slide would have been too huge. What industries are you in that are converging with other industries creating new opportunities? By the way there is a gold mine just in that question alone, pretty if we ask the right questions we can get great answers.

Technological change is going to accelerate faster than anyone that’s listening right now can possibly imagine because we’ve got three change accelerators. They go and bringing us into a period of exponential change and the three are, and with storage and processing power. Let’s just take a look at Moore’s law and processing power. It took 20 years to go from a five mega hertz chip to 500 mega hertz chip, how long would it take to double that and that was eight months, and that was years ago. You see, when you have a doubling, two becomes four becomes eight. It’s kind of slow in the beginning but all of a sudden it gets to the, wow holy cow phase. But right now we are in the holy cow phase. Remember the 512 K modem? Try one of those today. By the way, the votes in time, why? Because your emails now have attachments that are multimedia, see we change based on what the technology is and we can’t even hardly



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remember the old because the new changes our behavior so radically and when customers are changing faster that you are changing, when they are learning faster than you are learning you might end up like a Motorola or you may end up like a block buster, we don’t want to be like that. We want to use the hard trends to be able to drive growth and innovation to move forward. Well, we have those three change accelerators creating not just change we are going to a new period of transformation and what’s the difference between change and transformation? That’s an important question because a lot of people right now, a lot of companies say that they are transforming but in reality you know what they are doing? They are just doing rapid change. You know what, that’s not going to help you. We need to be transforming. Here is the difference, when I was a young guy I could listen to my albums, one album for spinning disks. So I could listen to my Allen Brothers and my Pink Floyd and my Jimmy Hendricks and [IB] okay so you get my vintage. And I could listen to those things on one album per spinning disc and then as I got older I would have said, ‘that was an amazing change that came along.’ I could get one album per smaller spinning disc called the CD. But the big benefit wasn’t making it smaller, it was getting all the hisses, and the pops and the scratches out of there and I liked it. I re-bought all my old stuff and got my new stuff on CD. Well, today I don’t use CDs anymore, today on my pocket I have got a phone, a smart phone that’s got all my music and all my videos and all my emails and that connection to the entire world through a browser. With more and more every second, that didn’t change how I listened to music, it transformed it and by the way the music industry still doesn’t get it and the television industry is still doesn’t really get it. But if we take a look we can start to get it, we can start to see it and we can do amazing things. We are going to transform how we sell, how we market how we communicate, how we collaborate, how we innovate, how we educate, how we train, we are doing this all over a five year period. Now look, most futurists give you predictions that go out 20 years so that you won’t remember it. I’m going to give you a big one. In the next five years we are going to look back at this period of time and we are going to say, ‘wow that was the great transformation and it was global,’ and that is what we are transforming. So if you are not transforming how you sell market, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, innovate and so on you are going to be like a



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block buster, you are going to be like a Kodak or a Polaroid and I don’t want you to be like that. You know, Monty Python was selling DVDs so their programs on Amazon and they are doing that good until later little snippets of those programs, put them on You Tube for free. What happened to the sales of their DVDs on Amazon? Within two months they went up 29,000%, hey we are going to change this whole ball game. A school in Denver has realized that instead of having kids walk around with bag packs full of books that aren’t that relevant to the kids and the teachers don’t even like them because they can’t change or notify them based on their needs. They are giving each kid and iPad and saying, ‘it is an electronic book, now it’s a multi media book, the teacher can modify the book and by the way we just gave you a computer and it costs less than giving you all those books.’ Hey look, we are going to transform the whole shooting match in a short period of time, what are we waiting for lets get moving because if you don’t do it someone else will. Across the world is 2.1 billion people on the internet, 25 watching TV, 41 using mobile phones but the mobile phones are becoming smart phones rapidly which means they are all using the internet, they are all watching TV and they are all on social media and if that 85% of the phones sold globally this year is smart phones, next year it will be a higher percent than that, predictably with certainty. In other words everybody has got a computer with them at all times. You see, when we got our laptop is not with us all the time but when we got our smart phone becoming more powerful than our laptop, wow it changes things. As a matter of fact it transforms things. We are transforming mobility, mobile data, mobile media, mobile finance, mobile commerce, as a matter of fact pick anything and add the word mobile to it and you got it. They got it, its creating a whole new infrastructure and because it’s with you at all times. Let’s just talk about Watson and super computers that’s the IBM super computer. You don’t have to have a super computer that costs millions of dollars, you don’t have to own that but you can have it, how do you do it? You access it from your phone. So we put the super computer in the cloud and let you tap into it with your phone and what do you use that for? Well, of course doctors can use it for diagnostics, pharmacists can use it to make sure that the new pharmacy that had the drug you were given to take isn’t going to interact with all the other ones you are taking. But could we use a Watson in the sky to be able to transform purchasing and logistics and the answer is, with certainty. In a short amount of time absolutely and if you don’t do it some one else will. Okay, you have this to think about here. I want us to enter the



