Mar
28
High Ambitions and Scarce Resources in Public Interest Organizations
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High Ambitions and Scarce Resources in Public Interest Organizations
Diana Scearce, Katherine Fulton
GBN practitioners Diana Scearce and Katherine Fulton (now head of the Monitor Institute) discuss how scenario thinking—a process and suite of tools originally designed for large resource-rich organizations—can best be adapted for small resource-constrained organizations working for the public interest. In early 2001, a small team at GBN began a journey to answer this question. In this article, Diana and Katherine share the highlights of what they learned and describe the key barriers they encountered in applying and adapting the scenario methodology and tools used in the private sector to the civil society context.
Official Website of The Ebook
High Ambitions and Scarce Resources in Public Interest Organizations (PDF)
Mar
28
Urbanization and Migration from a Global Perspective
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Urbanization and Migration from a Global Perspective
Stewart Brand and Joe Chamie in Conversation
Webconference report by Bertram Chan
We will soon reach a significant inflection point in the history of humanity. In just a few years, and for the first time in history, more people will be living in urban areas than in the countryside. At the same time, international migration is at an all-time high, with close to 200 million people living in a country other than their country of birth.
Urbanization is concentrating people as never before, while at the same time migration is mixing people in new ways. What can we say today about their trajectory tomorrow? What about urbanization and migration should we all be paying more attention to in the coming years? On March 28, 2006, GBN attempted to answer some of these questions by bringing together two incisive thinkers, GBN cofounder Stewart Brand and Joe Chamie, a leading demographer and former head of the United Nations Population Division, for a webconference discussion moderated by GBN practitioner Erik Smith.
Official Website of The Ebook
Download Urbanization and Migration from a Global Perspective (PDF, 9MB)
Mar
28
Connecting Present and Future
A Conversation with Chris Ertel and Maryln Walton
“Almost everybody loves to think about the future, especially people in organizations. We talk about the future, make predictions about the future, sometimes even bet on the future. We seldom get serious about connecting what we do today to what we think will happen tomorrow.”
Herman Miller, the pioneering workplace design company, is a noted exception. For a number of years, Herman Miler has been using scenarios to explore the future of work and then to engage its customers in an immersive experience and conversation based on the different futures that the scenarios embody. In this wide-ranging interview, published in SEE magazine and reprinted with permission, Maryln Walton, Herman Miller’s future insight manager, and Chris Ertel, co-head of the GBN consulting practice, discuss their collaboration as well as the history and value of scenario planning.
Official Website of The Ebook
Download Connecting Present and Future (PDF, 101KB)
Mar
28
The New Argonauts An Interview with AnnaLee Saxenian
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The New Argonauts
An Interview with AnnaLee Saxenian
Ask new GBN Network member AnnaLee (“Anno”) Saxenian about the future of Silicon Valley, and out pours a wealth of knowledge and sharp observation about the ways in which the region is changing and the new roles it is playing, and could play, in the global landscape of innovation. An economic geographer by trade, Anno has made a career of studying regional economics and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity.
Her latest book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006), explores how and why immigrant engineers from Silicon Valley are transferring their technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in their home countries—China and India in particular—and launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. The “brain drain,” she argues, has now become “brain circulation”—a powerful economic force for the development of formerly peripheral regions that is sparking profound transformations in the global economy.
Anno is the dean of U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information and a professor in Berkeley’s department of city and regional planning. Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994), Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002). She holds a PhD in political science from MIT, a master’s in regional planning from U.C. Berkeley, and a bachelor’s in economics from Williams College.
In this interview, she talks about why she’s so interested in regional economics, who the new argonauts are, and how she sees the future of Silicon Valley (and the U.S., and China, and India) unfolding.
Official Website of The Ebook
The New Argonauts:An Interview with AnnaLee Saxenian (PDF)
Mar
28
Five Centuries of the Future
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Five Centuries of the Future:
A Speech to the Scottish Parliament
by Eamonn Kelly
In December 2004, Eamonn Kelly, president and CEO of GBN, gave the opening address at the Scottish Parliament Futures Event, a one-day session held to consider what it might take to make Scotland a leader in anticipating the future. The session was attended by 150 invited participants and organized by the International Futures Forum.
Eamonn’s speech examined how many of today’s major political, social, economic, and environmental issues are rooted firmly in history. His “warp-speed tour of five centuries of the future” ranges from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, and identifies challenges and opportunities both for Scotland and for the rest of the world going forward.
Official Website of The Ebook
Download Five Centuries of the Future (PDF, 2.27MB)
