Social Technologies' futurist Andy Hines is featured in Escape from Corporate America, a new book by a reformed corporate ladder-climber, Pam Skillings:

"If your corporate career is leaving you stressed out, burned out, or just plain bummed out, you’re not alone.You don’t have to choose between paying the bills and enjoying a fulfilling career.” With humor and personal accounts, she offers a seven-step approach to breaking free: assess your job’s “suck” factor, identify your true calling, develop your escape plan, find jobs that don’t bite, be your own boss, follow your creative dreams, and overcome any obstacle.

Skillings, a career coach who made the leap in 2005, estimates that 80% of the working population fantasizes about leaving their jobs for something better. She admits that making the leap isn’t easy, but it is worthwhile:

It took me years of trial and error to escape corporate America. Once I left, I was amazed at how many people were dying to know how I did it and whether they could do it, too.

Skillings found a compatriot in Hines, who worked in trends and ideation for multinational food and chemical companies before joining Social Technologies in 2006 as director of custom projects. In Skillings’ book, he is quoted in chapter seven: “Swim in a Smaller Pond.”

“No offense against corporate places, but they are not always the most interesting,” says Hines. “A lot of the attraction of my current company was the ability to work for people who are really interesting. Who else would work as a professional futurist? You have to be a little nuts, and I like that.”

In a May 8 BusinessWeek article entitled "The Slump: It's a Guy Thing," Social Technologies' Andy Hines was interviewed by reporter Peter Coy about the fact that women and men are "operating in two different economies."

Writes Coy:

From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs. You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not. What's going on?

The trouble, Coy suggests, is that male-dominated sectors such as manufacturing and construction are in decline, while women are better-prepared for new kinds of work, with higher rates of college graduation.

Some analysts even argue that men are less suited than women to the knowledge economy, which rewards supposedly female traits such as sensitivity, intuition, and a willingness to collaborate. "Men have tended to do better in the hierarchies, following orders and relying on positional power," says Andy Hines, a futurist at the Washington (D.C.) consulting firm Social Technologies, who previously worked for Kellogg (K) and Dow Chemical (DOW).

Read the entire article.  

We recently sent some of our clients an autographed copy of Daniel Pink’s new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need.

The book is being reported as the first US business title written in the manga style, and as such, we thought it was a nice little artifact that shows how cultural flows work. We’ve talked before about cultural flows, first as part of our Top 20 Trends series and more recently on the blog with posts like this one on the opening of Guatemalan chicken joints in Shanghai. We've also specifically discussed manga as a cultural flow.

We view cultural flows as important indicators of the emerging future. The case of the Johnny Bunko book shows how manga has grown in popularity, spread to different parts of the world, and now even infiltrated the world of American business books. What's next for the future? Classic literature? No, wait...the BBC reports they've already done that.

In any case, we thought ChangeWaves readers might also enjoy seeing what it looks like when manga mixes with Pink’s unique take on “six essential lessons for thriving in the world of work,” so check out some sample pages and the books' entertaining ad on YouTube above.

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Will Americans still be commuting mega miles to get to work 10, 15, or 20 years from now?

Not likely, says Social Technologies' Andy Hines in an article published in the winter issue of the Career College Association's magazine The Link.

In fact, Hines believes the workforce of the future will behave very differently than the workforce we see today.

“Creativity will be valued more and as technology continues to evolve, more ‘knowledge workers’ will be required to fill jobs. These talented people will want to work with other talented people, and although money will be important it will become less of a differentiator. Instead, people will look for the opportunity to work with others they can learn from and successfully collaborate with.”

Other shifts that he thinks will become apparent in the coming decade include:

Click to read more ...

What will the workplace of the future look like?

In an article that ran in the Dec. 13 issue of the New York Times, "You won't find me in my office, I'm working,"  reporter Lisa Belkin talked about the growing trend of "white space," the place where workers go to think, write, and be creative. She spoke with S)T's Andy Hines about the topic.

