Food Equity, the Pandemic, and the Future of Public Health with expert Smriti Kirubanandan

My guest in this episode is Smriti Kirubanandan, a multi-talented computer scientist, robotics and public health expert, and a Certified Raw Vegan Chef and Nutritionist.  We take a deep dive into public health issues, the impact of disinformation, and the role of food equity.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Business Isn't Always about Business

We live and die in a transparent and networked world.  A world that is one invasion and/or viral video away from completely changing the market and business climate for a company.  In 2020 I wrote an article titled, Swarming and the Need for a Chief Values Officer, where I stated,  "The key to winning in a network of swarming consumers is to strategically be swarmed for good reasons.  It’s about being recognized for the societal good your organization is doing as demonstrated by purpose-driven advocacy and practiced values."  Today, under the dark clouds of war and senseless violence, it is all the more important to be recognized for your "practiced values."

In just the first two weeks of Russia's unconscionable invasion and continuing attack on Ukraine, over 300 large multinational companies announced they were restricting business and pulling out of Russia.  The companies that are still doing business with Russia will increasingly be shamed by their customers, employees, shareholders and history. 

Will Force Win Wills?

Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before - or to self-destruct. ~ Future of Life Institute 

As Russian military forces invaded the Ukraine in an unconscionable act of violence and devastation, their armies of social media operators joined in and were deployed to the internet to digitally influence the opinions and will of the world watching in horror.  The goal of these operators was to influence their own people to support their aggressions through disinformation, while demoralizing their adversaries, and confusing a worldwide audience with disinformation to prevent them from acting or interfering.

Kyle Chayka recently wrote in the New Yorker, “the invasion of Ukraine is by no means the first conflict to play out over social media, but it is perhaps the first war to be mediated primarily by content creators and live-streamers rather than by traditional news organizations.”  Because social media operators are now the major source of news for many if not most, this has become a hugely important and strategic digital battlefield.   

Tectonic Shifts Leading Us to Tomorrow with Futurist David Espindola

Our guest today, futurist and strategy expert David Espindola, wrote a provocative article a few weeks ago with the title, "Tectonic Shifts, Ten Transformations that Will Profoundly Impact Humanity." In this interview, we ask him to defend both his views on the future and his recommended paths to get there.

Article Link: https://davidespindola.com/tectonic-shifts-ten-transformations-that-will-profoundly-impact-humanity/   

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Wordle, French Toast and Hyper-Connected Ecosystems with Expert Dev Mukherjee

In this episode, ecosystem strategies expert Dev Mukherjee shares his insights and knowledge about hyperconnected ecosystems, leadership strategies, garage door openers, french toast and Wordle. 

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Abundant Public Data Impacts Modern Warfare

My last article was about leadership decision-making processes - where the trifecta of achieving better understanding, making better decisions, and taking better actions leads to better outcomes.  The first part, "achieving better understandings," is evolving at a speed we have never before witnessed as a result of sensors, satellites, smartphones, GPS, social media platforms, AI, big data, analytics and more.  We will spotlight some of these that made the news this week in the tragic events in the Ukraine.

Russia's unconscionable invasion of Ukraine demonstrated in real-time how the widespread use of commercial satellite imagery and sensors and the reporting of massive volumes of public data can impact world events. As an example, Google Maps is likely to have shown the Russian invasion before it became public.  The Observer published this description of the event, "Google Maps’ live traffic data was believed to have indicated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine before the news broke. On Thursday, Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, noticed an unusual “traffic jam” at 3:15 a.m.—way too early for rush hour—in Russia’s Belgorod city, near the Ukraine border."

Decision-Making, Complexity, Kill Chains and OODA

New Technologies are important, but not as important as new thinking. ~ Christian Brose

Today, it is more critical than ever for our leaders to understand how to make good decisions, fast. They must understand in a formal way what that takes. Leaders must have an optimized information logistics system that can help them gain an understanding of what is happening around them as fast as possible.  Any kind of friction that delays relevant information from being captured, transmitted, analyzed and reported hinders the ability to make decisions and act (decision-action loop).

