Like most industries, the manufacturing sector is transforming rapidly. Because of recent technological advances and globalization, U.S. manufacturing is facing intense international competition, increasing market volatility and complexity, a declining workforce, and a host of other challenges. Yet we know that in order to have a strong economy, we need a strong manufacturing base. So what’s the answer?

Today’s manufacturers must transform along with the rest of the world by adopting six advanced Next Generation Manufacturing principles. They are:

1. Anticipate customer needs: Look at your customers’ future and focus on what you DO know rather than what you don’t know. Ask, “What are the hard trends, the things that will happen, versus the things that might happen? What are the industries that are converging around our customers that our customers currently don’t see?” Then you can start seeing both needs and opportunities before they happen.
2. Innovate around the core: What are your core competencies? Are you still using your core competencies? In the past, manufacturers could go decades between innovations. That strategy doesn’t work anymore. Today you cannot just innovate now and then: to survive and thrive in a time of vertical change, you have to be innovating around your core competencies continuously. So what is your core, and are you using it?
3. Focus on collaboration: Collaboration is much different than cooperation. Cooperation is based on scarcity and it contains within it the assumption that your interests and mine are inherently in conflict; however, we will temporarily set aside those cross-purposes to find some cautious tactical common ground. In contrast, collaboration is when we co-create the future together. It’s about working with everyone else, even your competitors, to make a bigger pie for all. It’s based on abundance and requires working together under higher levels of trust and connectivity.
4. Pre-solve problems: The best way to avoid problems is to predict and pre-solve them. How? Use hard trends to look into the visible future and ask, “What are the problems that we can see based on anticipating customer needs?” Get that down to a short list that’s aligned with your core competencies. Then that’s where you focus because you can see which problems are coming. Additionally, look at your own company in the same manner to determine the problems you’re about to face. Solve them before they happen so they don’t occur in the midst of rapid change and transformation. That’s the only way to stay ahead of the curve.
5. Inform and communicate: Informing is one-way. It’s static and doesn’t always cause action. Communicating is two-way. It’s dynamic and usually causes action. Social media is a good example of engagement in communication, which is why it’s spreading so rapidly and becoming a business tool. Next generation manufacturers understand that you don’t just inform; you also communicate, develop that strategy, and move it out internally as well as externally.
6. Do continuous de-commoditization: The minute you come up with something new, a competitor will copy it. As they do so, your innovative product or service slowly becomes a commodity. The margins get thinner as time goes on. But instead of letting the margins get thinner and riding them down, you can wrap a service around a product or wrap a service around a service to add new value. You can think creatively about your product or service so you can repackage it, redefine it, revamp it, or somehow make it unique in the marketplace again. When you do continuous de-commoditization, you’ll find yourself with good margins and a growing business.

In a competitive global economy that is becoming more tightly connected every day, U.S. manufacturers can no longer do things the way they’ve always been done. Adopting these next generation manufacturing principles is the only way to obtain the talents, capabilities, and resources necessary to build a highly effective enterprise that thrives in a global marketplace.

Daniel Burrus

No matter what industry you’re in, your company can’t survive without technology. And these days, even non-technical employees know that technology goes way beyond desktop computers and networks. From smart phones and tablet computers to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there’s a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep track of, but also to profit from. To stay competitive, your organization needs to anticipate the future technology trends that are shaping your business and then develop innovative ways to implement them in your organization.

Now that 2012 is well underway, be ready for the following 20 technology-driven trends to continue to create both disruption and opportunity in the business world. But rather than just react to them, be pre-active to future known events and plan how your company will profit from them now. That’s the only way you’ll gain competitive advantage in the coming years.

1)    Rapid Growth of Big Data. Big Data is a term used to describe the technologies and techniques used to capture and utilize the exponentially increasing streams of data with the goal of bringing enterprise-wide visibility and insights to make rapid critical decisions. High Speed Analytics using advanced cloud services will increasingly be used as a complement to existing information management systems and programs to tame the massive data explosion. This new level of data integration and analytics will require many new skills and cross-functional buy-in in order to break down the many data and organizational silos that still exist. The rapid increase in data makes this a fast growing hard trend that cannot be ignored.

2)    Cloud Computing and Advanced Cloud Services will be increasingly embraced by business of all sizes, as this represents a major shift in how organizations obtain and maintain software, hardware, and computing capacity. As consumers, we first experienced public clouds (think about when you use Google or Apple’s MobileMe and now iCloud). Then we saw more private clouds and hybrid clouds from businesses such as Flextronics, Siemens, Accenture, and many others, all using the cloud to cut costs in human resources and sales management functions. This was only the beginning, as cloud services enable the rapid transformation all business processes.

3)    On Demand Services will increasingly be offered to companies needing to rapidly deploy new services. Hardware as a Service (HaaS) joins Software as a Service (SaaS), creating what some have called “IT as a service.” All will grow rapidly for small as well as large companies, with many new players in a multitude of business process categories. These services will help companies cut costs as they provide access to powerful software programs and the latest technology without having the expense of a large IT staff and time-consuming, expensive upgrades. As a result, IT departments in all industries will be increasingly freed to focus on enabling business process transformation, which will allow organizations to maximize their return on their technology investments.

4)    Virtualization of Storage, Desktops, Applications, and Networking will see continued acceptance and growth by both large and small businesses as virtualization security improves. We will continue to see the virtualization of processing power, allowing mobile devices to access supercomputer capabilities and apply it to processes such as purchasing and logistics, to name a few.

5)    Consumerization of IT Increases as the source for innovation and technology continues to be driven by the consumer thanks to rapid advances in processing power, storage, and bandwidth. Smart companies have recognized that this is a hard tend that will continue and have stopped fighting consumerization. Instead, they are turning it into a competitive advantage by consumerizing their applications, such as recommending safe and secure third party hardware and apps. Encouraging employees to share productivity enhancing consumer technology will become a wise strategy.

6)    Gamification of Training and Education will fuel a fast moving hard trend using advanced simulations and skill-based learning systems that are self-diagnostic, interactive, game-like, and competitive, all focused on giving the user an immersive experience thanks to a photo-realistic 3D interface. Some will develop software using these gaming techniques to work on existing hardware systems such as the Xbox and PlayStation. A social component that includes sharing will drive success.

7)    Social Business takes on a new level of urgency as organizations shift from an Information Age “informing” model to a Communication Age “communicating and engaging” model. Social Software for business will reach a new level of adoption with applications to enhance relationships, collaboration, networking, social validation, and more. Social Search will increasingly be used by marketers and researchers, not to mention Wall Street, to tap into millions of daily tweets and Facebook conversations, providing real-time analysis of many key consumer metrics.