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communication age. See we are information age organizations that’s one of the reasons the Wall Street protesters are trying to say we want communication and dialogue but the problem is Wall Street along with any other business and government is used to informing, its one way, its static, it doesn’t create action. Communicating is two ways dynamic, I think social media. So what we really want is to say, ‘look we want a discussion.’ Social media for business is just beginning to unfold because its really the beginning of what I call the communication age and that is how you get engagement in action versus the information age which is slow. It used to be the big ate the small now the fast eat the slow and informing keeps you locked into a slow mode. Communicating gets you into a dynamic fast mode, we need to get fast. By the way when you look at social media you think of the last column here, Facebook, LinkedIn, Four square word, Press Twitter, You Tube, that is the current leader and by the way the current leader can be displaced. Remember lets take search, at one time Yahoo was the game until all of a sudden it became something else called Google. By the way it’s Google the only [IB] the only game in town. Now, there is going to be new games in town that displace Google. In mater of fact [IB] intelligent electronic agents are going to displace what Google does if Google doesn’t become the alternate intelligent electronic agent. Though my point here is, look at the column on the right that’s, those are the categories that will remain. So Facebook is the current leader of social media, it may be somebody else later but its still will be social networking. Professional networking, LinkedIn is the leader right now. Maybe somebody else in the future but professional networking is still going to be a key social media driver. So the list on the right is even more important than the list on the left and the list on the right is growing. Can you predict the future of the web? Sure, web 1.0 is search, think Yahoo accessed information. Web two content sharing, we call it social media, what’s next? Immersion, the 3D experience, by the way you don’t need to wear glasses with the 3D experience that was a, that they are doing that now but it’s actually here, they are going to [IB] technology. There is a way already on cell phones, smart phones and on tablets where you don’t need to wear glasses and have full 3D going interspacial or sticking out. They are easier to do and it’s already started to happen in games. You see it starts with kids and then it goes to business then at last goes to education with of course no instructions. Alright, left and that is intelligence and by the way this isn’t last, it’s just the last of this particular slide. Well, we’ve got Watson in the



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sky. We’ve got the new iPhone even though it isn’t at five level yet. Already we have some electronic personal assistant that’s pretty good and we’ve just begun to see that revolution take place. All of this is our first to see and I want you looking a little bit more often. We need to redefine and reinvent what we are doing because if we don’t others will do it for us. There is all sort of technology hard trends available and for us to see, your smart phone is your primary computer now, tablets and apps for business huge opportunity, social media for business as a matter of fact we have got search think about social search and social search engines huge. Why are you listening to him a lot of people out there right now listening would say I don’t know what [IB] is. I was just in China recently they have in the two years built this city bigger than Silicon Valley all around M to M, machine to machine communication and they have already in China have decided that by the end of the decade they will have way over a billion machines stack into another billion machines all wirelessly, this is huge opportunities all over are we looking or are we too busy.

