About Nigel Cameron

Writer, conference chair, former think tank director “Asking Tomorrow’s Questions” Speaking managed by ATG│Chartwell US: ellis@americantalentgroup.com, Global: alexh@chartwellpartners.co.uk Nigel Cameron has extensive experience as a keynote speaker and in facilitating high-level conversations focused on the future – crossing disciplinary lines and bringing together participants with diverse opinions and backgrounds. His emphasis is on reframing issues, welcoming outlier opinions, and pressing for a positive sum outcome that recognizes differences and engages them. A citizen of the United States and the UK, he has worked on both sides of the Atlantic and travels widely. He recently chaired GITEX 2015 in Dubai and will be chair of the Future Technology 2016. In one year he addressed conferences on all five continents, including the biennial innovation festival hosted by Australian finance giant AMP in Sydney, and Nanomedicine 2010 Beijing. He was the sole US-based plenary speaker at “the world’s leading conference on content marketing,” the 2011 Content Summit. Other recent engagements include the UN-affiliated Rio+ 20 Planet under Pressure event (London), and the opening keynote at the European Identity and Cloud Conference (Munich, Germany). His unusually wide experience includes serving on U.S delegations to the UN General Assembly and UNESCO; three periods as an executive-in-residence at UBS Wolfsberg (Switzerland); testimony on technology policy and values issues before the U.S House and Senate, the European Parliament, the European Commission’s advisory Group on Ethics, the German Bundestag, and the UK Parliament; and co-chairing a nonpartisan panel that advised the UK Conservative Party on emerging technologies and health policy. In the early 2000s, he was an invited non-federal participant in the Department of State-led Project Horizon, 3-year scenario-based strategic planning process. He has appeared on network media in several countries, including in the U.S. ABC Nightline and PBS Frontline; and in the UK the BBC flagship shows Newsnight and Breakfast with Frost. With a strong academic background together with an M.B.A. he has developed projects focusing integrative approaches to new technologies both in the academic/business context (at the Illinois Institute of Technology) and in the policy community (Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies in Washington, DC). He hosted a succession of annual policy conferences on nanotechnology at the National Press Club, which led to the publication of Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century (Wiley). Among Washington events in 2011 he hosted a series of roundtables on impacts of new technologies (risk, intellectual property, change), co-sponsored by the Intel-led Task Force on American Innovation; and was invited to moderate panels on the security implications of the “Arab spring” for weapons (WMD) control. He regularly hosts teleconferences with thought leaders such as Wired Magazine founder Kevin Kelly, former Lockheed-Martin chairman Norman Augustine, CEA president Gary Shapiro, innovation leader Vivek Wadhwa and White House technology policy lead Tom Kalil. Other teleconferences have focused emerging issues in cybersecurity, and the future of on internet governance with Ambassador Philip Verveer and others. In Silicon Valley he hosted a breakfast for the venture community to discuss his provocative commentary on the innovation gap between the west coast and Washington, How to Bridge the Continental Divide. Other recent commentaries that have generated thoughtful interest in Washington and further afield: on NASA, and Washington’s core problem thinking about the future. He has written a monthly column for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the latest issues in corporate social responsibility and his op-eds include several for the San Francisco Chronicle on emerging issues in technology and policy. In 2015-16 he is Fulbright Visiting Research Professor in Science and Society in the University of Ottawa, Canada.

#Groupthink – public enemy number 1 as we face the future

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Groupthink hasn’t worked, it’s time to embrace the maverick

Giving credence to the outlier thinkers in our midst might have avoided things like the Wall Street crash. Photo: AP

As the Arab spring continues to unravel into an Arab summer, the most important lesson is that hardly anyone knew it was coming. Much like the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street could it be that as much as conventional wisdom may be conventional it is not always reliably wise?

I recently hosted a conference in Washington on the future of nanotechnology. All kinds of experts were round the table talking tech and policy and business. Then one of them made a stunning statement. She was there on behalf of a big, mainstream environmentalist group. “I have never,” she stated, “been on such a diverse panel in Washington.”

There was a brief but palpable intake of air around the room. I thanked her for the compliment before adding that I was now more concerned for Washington than I was before.

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Whom do we invite round the table when the questions are big and the stakes high? It tends to be those in the centre; the mainstream thinker whose wisdom is regarded as conventional.

When will we ever learn? We are still paying for the lesson we learned from Wall Street in 2008.

Conventional wisdom can be dead wrong, even in the hands of the smartest people because they tend to agree with each other. People with way-out views are kept at arm’s-length.

Whatever the issue, if your views deviate too far from the mean, however articulate you may be, you are unlikely to get invited, funded or promoted.

We have learned a lot this past generation about the value of diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity but we have learned little about the enormous and growing value of diversity of opinion.