The Physics of Business: The Speed Impact

When I talk with business leaders and hear their challenges, speed, and issues around speed, always comes up.  In this short animated-reading, I share the importance and impact of speed on businesses today.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Navigating to the Future

The problem with the future lies in its navigation system.  Let me explain.  In my Jeep’s navigation system, I put in my destination and it efficiently proposes routes (preferably over mountains and rivers. The future, however, uses different inputs.  It takes inputs from innovations in science and technology, and mixes them with developments in the societal, geopolitical and economic domains, adds fast changing consumer preferences and behaviors, VC investments, profit motivations, and then sprinkles in some additional earth-shaking catalysts like depressions, wars, pandemics, insurrections, and economic crisis.  Where will that navigation system take us?  Who knows!?  You can see why it’s a fool’s errand to make predictions about the future.

The future’s navigation system is either broken, or we just don’t know how to use it.  It seems to lack a key field – a destination field.  A field where we can specify a place we want to go where humans flourish, develop in healthy ways, in a favorable environment and that is filled with abundance and joy.  If we can find that input field, we should add that destination!

Many of us have given up on navigating to our desired future.  We’ve stopped trying and turned our attention to learning how to best react to whatever comes along on the road to nowhere.  As chaotic and complex as our world is, that still doesn’t seem to be our best option.  As stewards of our civilization and our children’s future, it seems having a desired destination where humans flourish, and choosing the most efficient, equitable and safe routes to get us there would still be in everyone’s best interest.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Optimistic Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Inevitable Minimization of Human Decision-Making

In the near future, many jobs that are accomplished today by humans will be done by sensors, software, and machines.  These include jobs where responsibilities involve inspections, measuring, monitoring, tracking, adjusting, analyzing, moving things and tactical decision-making.  Many of these jobs are tedious or dangerous and having machines take over will be a positive development.  For example, the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense recently announced plans for an Amazon-style delivery service in combat zones that will be operated by autonomous robots with air and ground capabilities.  Future Force Development leader Maj. Matt McGarvey-Miles shared that, "Robotic and autonomous system capabilities will play an increasing role in delivering “deployed sustainment” [supplies to troops] in the near-future."  These frontline delivery robots won’t just know a soldier’s static address, but where they are located in real-time while moving in combat zones.  That capability requires sophisticated algorithms and secure real-time GPS-style navigation capabilities.

In addition to autonomous delivery services in combat environments, robots will increasingly be assigned to support soldiers in the most dangerous missions which are often found in complex urban combat environments.  Robots can be used to pick-up and transport the wounded, remove doors, provide access inside buildings, and be the first to enter and surveil a room in combat conditions.  Knowledge is power, and once the robot(s) inform troops about the dangers and resistance they might face, then humans can take the appropriate defensive and offensive countermeasures.

Ecosystems, Automation and Interdependent Capabilities

Ecosystem business strategies involve emerging, changing, and evolving patterns of interdependence between businesses, which are designed to maximize the value of working together. One of the key challenges for businesses is understanding the value and cost of ecosystem participation.  For example, Amazon provides the following illustrative list of value drivers to participating sellers in their ecosystem:

• Marketplace for B2C and B2B

• 300 million active users (potential customers)

• 1.5 million active sellers (vibrant market)

• 353 million listed products

• Instant and automated website

• Storage of inventory

• Shipping services

• Customer service

• Returns management

• Shipment tracking

• Marketing services

• International product sales

• Secure payment systems and processes (B2C/B2B)

• Banking services (credit/debit cards, corporate line of credit, expense management)

• Web Services

Innovation for the Purpose of Human Flourishing

We are drawn to profits like a moth to a flame.  Although the window of opportunity for humans to flourish may be open, we turn away away away to chase the dollar.

We have lived through the invention, innovation and evolution of social media which could have united us in friendship, kindness, love, and compassion, but used it to create social conflict, agitation, divisiveness, disinformation, mistrust, depression in our kids, and to weaken our democracy and diminish our ability to respond to a global pandemic with a unified front.  All for the purpose of generating increasing profits.