Advance cloud services a 3D display it’s for smart devices just in time training big data for giving us ultra high speed transactions that we can see on our smart phones and tablet and by the way these are just a few there many more. By the way if you want a few more you can ask go to Burrus B-U-R-R-U-S.com and I have got a collection there you can take a look at. Alright just a few more here and then we will get into the question and answer. I want to give people the ability to do what they currently can’t do but would really want to do if they only knew they could do it. Just what do I mean by that? We typically ask people what would you like, what do you want we ask our customers what do you like and then we give it to them missing the big opportunity especially during a period of transformational change. We are going to do better than that because all we are doing is playing catch up, we need to instead ask ourselves what is it that they would really want to do, they know how they can do it but they really want to do it then lets look at all those tools, all those hard trends and ask ourselves is there a way that we could give it to them.

Nobody asked for an iPhone, nobody asked for an iPad and those two devices were impossible four years ago, today they represent 70% of revenue of Apple. By the way I was just working with the top executives of IBM they settle for 40% of there revenue is coming from products that were impossible four years ago. Well that was four years ago and we are just entering the pace of transformation in other words most of your profitability is coming from things that are impossible to do today. Assured three or four years from now we better be anticipating, we better



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be not just be reacting what we need to really focus on doing, is directing our own future rather than letting it unfold because if you don’t direct your future someone else will.

There is a fog out there right now, the fog is called news bad news sells good news doesn’t sell and if there is no bad news to report they will give you the anniversary of bad news. It creates a gigantic fog keeping us from seeing the opportunity. I want you to spend a little less time watching that entertainment based news that your watching everyday and start looking at what are the hard trends, what are the certainties, what are the things we know. By the way one other last thing before we go to question and answer here and that is that I like soft trends as well and I gave you an Elvis example which is just one type of soft trend it’s what I call it’s a pretty extreme one. Let me give you example of some hard trends, soft trends just to make sure you get this now. We get 78 million baby boomers in the US getting older and that creates a hard trend around health care because we know that you’re going to need a lot more healthcare as you get older a lot more procedures etcetera. It’s going to be a whole lot more people needing knees replacements and hip replacements and that is a hard trend count on it. So therefore let’s look at two other trends that have been true for ten years, a decrease in the number of people becoming nurses and doctors in the United States its been declining for ten years, its been a pretty good trend for ten years is that a hard trend or a soft trend?

The answer is it’s a soft trend why? You don’t like it change it if it can be changed its soft if its going to happen whether you like it or not its hard the 78 million baby boomers will be getting older and its hard if you don’t like too bad its going to happen anyway are we going to have an increasing desire and need for wireless broadband? Yeah is that hard? Absolutely. 2012 China’s economy will continue to grow and that’s soft why? Things can happen look what happened to Japan when they had that title wave from that earthquake, things can happen. So lets ask ourselves what are those hard trends and the things that are going to happen whether you like or not because they represent opportunity and lets ask ourselves what are the soft trends, the ones that if you don’t like them you can change them because they have opportunity written all over them.

Here is what I would like you to do before I go into this question and answer time and that is I would like you to spend one hour a week looking into your future. After all that’s where you’re going to spend the rest of



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your life maybe you ought to think about it and by the way your going to be too busy to do this unless you put it in your calendar make an appointment. You see everyone is way too busy let me ask you a question, were the top five executives of General Motors everyday for just five years before they went bankrupt were they busy everyday? The answer is yeah it didn’t help them its not going to help you either. Being busy is not the answer today because of transformation. Now you’re going to be busy but that’s not your full time job you also have to strategic using the power of foresight to do what you might even think its impossible today.

So what I would like you to do in that hour is unplug from the present, from the newest, from the crisis from all the stuff your dealing with because that’s crisis management and slip into an opportunity management mode. List the things your certain about, if your not certain about it don’t put it on the list should be amazing. It’s amazing what you see. I just because of an audience two weeks ago and we generated over a thousand hard trends that would directly impact men in their customers over the next two years, wow that’s powerful. When you what’s going to happen before it happens you have an edge why don’t we start doing that, I mean I’m curious it was a thousand trends came out there. That they can use, they were very specific to their industry, I didn’t know that before they did the process but now once they understood there is such a thing wow you can do amazing things going forward. So I like you to put what those hard trends are, what those soft trends are in that hour a week and then ask yourself what are the problems I am about to have? Because now that you can see the future, you can see problems before you have them and then they like you to solve the problem you don’t have it in the first place. You see most people will say a problem is an opportunity in disguise, nonsense you know what a problem is a problem when it an opportunity before you have it. So what I want to do is look at my customers future problems, the ones they are going to have next year and the year after and the year after the big ones that they don’t see right now because I want to develop things that solve those problems before they even happen. If I have got the solution just as they are facing the problem I’m going to do really well. Alright let’s open this up to some question and answer and then I will have a final comment to close this down.