Of course, we do disagree about a lot of things. With friends, and with co-workers. But we live in communities of ideas that set boundaries around acceptable diversity of thinking, and make sure we keep out those who challenge our shared assumptions.

We don’t want to rehash old issues we regard as closed. We don’t want to give room to opinions we find deeply objectionable – or threatening. Most of us find it challenging to take forward our thinking when there is someone in the room always, always asking why?

So our natural tendency is to put unconscious faith in Groupthink, the tendency for everyone’s thinking to move in the same direction to the exclusion of any serious questioning.

People in management know all about this as a problem for work groups and other teams. But it is more insidious and far more dangerous on the grand scale.

What brought Wall Street down, and with it threatened the entire global order? The G-word. And on smaller scales: what led Monsanto into huge losses in the late 1990s and ensured that Europe rejected genetically-modified food? What led Detroit to near-oblivion as they insisted on producing 1950s-style autos into the 21st century? What about the power company TEPCO and the nuclear disaster that the entirely predictable tsunami sparked in Japan?

Knowledge is building very fast, disciplines are converging, globalisation is changing the ground-rules of everything. Change powered by Moore’s Law, the digitisation process and the revolution in communication is driving shifts in the technical, economic and social order that most of us strain to grasp. Yet the faster change takes place and the greater its disruptive, innovative power, the harder it will be to make good choices.

So who should be party to the conversation? This is where the outliers come in; people who are articulate and serious, but outside the mainstream assumptions that generally drive conversations. Experts tend to resist the participation of thosewith unorthodox opinions. It needs to become the norm for them to sit round the table in every discussion. All articulate voices round the table; all the time.

This approach is hardly new. The century before last, US poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman asked the question his own way. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?” In the 21st century, great value lies at the extremities of opinion; and we need to harvest it as we move through change faster than we have ever known before.

First appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 2011.

69% of Global #B2B Orgs Ignore #Social Feedback

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

What would one expect to characterize a period in which exponential change really starts taking off? Well, terrible decisions, a lagging generation of leaders, huge advantage for economies and industries that were previously behind all the curves and for younger people, all that kind of thing.

So some of the big surprises we get, like this one, are no surprise at all! But wow: wanna get ahead of the competition? Hire guys who understand social and put them in positions of influence. ASAP.

In fact this squares nicely (nastily) with @markfidelman’s HBR piece on which I commented some weeks ago – that Fortune 250 CIOs are essentially in the social dark ages; only 4 of them have blogs, and 25 are on Twitter. Unbelievable, but also predictable. Terrible news for America and our current slate of uber-companies. Terrific for newbies of all kinds. Go read Thomas Kuhn. And remember, the exponential take-off has just started.

https://futureofbiz.org/2012/04/13/social-risk-seems-cios-think-social-is-beneath-them/

Several great links here to related studies:

69% of Global B2B Organizations Ignore Customer Feedback On Social Media | The Realtime Report.

Is #Facebook Doomed?

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Perhaps the strangest feature of the Facebook Phenom is how pervasive the network has become, how much time so many people spend on it, and how little we actually talk about it. This is a taproot of the crisis in valuation that has led the stock to sink today down above the $26 mark. I’m not bearish, at least in the short-to-medium term, as Facebook is making money and may yet find ways to make a ton of money. I’m more, shall we say, weirded out by the whole situation.

I’ve touched on this before, but to sum up and move along a bit here are some key statements I would wish to defend:

1. In general, I’ve argued that social media will soon be utilities, interoperable, and therefore not capable of generating economic profit or, in consequence, justifying these very high valuations. The future is not an AOL-style walled garden named Facebook with X billion inhabitants.It is something a lot more like the USPS. Or the power grid. I don’t know how long “soon” is. But it’s soon.

2. Back to my point about lack of discussion: My suspicion is that most of the enthusiasm for the Facebook Phenom has come from two groups: Generally older people who have little first-hand experience of social media (little, not none) (Group 1); and much younger people whose entire experience has been decisively shaped by one social medium, namely Facebook (Group 2). Group 1 has generally looked to Group 2 to confirm its sense that the Facebook Phenom is a big, big deal – whether their kids or the youngest people on their staffs. This scenario offers, at the least, a rather dire approach to risk management.

3. In the article linked below, an analyst has pronounced that by 2020 Facebook will have gone the way of Yahoo – still likely a profitable enterprise, but with far lower value and in a position of strategic insignificance. He is probably correct, although his focus on the problematics of mobile may be wrong. We all know that the shift to mobile, which is more rapid than anyone expected, has proved challenging as ad revenues are much more difficult to come by in the mobile environment. My suspicion is that Facebook like the many other companies caught in the same situation will come up with some ideas that work, even if they are not obvious today. In parallel, the shift to mobile may help power the move (which I see as highly desirable and in the long term inevitable) to subscription-based social that is protective of user privacy. And, at root, while ads make a lot of sense in search, they make little in social. There are other ways in which companies can occupy social space (branded high-end content will become increasingly important, for example), but if you want to see your friends’ pics you are not ever going to be that interested in clicking links for autos.