8)    Smart Phones & Tablets Become Our Primary Personal Computers, and the Mobile Web becomes a must-have capability. An Enterprise Mobility Strategy Becomes Mandatory for all size organizations as we see mobile data, mobile media, mobile sales, mobile marketing, mobile commerce, mobile finance, mobile payments, mobile health, and many more explode. The vast majority of mobile phones sold globally will have a browser, making the smart phone our primary computer that is with us 24/7 and signaling a profound shift in global computing. This new level of mobility will allow any size business to transform how they market, sell, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, and innovate using mobility.

9)    Tablet Computers with Enterprise Level Web Apps will be used to transform sales and service support and then move to purchasing, logistics, just-in-time training, and much more.

10) Intelligent Electronic Agents using natural language voice commands takes off with Apple’s Siri, rapidly followed by Android, Microsoft, and others all offering what will become a mobile electronic concierge on your smart devices including your phone, tablet, and television. Soon retailers will have a Siri-like sales assistant, and maintenance workers will have a Siri-like assistant. The possibilities are endless.

11) Digital Identity Management will become increasingly important to both organizations and individuals as new software allows users to better manage their multiple identities across business and personal networks. Next Generation Biometrics will play a key role in both identity management and security.

12) Visual Communications takes video conferencing to a new level with programs like SKYPE, FaceTime, and others giving us video communication on phones, tablets, and home televisions. Visual Communications will be integrated with current video conferencing systems, fueling this as a main relationship-building tool for businesses of all sizes.

13) Enhanced Location Awareness will accelerate the number of business-to-consumer apps for smart phones and tablets that will take geo-social marketing and sales to a new level of creative application, driving rapid growth.

14) Geo-Spatial Visualization combines geographic information systems (GIS) with location-aware data, RFID (radio frequency identification), and other location-aware sensors (including the current location of users from the use of their mobile devices) to create new insights and competitive advantage. Early applications include logistics and supply chain to name a few.

15) Smart TV Using Apps will get a major boost in the marketplace, fueling a major shift in home viewing. Ever wonder how you could have over 500 cable or satellite channels and nothing to watch? You didn’t have apps on your TV allowing you to personalize the experience. This is the beginning of a major shift that will take place in living rooms globally. Look for Apple to introduce the iTV (living room size iPad).

16) Multiple App Stores for all smart phone, tablet, and television operating systems (Android, Blackberry, Windows, and others) will take off, creating an abundant distribution and sales ecosystem for all. This will cement the revolution versus evolution that apps software represents. We will see business app stores for the enterprise starting this year.

17) 3D Displays for Smart Phones and Tablets will be the breakthrough that will drive wide-scale consumer acceptance of 3D computing. 3D Computing for the enterprise will grow rapidly for military, medicine, fashion, architecture, and entertainment applications.

18) eBooks, eNewspapers, and eMagazines Pass the Tipping Point due to the abundance of smartphones with readable displays, tablets that provide a full color experience, and publishers providing apps that give a better than paper experience by including cut, copy, paste, print, and multimedia capabilities. In addition, eBook readers will have high quality with a low enough price to bring in the masses.

19) Interactive Multimedia eTextbooks will finally take off thanks to Apple’s iBook Author and other competing tools, freeing new publishers to create compelling and engaging content, and freeing students from a static, expensive, and literally heavy experience.

20) Wireless Machine-to-Machine applications such as two-way meter reading, surveillance, vending machine, and point-of-sale solutions take off thanks to faster wireless data networks.

Spot Your Own Trends

Are these the only technology-driven trends for 2012 to be aware of? Of course not. As we all know from past experience, technology is always evolving, resulting in new trends emerging and new products appearing every day. That’s why smart organizations stay ahead of the trends by anticipating them, adapting them to their unique environment before the competition does, and ultimately enabling the organization to profit from them. The more you’re able to do that, the sooner your organizations will reach the next level of success.

Polaroid—the company that has been teetering on the brink of extinction for a while now—recently came out with a new digital camera powered by Android. I think that’s a good move, but they’re a little late to the game in doing it.

If you remember those old Polaroid cameras, they were all about instant photography and photo sharing. You’d take the picture and it would print out from the camera, right on the spot, and you could share it with a friend.

But somehow, Polaroid missed the shift to digital and stayed with their analog model way too long. That’s why most people don’t own anything by Polaroid anymore.

In reality, Polaroid should have owned digital photography, because the digital revolution was easy to see. In fact, it was here long before the first cell phones. I know this for a fact because I was writing about digital photography as early as 1983. Unfortunately, Polaroid didn’t see digital photography as a hard trend; they saw it as a soft trend. Remember, hard trends will happen; soft trends might happen.

Because Polaroid failed to see digital photography for what it really was, today they’re playing a big catch-up game. And even with their latest release, they still have a lot of catching up to do. Their newest release, The Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera, features a high definition 16 megapixel camera with built in 3X optical zoom, touch screen display, and Wi-Fi, making uploads to social networks as easy as the touch of a button. But let’s face it…every Android phone has a camera. Every iPhone has a camera. So what they’re really giving us here is a little better lens and a zoom, which the smart phones can do now in a digital way as well.

Do we have a lot of innovation taking place here from Polaroid? No. It sounds good and it looks good. But in reality, they aren’t offering anything most people haven’t already owned for quite a while. It just didn’t have the Polaroid name on it.

So from a technology futurist’s point of view, Polaroid has to stop playing catch up and start innovating if they want to reclaim their spot as the leader in photography sharing.

Daniel Burrus

We are definitely in the communication age.

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show took place January 10-13, and it helped reinforce the continuation of a hard trend that has been growing for a while now. Back in 1993 I predicted that we’d soon be shifting from the information age to the communication age. Informing is one-way, it’s static, and it doesn’t always cause action. Communicating is two-way, it’s dynamic, it’s engaging, and it causes action.

One way to tell which age we’re in is to look at our devices. Years ago we had things like the Apple Newton and the Palm. They were basic organizers with a calendar and address book—information age devices. At the time I commented, “When that thing becomes a phone, we’ll be entering the communication age.” Today we have that plus so much more.

First, we have social media, which is more about the word “social” than the word “media.” Because it’s social, it’s two way and communicative. And with social media, you get some powerful things that businesses like, primarily engagement and action. (And of course, people like being social too.)

Also, we like to create, connect, interact, and share. And at the 2012 CES, we saw devices that are allowing consumers to not just be passive receivers, as they have in the past, but that are taking hold of the ability to create, connect, interact, and share. Anything that involves the ability to create, connect, interact, or share is powerful. 

Here’s a simple example: Social media is a tool that’s being embedded into many things. So I can take a picture with my smart phone and post that picture to my Facebook page immediately. Using GPS, the smart phone knows where I am when I take this picture and it can link that information to the photo. Additionally, I can change the picture if I want to and make it look like a cartoon or erase something from the background. Now I’m creating, connecting, and interacting with the technology. And, more important, I’m sharing it, which is where the real communication comes in.