Interviewer: And we have numerous questions in our Q and A session now, just to let

everyone know if you are one of the first of 15 listeners who have submitted us a question and for some reason we are unable to get through



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to your question you will still receive your autograph copy of the book, we have your information on file. Then why don’t we start with a question about you had mentioned earlier that the gap that exists between older workers and younger workers and the need for collaboration rather than distrust. One listener asked about how is it possible to get older workers to recognize the younger workers has been more highly evolved for that next generation so that they can gain the wisdom that is needed to move forward with the company?

Interviewee: That’s a great question and one of the things that can help is sharing that

Ethan story that I shared with you and the key to look at is Ethan had been computing since for decades and decades way before Ethan and Audrey were ever born, way of decades before they were born as a matter of fact yet I don’t think like that. You see when I was growing up a toaster wasn’t technology it was a thing it is called the toaster, to them an advanced photo realistic interspacial collaborative tool we are talking about a video game is a toaster. I don’t think like them, they don’t think like me, they don’t have my experience.

So I begot something that they can’t get I have got knowledge and wisdom based on decades of experience, you can’t take a seminar on knowledge and wisdom and walk away with anything that if you are older is your gold mine but you also don’t have what they have and that is new knowledge and a new perspective about technology and what it can do. So use those two things, those two realities is a way to find the perfect fit. I have got the knowledge and the experience that’s my plus if I’m older but I have to also realize my negative and that is I don’t have the young persons perspective about technology, I don’t even know all of it, so if I can admit to my weaknesses as well as my strength and they can admit their weakness and their strength we have a perfect fit.

Interviewer: An interesting question came up about clarifying the future of renewable

resources and whether or not…. Because there is so much information available about that right now and I think there are some people that are now listening [IB] uncertain about what to believe what not to believe, where we are headed with renewable energy. Do you have any comment on where we are headed with that and what the trends maybe.

Interviewee: Yeah it’s first of all the future is not an easy road to both hands which

means there is a bright future for hydro carbons because we have an increasing need for energy thanks to India, China and the developing world and a huge middle class that’s being created. At the same time we



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need so much more energy and we need to do it in a much better way that we have transformation helping us to use alternative fields and alternative energies in new and amazing ways. I have written quite a bit in Flash Foresight in my book about what we can do and how we can revolutionize energy and energy production and if you are interested in more detail and I have just a few minutes to answer this question definitely take a look at the book. But what I can say is I’m very optimistic about it because if we got a damn grid it’s hard to get things to work well together and right now our grid is slowly becoming smart and we will of course need to speed that up because we have to. If you look at countries like China several years back, they were chocking on their own smug and all of those things that they were doing and when you get to certain level of crisis management, chocking on your own smug you probably realize that we are killing ourselves and we are going to have to be more green. Now China very quickly has done the modifications becoming one of the most green places you can be quite because if they don’t they are not going to be around.

So unfortunately it’s coming from crisis management but we are waking up globally to the fact that we have to be green and we have to use alternative energies but we have to do them in a smart way. So I think what you are going to see is a little good breakthroughs and they are based on hard trends, we don’t have the time to go through them right now but I am very optimistic about the integration from the old and the new types of fields integrating in, in a proper way with alternative fields and alternative energy that we will consider green to give us an overall better green effect.

Interviewer: The question about seeing the invisible, one of the keys to that is gaining

perspective from outside. Do you have suggestions about how to reach a different or broader perspective when you have a management in place that is very focused on now and what the current deliverables are for the organization?