4. Sorry, many smart people, but the idea that Mark Zuckerberg‘s very clever development of the Aol/MySpace enterprise will end up as a multi-billlion-member walled garden I find risible. Aside from the glow already fading from what was once almost (never quite) hip, as granny signs on, there are just too many reasons why barriers to entry will fall (or be knocked down by regulators) and basic social become part of the comms wallpaper.

Which draws attention to what I find enormously creative and popping with potential about Twitter. Facebook is very complex, keeps getting moreso, and has really only one core role. Twitter is very simple, has stayed that way, and has many roles. It’s the pathway to tomorrow. Which is one reason I hope it can be saved from the Facebook IPO fate by something a lot more creative in the financing/governance arena.

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/future/why-twitter-matters/

Facebook Will Disappear by 2020, Says Analyst.

#Innovate #Education, for real? #edu #Thiel #Wadhwa

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Those who have been following the ongoing debate between Peter Thiel and Vivek Wadhwa have been gripped by the bolts of words flying between these two icons of innovation and the Valley. They must be the two most outspoken figures in and around that community, and the most radical in some of their ideas. I’ve never come across either, in the flesh or on the web, without learning something new about how I should be thinking – and making decisions. I am looking forward to moderating a panel this week in Napa at the Tech Policy Summit with Vivek on the team.

Here’s his latest salvo fired into the vastly uninnovated and uninnovative education machine, about which he and Thiel are both frustrated though with somewhat different results.

No time here to sum up their respective and forceful arguments, but 4 key points as business, policymakers, and citizens look at the realm of higher education.

1. In 5-10 years we will see changes as revolutionary as those that have gutted and are beginning to remake, for example, publishing. Sorry, faculty. My modest suggestion that we dump tenure caused friends to palpitate. Believe me, that’s just the beginning.

2. Vivek’s proposal that we re-jig student loans so they can be retired in fresh ways is powerful. Education is in general a public good not merely a private one. We have powerful incentives to avoid a scenario in which smart kids don’t get it and those who do have major debt burdens.

3. The slowness with which “distance learning” (there’s an old-time phrase) has been adopted, even modestly, shows that only high explosives will shift the mainstream of our college and grad systems. But that’s just what happens when economics and technology perform a pincer movement. And they will.

4. The biz community should be driving radical approaches to web-based learning, which could provide us initially with a national online “community college” with free tuition and open access; and in parallel a global effort with USAID and the other agencies as partners working to deliver full college degrees worldwide at no cost to the student. The growing universality of English as a second language offers a remarkable spur to such an effort. And the benefits to American business, our values, and in the long term our security are all obvious.

I’m not claiming we can teach everything like this, or that it will always be as good as what can be done in the classic small-college model where professors and students spend years in round-the-clock community. But there are many options – and they will grow fast – between that and an old-time correspondence course stuck on the internet. We will soon be able to have professors delivered by avatar into living rooms, not merely to spout but to respond. AI is not the be-all and end-all. But it sure is going to make much else we humans do a lot simpler and more efficient.

The future-oriented biz community has a huge part to play in driving imaginative efforts of this kind, and ensuring that they not only deliver particular skills (plainly some, like coding, are a lot easier to teach this way than, say, poetics), but to do so in a manner that builds on the liberal arts tradition that is the jewel in the crown of American post-secondary education.

Dear Peter Thiel: Let’s Fix College, the Right Way.

Has the Social Media #Bubble Popped? #sm #IPO #Facebook

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I posted earlier on the debacle of the Facebook IPO and some longer-term considerations in respect of the valuation and staying-power of these early-generation social media brands. And they are early-generation. Part of the problem we are facing is that we are in the throes of exponential change. One thing that means is that we have faced dramatic shifts, which we are tempted to see as lasting and offering us a fresh gently-rising plateau as we look ahead. The fact that the exponential, disruptive bombs are getting bigger every day is too hard to grasp. So we don’t try. So we behave dumb. (Yes, there’s a book there to explain what I’m on about; and yes, I am working on it, so there. Back off, plagiarizers, but join the convo!)

Briefly:

1. In general, this is early early days. Which makes future-scoping (a) very hard, and (b) very necessary. More of both (a) and (b) every day.

2. We’re talking about the brands/companies that have been quick out of the box in, essentially, social media round 2. Round 1 was shaped and dominated by AOL; its curious corporate survival and the bizarre Time takeover blur our capacity to reflect on how revolutionary was Steve Case’s invention ( which has pretty much defined everything social since; Zuck owes him big. . . .). The key brands of the past decade have been awarded huge valuations on the naive assumption that the barriers to entry will remain high and that interoperability and utility status is not around the corner. Yeah, right.