Here’s another, more complex, example: Suppose you have friends in New York, California, and Kansas, and you’ve all decided to lose weight together. You can have running shoes that have a chip in them. That chip is connected to your smart phone and keeps track of how much you’ve run. But that’s not all. You can also instantly share the information about your running progress with your friends who you are exercising with virtually. You can post updates and pictures and cheer each other on.

At CES, we saw that companies that are not allowing for the creating, connecting, interacting, and sharing, what I call the “communication age elements,” are the ones that are not doing well. Conversely, the ones that integrate those things and allow people to do them easily are the ones that are thriving.

Which of those two categories is your company in?

Daniel Burrus

As a keynote presenter, I fly a lot. And I’ve seen and experienced the many changes airlines have been making over the years, most of which haven’t been positive from a customer’s perspective.

Yet, even with all the changes and added fees airlines have been charging, from baggage fees to pillow fees, most are still struggling. For instance, American Airlines is in bankruptcy, and almost every airline has been merging because if they don’t merge they’re going into bankruptcy.

In fact, if we look back in history, most of the major and some of the minor airlines that are still around have been barely surviving. They like to blame high fuel costs for this, but that’s not the whole story. Unfortunately, the airlines are making sure that customers find little to like about them.

I spoke with a friend recently who did a cross country flight on a major airline, and his comment was, “The seats were so old on the plane. They had no cushion in them that it was completely uncomfortable the entire trip.” I’ve experienced these rock-hard seats too.

This is where airlines need to be anticipatory. The competitive advantage is not in doing what everyone else is doing—which in this case is raising fees and lowering value. The competitive advantage is going in the opposite direction.

All airlines actually have a huge opportunity to win customers back and gain advantage if they simply focus on solving their customers’ problems. For example, if an airline upgraded their seats to be comfortable, they could tell customers, “We’ve checked all of our planes and have gotten rid of those old, rock-hard seats. As a matter of fact, if you find a rock-hard seat, tell a steward right away. We’ll change it so you never get another one on this airline.”

By doing this one simple thing, the airline would be giving customers a voice—a voice of change. Even if I did sit in a rock-hard seat, I’d know I can tell someone and trust them to take care of it. I’d even use the airline again because they listened and promised to take action. And that’s all most customers want—to be heard and be a voice of change.

Thanks to social media, customers have a way to come together, state their case, and be heard. And we’ve seen that doing so actually works and causes change. So rather than protest in person, we can arrange an online protest to American, United, Delta, or any of the airlines that are doing things we don’t like. Just like physical protests such as the Occupy movement, virtual protests work too, as we saw with people protesting online about Bank of America’s proposal for a $5 monthly debit card fee.

In the long run, these types of virtual protests are a good idea, whether they are directed to an airline or a bank. Why? Because it gets companies to wake up and think more before acting. And from my experience, thinking before acting is always a good thing.

When President Obama became president, it was widely reported that he used social media and technology to help gain the momentum and the votes he needed.

Today, if we look at the republican candidates and their use of social media, we see that each has a lopsided social media strategy at best. In other words, someone might have a lot of Facebook activity, but not much on Twitter. One might have a lot of “likes” and another one may not have any “likes” because they don’t understand what “likes” do. Some of them have Facebook and Twitter, but they aren’t on YouTube.

For example, let’s look at frontrunner Mitt Romney. He has over 1.3 million Facebook “likes.” That’s powerful. But his Twitter followers are only around 200,000, and his You Tube subscribers are a measly 3,300 (as of this writing). So he’s doing great in one area, but where’s the rest?

The other candidates have a similar track record. They’re really good at one or two things, but there’s no overall, consistent social media strategy. I see the same challenge in the business community every day.

Here’s an important point for everyone to consider: Many people think social media is all about Facebook and/or maybe it’s all about Twitter, but it’s so much more than that. Facebook is the current leader under a certain category of social media. But realize that leaders come and go. Any leader is good for a certain period of time, but then someone else takes over.  Why?  Because technology shifts.

For example, when it came to search, Yahoo was the leader of search…until Google came along.

Now let’s talk social media. Social networking is a category. Who’s the current leader? Facebook. But Facebook wasn’t always the current leader. It used to be MySpace. You don’t hear about MySpace much anymore, but they were the big one until Facebook changed the game.

So could someone change the game on Facebook? Of course. Someone can change the game on Google, too, by the way.

The point is that there’s more than Facebook when it comes to social networking. Are you on the other social media sites? Do you even know what the other ones are? Here’s the short list of social media categories and their current leaders: The social networking leader is Facebook. The professional networking leader is LinkedIn. The blogging leader is WordPress. The micro-blogging leader is Twitter. The video sharing leader is YouTube. The photo sharing leader is Flickr. The crowd-sourced content leader is Reddit. The geo-social networking leader is 4Square.

As you can see, there are a number of categories. Are you looking at how you might be able to use those categories, or are you just picking the big ones in one or two categories?

Going back to the presidential candidates, it seems that none of them have a comprehensive, integrated, well-thought-through social media strategy at all. In fact, it seems they are really good at one or two social media platforms, but they haven’t found how to pull it all together and integrate them all into a powerful whole.

Here’s my prediction: The candidate who figures out how to create that well-rounded strategy, whether it’s the republicans or whether it’s the President, will get amazing momentum and tip the scale in his favor this November. The only variable is who that person will be.

Daniel Burrus

In the past few months, we’ve seen quite a few corporate reversals that have come about via social media. For example, Bank of America proposed charging customers a $5 monthly fee for using their debit card. It didn’t take long for a social media revolt from customers to get BOA to reverse that decision.

Most recently, Verizon Wireless announced they were going to charge customers a “convenience fee” for paying their bills online. That quickly was beaten down, again thanks to technology and social media allowing consumers to voice their opinions collectively.

Those are just two examples. The list of corporate reversals is long, from Netflix to Blackberry to Hewlett-Packard. So what’s really going on?

First, in a world filled with uncertainty, you have to ask what you are certain about? The number one thing I’m certain about is that the future is all about relationships. If you want a positive future, then you need to have positive relationships with your customers. And if you want positive relationships, you have to focus on the glue that holds a positive relationship together. What is that glue? It’s trust, which you earn through your values, such as honesty, integrity, delivering on promises, and so on.

Whenever you don’t consider trust when you take an action, you undermine the trust you have and can turn a positive relationship into a negative one. In the world of business, that means you lose your customers.

Unfortunately, I see many companies following the model of the airlines, where they charge additional fees for things that used to be included, such as baggage fees, food fees, pillow and blanket fees, etc. Wherever they can find a way to charge you, they’re doing it.

But ask yourself, “How much do customers like the airlines and appreciate those fees?” The answer: They don’t, because there is no added value to those fees.

