Looking to the next decade: excerpts from Global Business Network conversations - What's Next? - technology and culture - Brief Article

The musings that follow began as material for the 2001 Annual Forum of GBN, the global membership organization for thinking collaboratively about the future and developing tools for organizational learning and innovation. The 2001 Forum generated scenarios around significant shifts in the world that might radically affect the business environment of the next decade.

In preparation, GBN "knowledge developer" Pete Leyden interviewed thirty GBN members and other luminaries, asking "what should global businesses be watching for, learning about, and doing differently in the next ten years?" GBN members received summaries last fall. We are grateful for permission to choose and reprint this selection.

GBN is posting complete transcripts on its website, www.gbn.com, over the coming months. Readers of the transcripts found them so helpful that Pete is continuing to interview members. The transcripts will be edited into a book, What's Next: Exploring the New Terrain for Business, to be published late this summer by Perseus in North America and John Wiley & Sons in the UK/Commonwealth. Readers will notice that there's only one woman in this group. 6BN staff assure us that women will be better represented in the book.

Reviewing the interview transcripts, GBN's editors extracted common themes and patterns emerging from them. Here are some of the highlights:

* If the nineties were shaped by technology and markets, then the coming decade will be more about people, culture, and society. Given the relatively slow pace of cultural change, continued friction is likely, especially as values re-emerge--and collide--in public debates over biotech and common global issues.

* Technology will nonetheless continue to have a transformative impact, driven in the short term by expanding computer and telecommunications capabilities. In the longer term expect mutually accelerating benefits from technological and scientific advances in photonics, biotech, nanotech, energy, and neuroscience.

* The current economic downturn is worthy of concern, but not panic, when viewed in a longer-term context. To some extent, the dot-com and stock market woes reflect different time expectations among techies, entrepreneurs, and investors--especially concerning the adoption of new technologies and behaviors.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group