Interviewee: Yeah absolutely. You know the, first of all there is nothing more powerful

than certainty and if you are going in and talking to upper management if you are not or the CEO if you are not the CEO yourself and or you are trying to sell something to somebody certainty is unbelievably powerful because we call agree on it. So if before having that conversation we ask what are the hard trends, what are the certainties that we know. And then you look at your agenda and what you are talking about and making sure that it’s relevant based on those hard trend and then you go in and discuss it using the certainties as a framework for that discussion. You can sell things very easily and you can persuade people’s decisions because you do



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not have debate. I mean again I’ve been probably a surveyed post to 100,000 people this last year and I was getting 100% of people from different countries, I’ve got 100% of people on this country of democrats or republicans on the same room all in full agreement on hard trend after hard trend after hard trend. In full agreement and it is you the people that don’t agree with each other on anything. And that’s what happening, they are not agreeing with each other. You see it’s unbelievably powerful to do that.

One other thing on the invisible visible that you asked, we only hard so much time in this conference that we have together and I’ve got seven principles in the book that make the invisible visible which gives you the ability to do what you think might have been impossible because impossible things are done by looking where you are not looking so see what you are not seeing. Impossible things are done because you see an opportunity or a solution to a problem that might have seemed impossible and that gives you that flash of foresight letting you go forward. Let me give you a very quick example of one that I didn’t cover just to give you a teaser for the fact that there are seven principles that make the invisible visible letting you do impossible things and go forward in new ways in the book. So here is a new one; real quick one, to give you some…and that is take your biggest problem and skip it. See right now you’ve got a major problem in front of you and why do you have trouble with that problem? See here’s it; whatever problem you’ve got that’s not it, you are working on the wrong one. You need to be looking and peeling it back and then you need to find the right one. A quick example I like to share is Eli Lilly, a couple of quite a few years ago actually they came to me and said we had a problem, right a way I had an advantage, I knew whatever they were going to say, that wasn’t it and they said the problem is they are going to hire 2000 additional Ph.D researchers to solve on molecular problems so that we can get more drugs in the pipeline so that we can get our stock price up. But we don’t have the budget for those researchers. So then I invoke the principle, good let’s skip that. What did they do? They put their molecular problems on the internet in a dozen languages and said we paid for solutions. Now they’ve got thousands and thousands of researchers around the world submitting solutions to their molecular problems and Ely Lilly just buys the ones they want to buy. The point is having a budget to hire researchers wasn’t the real problem it was solving molecular problems and there is other ways to do it. So that is just a very, very quick 60 second example of another one of the principles on the book and if you haven’t read the book yet, I think you will like how that makes the invisible visible for you.



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Interviewer: A great time for maybe one or two more questions and one I think we

needed a cover, there’s one that came in from a listener who works in a city council for a small municipality that is currently experiencing some financial difficulties and needs to find additional streams of income. He brings up the fact that in the book you relay the story about an elementary school and it’s use of computing power as a way to gain revenue. Would you mind kind of clarifying that for the audience and giving a little perspective about that?

Interviewee: Yeah I mean once again it’s about invisible visible. So this was Michigan

school district and I was asked to, first of all they said “we’ve got a problem and we’ve got to lay off teachers, we’ve got to get rid of band and course and we may even have to get rid of sports and we can’t get any money” so I said “well how do you get money?” And they said “well, what we do is we get money here from the state or from the government and you know I mean that’s how we…and the taxpayers, that’s how we get our money but we don’t have enough.” And I said “well you know, why don’t we do the opposite because that’s another principle to make the invisible visible, why don’t we make money?” I said “your schools are really close to a major airport here in Michigan,” why don’t we put some advertising on the top of the schools on the roof so the people can see it flying over and instead of putting objectionable advertising up there that parents may not like, let’s put positive things up there that they would not object to. They did that to start bringing an income. And then since this is a very large school district I said, “How many computers do you have in the school district?” and out of course there were thousands and thousands and I said “what are they doing at night while they are all turned off?” I said “why don’t do the opposite” since again that’s one of the principles that I share in the book and the opposite is “let’s leave them on at night and let’s…we use some free software that allows us to link all of these computers into one big giant computer, it’s called the supercomputer and let’s then lease out that supercomputer time to a drug company trying to cure diseases.” They did that and created over a six figure stream of income coming in just using their turned off computers leaving them turned on at night. So in other words all of a sudden they had money.