So how do you win? Well, you don’t do it by following a losing model. Here’s a better approach: Before you implement any new product, service, or change in policy or procedure, ask yourself, “Where is trust, currently, between our company and our customers?” Then ask yourself, “If we implement this change in this way, what happens to trust?” If the answer is, “Trust will go down,” then don’t do it in that way.

Notice the words I used. I didn’t say “don’t do it.” I said, “Don’t do it in that way.” The insight is: It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it. It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. It’s not what you implement; it’s how you implement it. 

So the next question is: “How could we change how we say it, do it, implement it, or charge for it so that people would maintain trust?”

Too many times, companies just assume trust. Since it’s assumed, they don’t think about it. As a result, they implement things based on the bottom line figures without realizing their actions could be undermining trust and ultimately bankrupting the company.

So the real bottom line is this: Instead of acting out of profitability, let’s think first about growth, relationships, and trust. When you put trust first, the bottom line usually takes care of itself.

Customers have let it be known that they’re not going to accept new charges without added value in return. This post comes from Matt Brownell at partner site MainStreet.

When Verizon announced last week that it was imposing a new $2 fee for paying your bill online or over the phone, it probably thought the news would fly under the radar. After all, the announcement came during that dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, a time when many members of the media are on vacation and people are preoccupied with their New Year’s Eve plans. In that sense, it was the perfect time to drop the bad news with the minimal amount of controversy – or so the company perhaps thought.

Verizon customers revolted, with the news trending on Twitter and an online petition against the fee garnering upward of 50,000 signatures in a single day. The company quickly backtracked, canceling plans for the new feejust a day after the initial announcements.

Verizon’s timing may have been correct from a public relations perspective, but it badly misjudged the public’s mood. Specifically, the public really hates fees, and has the means and motivation to do something about it. We’ve already seen that once in the past year, when Bank of America canceled plans for a $5 debit card usage fee after weeks of customer outcry and closed accounts.

“What we’re seeing is an angrier, more defensive, more reactive consumer,” says Kit Yarrow, a professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University who specializes in consumer psychology. “And they have a voice now – they’ve never had the ability to connect with each other and facilitate change the way they do now.”

Yarrow says this new level of consumer push-back extends beyond just fees. But she says that fees in particular – whether for checked baggage at the airport or for using your checking account – have become saddled with an extremely negative connotation that should have many companies thinking twice about using fees instead of price hikes to raise revenue.

“Fee is now a four-letter word,” she says. “Consumers are much more resilient to price increases, as it logically makes sense to them that everything eventually costs a little more money.”

That doesn’t mean that fees should be completely off the table. Companies just need to implement fees in a way that doesn’t violate customers’ trust – a test Verizon utterly failed, says business strategist Daniel Burrus.

“They called it a convenience fee, and that’s a slap in the face,” he says. “Now they’re charging me to give them more convenience, while I have to do things that are inconvenient for it to cost less.”

Just as importantly, consumers need to feel that they are actually getting something in exchange for the fee. For example, Burrus points to an ATM fee that is announced alongside enhanced security features at the machines. That’s in contrast to Verizon’s attempt to charge for a service that had always been free, a move that didn’t pass the smell test for its customers.

“Companies need to find more honest and transparent ways of explaining why there are different price structures for different products,” says Yarrow. “It has to somehow make logical sense to consumers, because they’re paying attention now.”

Read the Original Article 

By Mary K. Pratt of Computerworld

Forecasts for IT hiring are almost universally predicting that project managers and business analysts will be in demand in 2012, but what about cloud transformation officers?

With big data, mobile computing, social media, cloud computing and the consumerization of IT all converging on IT in 2012, some new — and intriguing — job titles are beginning to emerge.

Computerworld went digging and unearthed a handful of positions you can expect to see popping up more and more — along with details on what you’ll need to land one of them. Read on, future chief agile officers.

Director of cloud transformation

As companies move from the client-server world to one where systems reside in the cloud, they’re hiring professionals to oversee the entire strategy, says Al Delattre, global industry lead for technology at Los Angeles recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International.

Whether the position’s called director of cloud transformation, vice president of virtualization or cloud transformation officer — all of those titles are floating out there in the corporate world — the job description remains roughly the same: Oversee all the moving parts required to make the move to the cloud, Delattre says.

“This position is like being a conductor of an orchestra. It’s a series of 500 projects over seven years. You have to make sure it works and it’s sequenced,” he says. “No one person is an expert on all of it,” which means multiple specialists are often involved — and that, in turn, spurs some companies to seek out an overseeing director.

Skills required

Delattre likens the move to the cloud to the big ERP projects that swept through organizations in the past decade or so. Now, as then, companies are looking to hire people who can show that they’ve been able to plan, control and deliver complex, high-risk projects involving technology that’s evolving even as the project is underway. “You’ve got to have that track record. You want someone who has landed on the moon and returned before,” Delattre says.

They’re also looking for deep knowledge of the organization’s applications. “You have to understand the parts you’re working with. You need to understand what’s in there now,” he says. “You need to know that [someone] might have put in a patch 10 years ago and never documented it.”

Finally, they’re looking for folks skilled in negotiating with and managing vendors. “There is absolutely a skill requirement around procurement, because so much of this is about procuring services,” says Delattre.

Once an organization successfully moves to the cloud, does the job go away? Given the complexity of the task, Delattre says, cloud transition managers can expect to stay busy for at least the next several years, before transitions are complete and the job morphs into one focused on maintenance.

“This is a two-to-five-to-seven-year run, similar to what happened when we went from mainframe to client server and then again when we went to the Web,” Delattre says.

Socialite

Companies of every size and stripe are implementing ever more ambitious strategies involving social media, so it’s only logical that they need technologists who can make the most of their investments, says Rachel Russell, director of marketing at Hanover, Md.-based IT staffing firm TekSystems.

Some of them are moving to hire people who understand both the marketing value of social media as well as its technical complexities — an acknowledgement that in most organizations social media has, up until now, been under the purview of either marketing or IT. Now, some are putting a new crossbreed of talent into positions with titles like chief social media strategist, new media coordinator, manager of social media and (less frequently) socialite.

“What you’ll see with these positions is a tie-in to strategy. Companies want someone who can help them understand and define what the strategy is; [someone to say] ‘Here’s what we want the social media strategy to be,’” says Matthew Ripaldi, senior vice president of IT staffing firm Modis in Jacksonville, Fla.

The role isn’t about sending out tweets and posting on Facebook all day, he clarifies. It’s about leveraging technology to monitor online activity and interactions and to engage consumers.

Skills required

Given all that, the ideal candidate is someone who has a strong background in business strategy and marketing with project management and business intelligence experience mixed in — and a technical background, with skills in HTML and Web rendering, Ripaldi says.