Hines said: "White space is “what we are looking for when we have thinking to do.”

Mr. Hines often starts his lectures by asking his audience to name the place where they come up with their most creative ideas. The profession and salary level and age of the respondents might vary from one audience to the next, he said, but the results are always the same.

The workplace, he said, is “either not mentioned or is mentioned near the very end of the list, after all the other places have been exhausted.” Mr. Hines, it should be noted, said he does his best work while running or reclining in his favorite chair.

Belkin and Hines continued their conversation later in the day on New York Public radio.

Image: (c) 2007 JupiterImages Corp.

Social Technologies' founder Tom Conger discussed the forces changing the global workplace at a recent leadership conference hosted by the Society for Human Resource Management.

Conger explained how migration, new wealth, and time pressure are factors driving the shift. His ideas were outlined in a Dec. 7 posting on the SHRM.org website by reporter J.J. Smith, who wrote:

The numbers for annual international migration went from 145 million during the 1990s to 190 million by 2005, said Conger, who is founder of Social Technologies, a global research and consulting firm specializing in the integration of foresight, strategy and innovation. Such mass migration of people will drive new trends in areas such as entertainment, food, social values and language, but a new trend that has been produced is economic, he said while discussing trends and lifestyles that affect global business.

Immigrant workers are sending large parts of their wages to their countries of origin—presumably to support family in those locations—so that about $100 billion per year in migrant workers’ pay is flowing globally, Conger said. Employers can help their workers and the company by allowing the employees to remit money overseas via automatic deposit, he said. While there is a chance some immigrant workers will be illegal aliens, by enabling immigrant employees to remit money overseas, companies will provide a benefit that can help attract and retain employees, he said.

While employers might focus on international migration, domestic migration—mostly urbanization—is another trend which companies need to be aware of, Conger said. A milestone was reached during 2005 when the combined populations of cities surpassed the populations of rural areas, and that is expected to continue until at least 2030 when 61 percent of the world’s population will be urban, he said. However, most population growth is not going to be in the “mega-cities”—cities with at least 10 million inhabitants; more than half of the growth is likely to occur in cities with 500,000 or less inhabitants, he added.

View the entire article.

In the premier issue of Changewaves Newsletter, our own Josh Calder developed a list of new jobs for the year 2020. On Saturday night, The Huffington Post, one of the web's most widely-read blogs, picked up the list for its "Living Now" section. Check it out here.

For more on one of these new jobs, see Josh's recent blog post on geoscaping.

A few months ago we wrote about jobs of the future; here's some coverage of our list at CNBC.

One of the future jobs was "geoscaper," someone who makes corporate and private properities look better in Google Earth-style aerial views.

Well, Google users recently spotted this unfortunately shaped building on a Navy base in San Diego:

In the face of the somewhat silly brouhaha that erupted, the Navy announced that it would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the building look less offensive from space. Geoscaping, here we come.

Image: Google.

Image: Laffy4KThere are lots of forces driving an increase in virtual work or telecommuting. One that may escape notice is its potential contribution to creativity!

I taught a creativity class for several years. An exercise I typically began with asked people to reveal their “most creative place,”  the place where they most often came up with creative ideas. Exercising, the car, the shower, meditating, in bed and so on would emerge. Typically, near the very end of the exercise, someone would say “work,” and everyone would have a great laugh.

The workplace never came up early – it was near the end if appeared at all. Yet, we all recognize that we are in a “knowledge economy,” where our competitive advantage is based on our intellectual capital, which in turn is heavily based on ability to come up with creative and innovative ideas. If the workplace is the “last” place where people come up with creative ideas, why are we insisting they spend all their time there? Sure, there are creative benefits to group collaboration. So the “ideal” mix of time from a futurist perspective involves alone time at the places where people are most creative (not work) and bringing people to work for the purposes of creative collaboration.