If we think that the problem is insolvable, we think that we are stuck, we are only stuck because we are really not looking at what’s the real problem so getting back to helping us and this person that asked the question, whatever problem you’ve got that’s not it, you don’t have…most people would say their problem their problem is money, that’s never it. Peel it



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down, ask two or three or four [IB], go down a couple of notches, you will find the real problem and then you can stop it.

Interviewer: I think we’ll close with the question about taking the results of what one

finds when doing this analysis and moving to that next stage, can you talk a little bit about getting a leadership group to go from whether it’s their current level of observation or the trend that they might be seeing to actually acting on them and moving forward. What are some of the keys to moving forward once the analysis has been done?

Interviewee: Well you have to get a vital feel. A big list never gets done and we get a

list of five of five or ten or fifteen things and they just can’t get done. I was just talking to a CEO of a company that’s in a 197 countries. In other words it’s a very big company and he said that he had his management team come together and they did something very neat I thought. He said, you know he had…he gave them all because they’d all read my book and were using it and he said we all had five cards with a key strategies on each of the five cards and what we did is we, our task was to eliminate one card.

So we had to negotiate to eliminate that one, one of the cards because there was too big a list there and they did and he said it was a very positive process, it really was insightful because people had to negotiate and in that effect some people were willing to go down to three strategies but they were going to do so because somebody else had one that was so important they would ordinarily give up but he shared with me that there is still as too many to do, we don’t have that much time, we don’t have that big a budget. I mean even though we are a big company and we’ve got Wall Street to worry about, we’ve got to make our numbers and he said, “The frustration is we still have too much that we want to do.” So what I did is I said “alright, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to take all the cards [that won]” That was the one thing that you could do, that would give you the biggest impact and he knew exactly what it was. Well why don’t we do that first?

So instead of trying to do 10 things, 20 things, 30 things, why only try to pick the biggest things, the one thing, the lowest thing [filled] with the biggest pay off. Do that because success brings success and then go to another one. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Interviewer: Before we wrap up today folks I’d like to let everyone know about a very

special offer for you courtesy of our guest Daniel Burrus, he is offering a six month free trial of his TechnoTrend newsletter, now on it’s 27th year,



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each issue features a column written by Daniel that offers readers innovative strategies for the creative application of new and emerging technologies. If you would like to get your free trial you can look for instructions in the follow up email that you will receive in three to five business days from Soundview. And Daniel before we go why don’t you let…in addition to burrus.com why don’t you let everyone knows where they can find you online?

Interviewee: Well burrus.com is great, B-U-R-R-US also the book flashforesight.com is

a place that you can go and let me just mention about that newsletter. That is a newsletter that we do charge for, it’s been in publication as you said for 27 years and we are giving you a free subscription for being part of this and I think you’ll like it because we’ve got people who’ve been subscribing for a long, long time.

Interviewer: And again that free six months subscription is available, look for the

instructions in the follow up email that you will receive in three to five business days. Daniel, thank you so much for being with us today.

Interviewee: My pleasure. Interviewer: We would like to thank Daniel Burrus for appearing on Soundview Live,

thank you all of you today for participating, you sent us so many questions and all of them were fantastic. Special thanks go to Ursula Sharp, the executive producer of Soundview Live. [Join us] next week on Tuesday, November 22nd at noon eastern for our next program, I guess we will be consulting an executive coach Derrick Miles for presenting Utilizing Your Gifts for Superhuman Performance. Now remember if you are a Soundview Subscriber you can attend Soundview Live for free for subscription information and to sign up for the next installment of Soundview Live, visit Soundview’s website summary.com, that’s S-U-M-M-A-R-Y dot com. Soundview Live is a production of Soundview Executive Book Summaries, a division of Concentrated Knowledge Corporation. This program is copyrighted 2011, Concentrated Knowledge Corporation. For Soundview Executive Book Summaries, my name is Andrew Clancy, thank you and have a great day.

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