If that order weren’t tall enough, companies also want candidates with proven experience. Strong candidates would have solid experience in marketing and could demonstrate the ROI of their past marketing projects, Ripaldi says.

“When we’re interviewing IT professionals, we want to hear about what projects they worked on and what they did for the business: What business stakeholders did you work with? What were the challenges? If they can answer those, [we see that] they get what they’re doing,” Russell says.

In a move that may be welcome news to IT types, some organizations are going so far as to create more than one specialized social-media-oriented position. They’re hiring a high-level executive to develop a strategy and then hiring a midtier techie (as social media architect, engineer or developer) with skills in coding, HTML, website development, graphical user interfaces and search engine optimization.

Data scientist

Big data is on the agenda of nearly every future-looking operation, for good reason. “Organizations are drowning in the amount of data that comes in, but it’s all very siloed. People have the information, but they can’t find it,” says Daniel Burrus, founder and CEO of Burrus Research Associates in Hartland, Wis., and the author of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible.

So enterprises need a new breed of worker who understands how to collect, interpret and analyze vast amounts of data in a way that’s truly useful for making business decisions.

“There’s a huge explosion of consumer data, and every company that’s even close to a consumer market is trying to figure out what to do with all this data — to move it from data to insight to actionable items instantaneously,” says Korn/Ferry’s Delattre.

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By Daniel Burrus and John David Mann

Anyone who has kids—or who has been around them for any length of time—knows they are attracted to video games like moths to light. You might be tempted to think these young-uns are using their time idly.

In reality, they’re pioneering the future of business training and education.

This is part of a trend I call gameification, which I first identified in the early eighties and is today reaching its tipping point.

Gameification represents part of a predictable sequence. Many of the greatest technological advances in business have come originally from the world of kids and their games. Here’s how the sequence flows:

• First, an innovative concept or new technology often starts out in the world of games for children. Sometimes it’s the military (or in times past, the space program) that serves as the launch point. But it’s amazing how often it’s kids’ games.

• From there it sooner or later gains the attention of the adults in the business community as they learn how to adapt and apply it to their needs.

• Finally, it creeps into the education sector.

Just look at the evolution of social media.

When new social-media sites such as FaceBook and Twitter first launched, who were the first to get on board? Young people. Adults didn’t see the value. (Who really cares what you had for lunch or what outfit someone wore to the dance?) Eventually adults in the business world started seeing how social media could be used for tasks like brand management, marketing, and collaboration, and began embracing the tools their teenage kids had long mastered.

New Thresholds of Interactivity

Social media and video games are very different technologies, but the migration pattern is the same. And with game-controller systems like the Wii and Xbox Kinect giving us radical new ways of interacting with technology, the business world is finally on the threshold of becoming gameified.

In the past, gaming meant sitting passively in front of a computer or television screen and using a game pad, joystick, or keyboard to play against the computer or online opponent. No more. With Nintendo’s interactive Wii, players began standing up and getting physically involved in their games. Microsoft’s Kinect eliminated the need for a hand-held controller entirely, with players using movements of their hands and bodies to manipulate the game.

Thanks to Microsoft’s software development kit for the Kinect, university students are writing software that lets users control business software using hand motions alone—no keyboard or mouse. You want to go to the next page? Just sweep your hand in the air, past your screen. Sweep left, sweep right, scroll up, scroll down … Remember in Minority Report how Tom Cruise could maneuver data in the air without touching anything? Science fiction to science fact. Interactive gaming like this will transform the nature of training and education.

Five Core Elements

Based on twenty-five years of research, I’ve identified five core elements that can dramatically accelerate learning when applied together.

1) SELF-DIAGNOSTIC. In the world of gaming, the more feats you accomplish, the greater challenges the game gives you. Power down and the game remembers where you left off, so when you return to the game, you don’t have to start over from scratch.

How much time have you wasted sitting through business trainings that mostly covered things you already knew, just to learn those few key items you didn’t? Why not give your business training a self-diagnostic component, like advanced video games?

2) INTERACTIVITY. For centuries education and training have been mostly passive experiences: someone stands in front of the group and talks, and the trainees sit and listen. You might get some hands-on practice in a lab, but that’s comparatively rare.

In advanced video games you move things around and manipulate items. You interact with the information. You are engaged and immersed—and learning is far more effective when you interact with the material. Why not create an interactive module for your business training?

3) IMMERSION. With early 3D technology (including today’s 3D movies and 3D televisions) you have to wear special glasses to make the images pop out at you. With newer technology the 3D is interspatial: instead of images popping out at you, you enter them. You become immersed in the information.

When you’re training salespeople on, say, a particular manufacturing tool they’re going to sell, why not have them see the tool in 3D and get to manipulate the tool (virtually) rather than have them read spec sheets about it?

4) COMPETITION. Humans are naturally competitive. We want to sell more, be more productive, and innovate faster and better than the next person. When you sit in class learning, there’s little competitive value. Whether you learn the materials in one hour or three, no one advances until the class is over.

When you compete in a game, there’s an adrenaline rush that keeps you engaged and focused on the task at hand. In an effort to win, people master concepts faster so they can be first.

5) FOCUS. When you play a game, you’re forced to focus. You have to do A before B can occur. If you don’t focus on doing A, you don’t get very far. Focus is enhanced by interactivity, competition, immersion, and self-diagnosis. And when you can focus, you can learn virtually anything—fast.

Accelerate Learning

When you model your company’s training to include these five elements, your employees will learn more in less time and have better results.

Using all five core elements is the key to accelerating learning. With more and more to learn, it will be increasingly important to gamily both business and education to create better results faster. Since businesses spend large sums of money on training and education, any tool that can accelerate or enhance learning will save both time and dollars. Those companies and school districts that adopt early will be the long-term winners.

So here’s your homework assignment: Get together with a kid and play one of their games. While you’re playing, think about and how you could reinvent learning with tools like these.

Daniel Burrus (www.burrus.com) and John David Mann (www.johndavidmann.com) are coauthors of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible.

There are lots of great business books out there but, as a small-business owner, you may not have time to read them all. Luckily, we were able to get some of the country’s best business writers to distill their business theories into one short and sweet New Year’s resolution for you. Even if you only pick one or two, you’ll be on the road to building your business in 2012.

Stay current on transformative trends. Based on 28 years of research and analysis of current hard trends, it’s evident that the next five years will usher in the biggest technological transformation in human history, transforming how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train, educate and research. We are entering the era of “big data, meaning anyone can access data streams and analyze them using a smart phone or tablet. For example, Wall Street is now mining Tweets to determine mood and sentiment among the public. As technology progresses, it will be more common for people and companies to have moment-by-moment data for a variety of uses that will give us intelligence and help us learn about, react to and anticipate changes that are happening globally. – Daniel Burrus, “Flash Foresight”(HarperBusiness, 2011)

Read the Other Authors’ >

If you’re one to make resolutions at the start of the New Year, the number one resolution you need to make is to take control of your destiny and stop waiting for outside help to come in. This advice is especially true for business owners and leaders.

