May 13, 2020 | Anticipation, COVID-19, Mega Trends, Perpendicular Thinking, Social Commentary, Strategy, Thinking Tools
Photo by Alok Sharma on Unsplash We live in the world C-19 has permanently changed. We need to pivot now from a crisis mindset to a coexistence one. Next, we’ll need to figure out how to capitalize on it. In early March (after SXSW was canceled, before the NBA shut...
Apr 22, 2020 | Anticipation, COVID-19, Mega Trends, Modern Life, Social Commentary
I’ve been thinking a lot about how this current phase of the pandemic – and the one that follows – will change us. Unfortunately, I don’t think that we are close to returning to normal. We are instead, to borrow a Churchillian turn of phrase, reaching the...
Mar 31, 2020 | Anticipation, Mega Trends, Modern Life, News, Perpendicular Thinking, Social Commentary, Strategy, Thinking Tools
Photo by Joshua Brown on Unsplash Are you surprised that the whole US economic system has essentially collapsed in a matter of weeks? I am. This is an enormously disruptive shock, to be fair. But the speed with which the health of the American economy has gone from...
Mar 9, 2020 | Anticipation, Mega Trends, Social Commentary, Strategy
Everyone is comparing COVID-19 to 1918 and the Spanish Flu. But I think that the better historical analogy is a century earlier, in 1816. Photo by Jared Murray on Unsplash I went to see a theatrical rendition of “Frankenstein” with a friend last night – in part...
Feb 11, 2020 | Acceleration, Habits, Lifelong Learning, Productivity
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash Did you know that there is a Japanese word for buying books that you don’t read? This habit – one that I exhibit, sadly – is actually so universal that they created a term for it: 積ん読 or tsundoku. It combines the words...