We are witnessing the deployment of low-cost lethal drones that can swarm, follow, and attack a person silently from the air using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and lethal weapons.   These are developed and sold in the pursuit of profits.  Profits don’t respect borders, and these technologies will soon be available to be purchased by all - a fearful thought.

Ecosystem Strategies with Dr. Ron Adner

An understanding of ecosystem strategies is required for every business leader today.  It involves a new way of thinking - a new mindset.  There are massive opportunities for new businesses, processes and innovations to be created by connecting together new and different combinations of data rich businesses into new value creation engines.  In this interview with author Dr. Ron Adner, we take a deep dive into ecosystem strategies.  Enjoy!

For more insight read the article Ecosystem Business Strategies.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Ecosystem Business Strategies

It seems business leaders today must recognize and implement two distinct kinds of business strategies.  One strategy for well established businesses in traditional industries designed to maximize efficient operations.  The other is ecosystem business strategies required for innovative, fast transforming and emerging business environments.

In the traditional automobile manufacturing industry, competitors and suppliers were well known and competition was mostly centered around incremental design changes and improving efficiencies.  Today electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers often use new and different supply chain ecosystems, and are just as likely to emerge out of Silicon Valley as Michigan.  

Giving Our Own Moral Codes to Robots

In military and other time sensitive environments the ability to shorten, or compress the time it takes to gather relevant information, make a decision and then act on it is critical.  For that reason, no matter how concerned people are about introducing artificial intelligence, automation and robots onto the battlefield, it will happen.  

Already today, inexpensive swarms of commercial drones supported by open source software and algorithms, high definition cameras and commonly available weapons can be launched by the dozens to attack predesignated targets.  The low costs of these attack drones guarantee that large numbers will be used to overwhelm slow, human dependent defense strategies and responses.  These vulnerabilities today ensure that automated defense systems will need to be employed in the future.  The speed and complexity of an offense dictates what is required of a defense.

Starting at the Finish Line

Starting at the finish line

Every futurist I know seems to be emphasizing that the speed of change is accelerating.  Are you hearing the same thing?  Have you ever pondered why that might be the case?  There are many reasons given including the famous phrase by Marc Andreessen, "Software is eating the world," so in this article we will touch on a few additional ones.

Let's start by considering a line of automated robots building vehicles on an assembly line.  If the manufacturer needs to scale up and produce more vehicles they simply deploy more robots with all necessary best practices and instructions pre-loaded.  There is no long recruitment, training, experience and probation period required. The robots are optimized on day one.  This example represents an ability to introduce change much faster than in the past as digital automation provides far more agility.

Another reason change can be accelerated is that once institutional knowledge is captured, codified and algorithms developed there are near-zero costs to duplicating and distributing them anywhere around the world.  Instantly best practices from Europe or Asia can be uploaded to systems anywhere and the benefits of the digitized knowledge utilized.  There is no need to start from the beginning again in a different location - when you can simply start at the finish line.  

The Future of Climate Risk with Expert Stephen Bennett

Each of us are experiencing the effects of extreme weather, so I reached out to Stephen Bennett, the Chief Climate Officer and Co-Founder of The Demex Group to learn how businesses and markets should strategically think about and adapt to them. A fascinating interview!

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

An Optimistic Futurist

At any given moment, there are events within our control and out of our control.  There are areas we can influence, and areas we cannot.  As an optimistic futurist, I read and analyze the positive with the negative, and then I seek opportunities to influence a positive outcome. 

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a timely point of reference.  I read all the distressing news and projections like everyone else, and then look for opportunities to both mitigate the risk and to achieve the best possible outcomes.  

Imagine if you would sitting in a canoe full of your dearest family members.  The canoe is drifting quickly toward a dangerous waterfall.  Our choices are to focus on all the possible negative future scenarios of going over the waterfall, or focusing on influencing a positive outcome.  What will it be?