Realize that we all have amazing opportunity in front of us right now. Thanks to today’s technological transformations taking place, we’re transforming how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train, and educate—and all this is leveling the playing field globally. Why? Because no one has an advantage when there’s a major game change taking place, and right now we have multiple game changes taking place on a global level. That means the big, established players no longer have the competitive advantage they’ve had in the past. So not only are the technological tools for success changing, but the rules that govern how you apply those tools are changing as well.

But the key question is, “Are you noticing it?” And if you are, are you making your move, or are you waiting for the economy to pick up or some law to be passed before taking action?

Unfortunately, too many people fail to take control of their future and instead let others dictate their next move. They create a list of can’t do’s rather than a list of can do’s. They create a list of things they disagree on rather than a list of thing they do agree on that will allow them to move forward with their team.

Taking control of your future is vital, because too often change comes to us from the outside-in, which forces us to crisis manage and put out fires. But this is a time to be an opportunity manager and create some change from the inside-out.

On a business level, deciding to take control of your company’s destiny and shape the future means seizing the opportunities at hand. For example, the revolution of mobility and cloud technologies are two things that offer tremendous opportunities to create new products, services, and markets…and to do that from the inside-out of your organization rather than expecting external changes and government regulations to affect you from the outside-in.

Two important things to ask yourself at this time of year are, “Are you changing as fast as your customers are changing?” (Hint: You’re not.) And, “Are you learning as fast as your customers are learning?” (Again, you’re not.) You need to be in front of the consumers you’d like to convert into customers, but most organizations tend to be behind them—again, forcing reaction rather than action.

So let’s not just be crisis managers in 2012, waiting for the next shoe to drop and hoping that something positive happens. Hope is not a strategy. Instead, let’s all make a resolution to create a strategy—a personal one, a professional one, and an organizational one—that allows us to direct our future, create positive changes, and drive them from the inside-out.

Over the past week, many people have expressed concern over the passing of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il. In reality, it’s not his death that should raise concern; rather, it’s who is taking his place as the country’s ruler.

Kim Jong-il’s successor is his youngest son, Kim Jong-un—someone North Korea’s official KCNA news agency called the “Great Successor,” and “the outstanding leader of our party, army, and people.” Is that an accurate statement? I’m not too sure.

We don’t know much about Kim Jong-un, other than the fact that he’s in his late 20s, studied for a short time at a school in Switzerland, and was appointed to senior political and military posts only last year.

Now here’s where the real concern comes in: North Korea is a nuclear power. And anyone in their late 20s—no matter how well schooled—is fairly inexperienced when it comes to leading a country. Granted, I’m sure he accompanied his father on a number of different government meetings and perhaps even international meetings, but he’s still very young to be in control of a nuclear power. That’s where the real concern and worry should be.

Realize that I’m not knocking young people. I’ve asserted for years that young people have a great advantage over older people because the young have new knowledge—they understand technology in a way that their elders do not. That alone often gives them a great advantage. We’ve also had many successful start-ups by young people, including Facebook and Twitter. These young entrepreneurs saw a future that older people could not.

However, there’s one thing that older people have that young people simply can’t get—it’s called wisdom gleamed from years of experience. And when it comes to running a country that has nuclear weapons, it helps to have wisdom and experience.

At least with Kim Jong-il, the world knew who they were dealing with, although they may not have always liked it. Now we have a “wildcard” leader, and wildcards create a lot of uncertainty.  As the next few months unfold, the full picture of North Korea’s new leader will become clearer. Let’s hope that he uses his youth wisely and sees a future his elder did not.

By Kim S. Nash
Originally Published December 16, 2011

What’s wrong with how most companies create a business strategy?

C-suites spend a lot of time focusing on execution. The problem is they may not be executing on a full strategy. Too often, a strategic plan is a static document. We have a meeting and write it up, including objectives, goals, time lines and accountability. But then it’s fixed in time until the next time we have a strategic planning session and come up with a new one. We need to make the strategic plan alive in the minds of our people.

If you ask somebody, “What’s your strategic plan?” we don’t want them to say, “Just a minute. I’ll find it on my computer.” That means they’re not living it.

Traditional strategy focuses on scenario planning. “If this happens, we’ll do that.” But people fail to realize there are two types of trends: hard and soft. Hard trends will happen. Soft trends might happen.

What’s a hard trend?

A hard trend is going to happen whether you like it or not. There are three prime drivers of hard trends: technology, demographics and government regulation. When there’s a law passed, pay attention. It’s loaded with hard trends that give you amazing opportunities if you pay attention. Will we be able to use cell phones and tablets to tap into a Watson-like supercomputer? Yes. Will we be able to use mobile devices to tap into logistics and supply chain systems? Yes. So why are you waiting?

What’s a soft trend?

Soft trends are ones you can change. Seventy-eight million baby boomers are getting older and their healthcare needs are going to increase. Hard trends. Meanwhile, over the last 10 years in the United States, there has been a decreasing number of people becoming doctors and nurses. That’s soft. You can change it. As a business leader, you can see a collision course, then change. That’s strategic planning.

What happens if you fail to distinguish between hard and soft trends?

In the year 2000, the federal government forecasted a trillion-dollar budget surplus. How could they be so wrong? They were looking at good numbers but treating soft trends as if they were hard trends. As if they would happen for sure. Elvis Presley died in 1977. Every year after for 10 years, there were more Elvis impersonators. Back then, I projected those numbers out and found that by the year 2000, one in three Americans would be Elvis impersonators. That conclusion ignored other trends and treated a soft trend-that Elvis impersonators were increasing-as a hard trend, something that would definitely happen. That’s the exact same thing the federal government did.

If we make a mistake on a hard trend versus a soft trend, it can take a company down. Why did Motorola, which was dominant in the 1980s with cell phones, lose out? They treated digital as a soft trend and lost. Digital was happening whether they liked it or not, but they stayed with analog too long. Polaroid and Kodak thought digital was a fad, too. Look at Blockbuster versus Netflix. Why are we making mistakes? We’re not correctly separating the soft trends and hard trends. Part of that is also because most people protect and defend the status quo.

What’s wrong with a strategy centered on sales and profits?

Most strategic plans are financial plans in disguise. Money is not the whole ball game, but most people treat it that way. This year, 70 percent of Apple’s profits are coming from products that were impossible to make four years ago. Consider four years from now. Will at least half your profits come from things you’re not even doing today?

To get there, you need more than a financial plan. You need a plan that encompasses trends-correctly identified-that you can respond to and that you can redirect in your favor.

Daniel Burrus is a business strategy consultant and the author of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible. Follow Senior Editor Kim S. Nash on Twitter: @knash99.

Read more about it strategy in CIO’s IT strategy Drilldown.

By WALLACE IMMEN
Published Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011

Taking tech changes into your own hand.

As bleak as the prospect of a long winter might be, at least you can be sure that it’s going to give way to spring.

It’s a shame you can’t be as certain about an economic rebound, a resurgence in hiring or even whether your job or employer will be secure in the coming year.

Yet there are changes and trends you can be confident will happen in the near future, and they can be used to design career strategies to weather even the most prolonged economic chill, according to technology trends consultant Daniel Burrus, author of Flash Foresight.(To read an excerpt from the book,click here.)

“A career strategy based on uncertainty has high risk. When the level of uncertainty is high, if you put off making decisions … it can keep you from moving forward both personally and organizationally,” he said in an interview.

“It has been never more important to ask what we can know for certain, and plan from there,” said Mr. Burrus, who is chief executiveofficer of Burrus Research Associates Inc. in Hartland, Wis.

Stay current or die

Over the next five years, technology will transform how we sell, train, collaborate, and market products and services, he said.

If your company is not transforming itself, he said, you run the risk of working for a Blockbuster Video, an Eastman Kodak or any of a long list of businesses that were doing great but stuck too much to their existing patterns rather than building in new directions based on clear trends.

“The important distinction is that most companies say they are transforming themselves when they are just making adjustments and continuing to do what they already do,” Mr. Burrus said.

“To be a leader and a winner you need to be willing to lead a transformation.”

The shift away from desktops or laptops to smartphones or tablets as peoples’ primary computers, for example, is a huge change, especially when combined with mobility that allows their use anywhere.

More importantly, it means there will be a bigger market for computer applications, not only for sales and customer support but also for more traditional jobs. For example, maintenance workers could go to a job with a tablet and tap into an inventory of parts available and complete all the paper work all on the same screen.

If your employer isn’t up-to-date on technological shifts, you might want to look around to see which other companies are more tuned in to the trends, Mr. Burrus advised.

“Companies of any size and age can wake up to the opportunity of the future. It’s not about the age of leadership or the employees,” he added. “You’re young if you see opportunity.”

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Please check my recent guest blog post on Mike Figliuolo‘s blog, thoughtLEADERSLLC.com. Originally published on December 14, 2011.

We’re all aware that there are timeless leadership principles that have been true since the dawn of time and that will continue to be valid in tomorrow’s business environment. Things like integrity, honesty, and personal responsibility immediately come to mind. While those are all vital traits, they’re not the leadership traits I’m addressing right now.

In today’s world of technology-driven transformation, leaders need to embrace a new leadership principle if they want their organization to be relevant today and in the future.

In the recent past, leaders have focused on agility—being able to change quickly based on external circumstances because change from the outside-in has been coming at an ever-increasing speed, and it’s only getting faster. Many of these types of changes are driven by technology, but they’re also from our customers, because technology is influencing our customers and changing the way they interact with us.

We also have increasing transparency, meaning your customers and prospects have access to complaints, as well as accolades, through social media and other new forms of communication. All of these changes, which are coming from the outside-in and force agility, cause leaders to react, crisis manage, and put out fires on a daily basis.

Knowing this, it’s evident that simply being agile no longer works. Instead, today’s leaders need to be anticipatory.

When you’re anticipatory, you’re creating changes and driving disruption from the inside-out rather than being disrupted from the outside-in. Disruption is the disruptive technology that changes our world on us and keeps many leaders up at night. Chances are you’ve often asked, “What new technology will disrupt my path to market?” or “What new technology will change how my customers behave?” For many leaders, disruption is a familiar foe.

But realize that disruptive technology is only disruptive if you didn’t know about it ahead of time. And when you’re anticipatory, you can not only see and accurately anticipate those disruptive technologies, but you can use them to create new revenue streams, new products, new services, and new markets. That’s when you drive growth and change from the inside-out so that others have to react to you instead of you reacting to what others are doing. In this scenario, disruption is your friend.

So the question is, how do become more anticipatory?

Continue Reading >

Originally published on ChiefExecutive.net December 9, 2011.

Chances are your company is one of the many taking a “wait and see” approach to one or more business issues right now. The approach plays out like this:

• “Should we redo our website? Let’s wait and see what the competitors do.”
• “Should we expand into a new market? Let’s wait and see what the economy does.”
• “Should we invest in cloud technologies to increase the speed and agility of the organization? Let’s wait and see what new innovations will be released.”

On the surface, taking a “wait and see” approach seems to make sense. After all, we’re dealing with a U.S. and global economy that’s filled with uncertainties. We’re hearing news reports that predict a long and drawn out recovery. We’re witnessing not just rapid technological changes, but major transformations on so many levels. So “waiting and seeing” what happens certainly seems less risky.

In reality, a “wait and see” approach has much more risk than the action being avoided. Here’s why. In the past, when we were going through rapid change (not massive transformation like we’re seeing today), a company could use a “wait and see” approach because it was harder for competitors to develop and deploy new offerings quickly, and it was harder for established competitors to change the game or redefine completely. None of that is difficult anymore.

Today, new competitors can emerge rapidly, and they can even be from another part of the world. Geography is increasingly less of a hindrance. Anyone, at any time, can quickly become more relevant than you because the barriers to entry are low and the ability to scale is fast. Therefore, in a world were the game is changing rapidly, failing to take action—deciding to “wait and see”—can quickly put you on a path of increasing irrelevancy or a rapid demise.

Additionally, with many adopting a “wait and see” approach, the pace of recovery will be very slow indeed.

Transform To Grow

When you start looking at the certainties around you (which point to opportunities), rather than focusing on the uncertainties (which point to risks), you can see how detrimental a “wait and see” approach can be—how you’re actually missing major new opportunities for sales and growth. In an uncertain world, it’s important to focus on the certainties. So, what are you certain about?

One thing that’s certain regardless of industry or profession is that we have massive business process transformation taking place. Which processes? Virtually all of them: purchasing, logistics, accounting, sales, marketing, communications, collaboration, innovating, educating, training, managing, releasing new products, engaging our employees…the list is endless. We’re transforming all of these things plus more, and if you don’t initiate the transformation, someone else will.

To see the difference between mere change and game-changing transformation, consider these examples: Barnes & Noble may have changed bookselling by creating the super bookstore, but Amazon transformed how we buy books and so much more. Blockbuster Video may have changed how we rent movies, but Netflix transformed it. Yahoo! may have ushered in the era of search, but Google transformed it. Best Buy may have changed the retail environment, but Apple transformed it.