We need the clarity and wisdom of recognizing all the possible negative scenarios and consequences, but once we have that recognition, we should focus on shaping the outcome to something purposely positive.  Wouldn’t you agree?  Some might say futurist are better off being objective spectators, but I want a futurist to throw me a rope.

Doomsday futurist are often secretly hopeful they’ve got it right.  They sit back and wait for the canoe to go over the waterfall...as they predicted.  Optimistic futurist, identify, reverse engineer and rehearse both positive and negative possible future scenarios to learn what needs to be done today to purposefully influence our path to achieve the best possible outcome.

Future

My Futurist boss here at TCS, Frank Diana, always says, “It is impossible to predict the future - anyone who tries is on a fool's errand.”  There are simply too many building blocks of the future including, science, technology, societal, geopolitical and economic converging together, plus catalysts of change (think pandemic), mixed into this giant pot of stew we call the future.  Exactly what comes out can be guessed at, but not predicted.  At best we can identify a range of possible and plausible future scenarios to consider and rehearse. 

Given that we can’t predict the future - let’s identify the future we want and do everything possible and purposeful to achieve it.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Future of Safety

In this interview with Autoliv's expert, Christoffer Malm, we take a deep dive into the Future of Safety.  We explore the role of digital services and how they have created a revolution in safety, not just inside vehicles, but for all vulnerable road users.  

The complexity of our journeys is increasing.  We might take an e-bike to a train station, then take a train into the city, then we take an e-scooter into work.  On the way back we might take an Uber to the train station, or ride an electric unicycle or skateboard.  All of these modes of transportation need traditional and physical safety systems and digital safety systems protecting us.   

Join us as we dive into the future of safety.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

A Plausible Future for Higher Education with Expert Dr. Paul J. Bailo

In this episode, I explore the future of higher education with expert and Adjunct Professor Dr. Paul J. Bailo.  I present him with 16 different future scenarios and ask if they are possible, plausible, impossible or implausible.  Join us for some deep thinking, insight, laughter, and a look into the future.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

A Review of TCS's 2021 Global Financial Leadership Report with Expert Paul J. Bailo

In this episode, we take a deep dive into TCS's newly released 2021 Financial Leadership Study and discuss its implications with financial expert and professor Dr. Paul Bailo.

The full report is available to read here.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Future is Where Everything Happens!

A rip current is a strong flow of water that pulls floating objects out to sea before dissipating in deeper water.  Swimmers who are caught in a rip current often panic and exhaust themselves by trying to swim directly against the flow of water, rather than with it.  The future is not unlike a rip current.  If you fight against the future you will exhaust yourself and ultimately fail.  

Change is uncomfortable, and time brings change.  Many people have a deep resentment against time and all the changes it brings.  These people often look at the future with dread.  All they can see coming is a rising tsunami of change and discomfort - physical, mental and emotional.  They point to today's problems as examples of what yesterday's future brought, and they don't want any more of it.  Often, people don't realize that the seeds of the changes we see today were planted long ago.  It is the past that brought us to today - for good and for bad.

It is the season of planning.  We are all busy looking ahead and planning for 2022.  The reason I get so excited about the future is we can influence it for good.  We can improve upon the past.  It's our opportunity for a next version - a version 2.0.  We can't change the past, but the future is our's.  What is our life's purpose anyhow, if it is not to build a better tomorrow?

Innovating, inventing, planning, creating, designing, developing, growing, starting, birthing and building are all future oriented terms.  They point to what is to come.  The future is a new place.  Let's bring forward from the past all that is good and improve on the bad.  Let's all work together for good so the future can be our gift to generations to come.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Leadership Advice from a Futurist - A Reading

Leadership is hard.  So for all the leaders and want-to-be leaders out there, here is some advice that I hope you will find useful.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Intelligent Customer Experiences With Verint CMO, Celia Fleischaker

In this episode of FOBtv we explore the evolution of marketing and customer experiences and dig deep into the concept of intelligent customer experiences with Verint's CMO Celia Fleischaker.  We explore the role of AI, NLP, chatbots, ML, and the other technologies involved and how these all contribute to a better customer experience.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.