Here’s another current transformation: This year, many forward-looking school districts across the country are moving away from textbooks and issuing tablets filled with ebooks to students. Grandview High School in Jefferson County Missouri is one such school. Students will use the tablets to take tests, do homework, and complete assigned readings using applications and programs such as Moodle, a free online classroom. The tablets will also contain digital copies of textbooks as well as free online textbooks. An Internet filter blocks inappropriate web sites. This is a game-changing move, and one that will save the school about $25,000 each year. Students will keep their tablets, which will be updated, throughout their high school careers. And when they graduate, they can keep them.

The tools to redefine everything—even education—are there. The question is, are you using them?

The Hidden Costs of Saying “No”

When people are given an option to do something or not, they think that the expense is in saying “yes.” Actually, given the transformational changes taking place today, the bigger expense is often in saying “no.”

For example, suppose someone suggests that your company have its website redesigned. You may immediately shoot down the suggestion and say, “No. We’re not investing in that. We already have a website that works just fine.” It seems that the expense of creating the new website comes when you say “yes.” It’s less expensive to “wait and see.”

But consider that what you can do with a website today is much different than what you can do with a website that was created two years ago. The way you can design for mobile users, engage visitors, increase sales, track people, and improve your rankings with search engine optimization are changing so rapidly that if your site is two years old, it’s obsolete.

So while saying “yes” and taking action seems expensive, saying “no” and “waiting and seeing” will actually be more expensive in the long run because of the opportunities (read: increased relevance, visibility, and sales) you’ll be missing. And this goes way beyond website design. Saying “no” to any new capability—whether it be embracing tablets for the enterprise, levering mobility in new ways, adopting new collaborative tools that can revolutionize how your teams work, or using the cloud to more rapidly deploy innovations—does not allow you to transform while competitors are taking action.

Therefore, you have to evaluate what you’re saying “no” to in terms of potential lost opportunity, because what you could gain by saying “yes” will often outweigh the perceived risk and expense.

Think about it…at some point, someone within the Apple Corporation pitched the idea of opening retail stores. Apple could have very easily said “no” to the idea. They could have looked at Circuit City and Best Buy and said, “Why would we want to do that?” Rather, they looked at the current retail model and asked, “How can we reinvent retail?” They looked at what wasn’t working with retail and used a transformational mindset to redefine retail and extend their brand.

On the surface, had Apple said “no” to opening retail locations, it would have seemed logical. After all, opening a retail stores takes lots of money and effort. There’s an immense risk involved. But they saw the certainties around them and thereby saw the opportunities in saying “yes.”

Stop Waiting; Start Doing

In a world filled with uncertainty, it’s easy to fall into a “wait and see” mindset. But waiting and saying “no” has a cost just as high, if not higher, than saying “yes.” Because technology is increasing so fast and because we are in a period of rapid transformation are the exact reasons why you can no longer “wait and see” what will happen.

Remember this: “If you don’t do it, someone else will.” And they’re doing it right now!

Read the Original Article >

In terms of TV, Xbox is doing something that Apple TV has been doing for years, but Xbox is taking it to a new level. With Apple TV you have Hulu, Netflix, and Access. You can play games, watch TV, and read your emails. But the thing that the Xbox is bringing to users is their Kinect system, which includes a 3D video camera combined with voice recognition to allow users to control the screen with their hand and body movements. No mouse and no remote control—just hand and body movements.

This is taking the Xbox on a predictable path. In the late 1980s I predicted that IPTV (internet protocol television) was where we were going. Now here we are. And in the future, IPTV will continue to grow.

Looking at the hard trends around us, it’s clear to me that the real future of television is apps. Have you ever wondered why you can have 500+ cable channels and nothing to watch? It’s because you don’t have AppTV.

To understand how AppTV would work, let’s look at the iPhone. Two people can have an iPhone and have the same service provider. But those two phones would be completely different from each other. Why? Because when you have an iPhone, you customize it for your needs by picking the apps that are significant to you. You turn an iPhone into a MyPhone.

In that same way, with AppTV your TV will be customized for you. Think of it as an iPad big enough to be in your living room. Here’s how it will work: We will be using apps on the TV so that when you sit down to watch, you’ll have a customized viewing experience rather than hundreds of stations you don’t want to watch.

Not only that, but there will be a camera on those TVs, just like the tablets and smart phones have today, and it will use facial recognition. So when you walk in the living room, it will know you are there and will self-configure the right apps for you. If the entire family is in the room, you’ll use your voice to let it know which apps you want to have available.

For example, if your family consists of five people—two adults and three kids—and the dad and one child are in the room, the system will have the apps for those two individuals available for them. The two people can then decide which of those shows they want to watch.

So IPTV and apps is the future of television. And what the XBox is doing today is part of that progression. As the technology progresses, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, as well as other manufacturers, will continually fine tune it, making the future of TV happen today.

Listen to my interview with Alisa Parenti in Wall Street Journal’s, “Money, Markets and More.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been in the media for months now. But are they making any progress? Not as far as I can tell.

For any movement or protest to be successful, the demonstrators must have a list of demands. This is where the Occupy movement protesters are lacking and why they’re confusing so many people. Initially, it seemed they didn’t have any demands. The best we could get was that they wanted to create communication with Wall Street and with government because they felt there was none. Then, weeks later, we started getting many different lists of demands. And that’s when the real confusion began.

We started getting too many demands, an ever-changing list of demands, and some over-reaching and unrealistic demands. For example, in one publication they stated 13 demands. In another magazine, I saw 5 demands. In yet another, there were 12. Even more confusing, there were very few repeats between the lists, meaning there were actually dozens of demands, and none of them solid.

So here’s my advice for the protesters: Big lists never get done. A better approach is to pick two or three demands that people can remember; you’re more likely to get them met.

Additionally, when you’re asking for demands, you need to ask for something that can actually happen. For example, in one of the articles published this week about the Occupy movement, demand number four was free college education for all. While I completely believe in education and the value it brings our country, that’s one tough demand to fill. If you’re ready to be occupying all the parks and all of the public places for many years to come, then you can stay with that demand. But it would be better to revise that demand into something that can actually be delivered.

Other examples of unrealistic demands were spending $1 trillion in infrastructure now and outlawing all credit reporting agencies. There were many others.

If the Occupy movement is to merely get a lot of people out on the streets, occupying for an unknown cause, they’re doing a good job. But if they are trying to actually get something done, they need to get their act together. Reduce the list of demands to no more than five and have every single protester able to talk about those five sole demands to the media. And most important, make sure those five demands are actually doable. Until this happens, the Occupy movement will flounder, and it will be more of a news report of how police are trying to move the occupiers.

Now don’t get me wrong…Being able to protest is one of our most cherished rights. So protest and occupy if you feel that’s needed. It’s certainly your right. Just get your act together if you want your efforts to make a difference