3. As we look ahead, we see multiple converging streams that include “social” a la Facebook, social marketing leading to profound shifts in “social business,” CSR/social enterprise parallel and convergent developments as a subset of the foregoing, Gov. 2.0 (3.0), wholly new developments in global governance (of which more in another post), and . . . well, point is, we have just begun. It’s why Facebook and Google, qua biz model and tech trailblazers, are so important. It’s why, qua brands, they will be proved to have been relatively insignificant.

4. While we are at it: Facebook’s curious upcoming vote on a privacy change reminds us that, ultimately, social networks will be mutually owned and driven by crowd-sourced decision-making. I am actually astonished that Zuck (whom I greatly admire) has not tumbled to this. But one thing one learns is that innovators are often successful precisely because they don’t see most of the context, rather than because they do.

The future is social. But that social is not ad-driven, privacy-destroying, IP-wielding, reaping economic profit. It is in general mutualized, open-sourced, and ultimately a thrilling constantly innovating utility environment for much human activity. Getting there is messy, but since when was getting anywhere worthwhile not?

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/facebook-being-dumped-says-reuters-whats-the-real-issue-well-there-are-3/

The Social Media Bubble has Popped.

Federal #Science and Ideology: #DC and the #Valley

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

In a largely historical op-ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Michael Lubell of CUNY and the American Physical Society lambastes the current parties for their inability to agree on the priority of science funding – in marked contrast to earlier efforts over the past generation when, despite differences of emphasis, bipartisan collaboration led to big increases in the public funding of science and technology.

My take? Three quick points.

1. This brings us back to the question of the question. How is it framed? Little by little, broader concerns with budget, disaffection with “big government,” and stories of weird research projects (always findable, and some plainly are weird), have chipped away at the semi-consensus. I think there’s more to it, and am not sure if the big increases in public science finding would continue anyway for several other reasons. But the issue is framed differently now.

2. I sat round a table recently with the CTO of one of our major tech companies and asked him why, when his organization has strategy people working for the chairman, and R and D people working for him – all with timelines of 7-10 years in their heads – they have federal relations people in DC told that around 18 months should be their time horizon. That is, why have not our major tech companies done the heavy lifting in driving forward the politics of the long term? Also a big issue. My sense is that their deciding to do so, and agreeing long-term goals on which for all their diverse interests they can work together, will prove central to the possibility of a prosperous and secure American tomorrow.

3. Back of the conflicting ideological agendas in Washington lies a remarkable degree of unanimity in, as it were, the “corporate culture.” I have written elsewhere about the divide between the District and the Valley (search this blog or see my Kindle e-book Innovation President). It is vast. Our creative, entrepreneurial culture is almost entirely divorced from our political culture. This is true across the parties, and despite fine people and good initiatives. The cultures are deeply misaligned, and few people at either end care. That’s the core issue here. Budget levels, and an inability to collaborate on agreeing them, are presenting problems. Their cause lies elsewhere.

It’s not my view that more money is “the answer,” though federal S and T spend is very important. There are many other questions that need to be addressed if we are going to ramp up American S and T leadership, and resulting innovation, for the next generation. In the past I have proposed the abolition of academic tenure (through an appropriations rider), restructuring of funding agencies (we could start off with a new one taking 10% of existing non-DoD spend and based in the Valley), cabinet positions for the Science Adviser, the CIO, the CTO; and more besides. I’ve also proposed moving Camp David to the Valley (my friends out there are horrified by the traffic implications) – as the first step in the migration of the federal government to the west coast that I believe to be probably inevitable and certainly desirable in the first Pacific century.

Our C-PET motto is Asking Tomorrow’s Questions. It’s all about the questions. Washington is a city full of smart people with answers. Get the questions right and things will change.

Lubell: Science Funding and the Ideological Divide : Roll Call Opinion.

#Apple CSR #Strategy – #Risk risk risk

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Triple Pundit has just published a strong critique of Apple’s approach to corporate social responsibility.

The leadership point is especially telling (see my post earlier today), but in general what this sharp series of points suggests to me is that with the passing of the baton a fresh approach is being explored that has yet to find its feet.

Any company so dependent for its high profits on its reputation should be first in line to address all of these concerns and others also. It should also consider, seems to me, whether taking over Foxconn or developing a joint venture in which it was the senior partner might nor prove a more aligned and coherent way of addressing the huge issues that its reliance on Chinese manufacturing has begun to raise. To be able to address these issues within rather than outside the organizational boundary would shift their status and character in a way that could only help Apple going forward.

5 Reasons Why Apple’s CSR Strategy Doesn’t Work.

#Apple and #China sweatshops and #CSR at #Foxconn

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I have written before and at more length about the Apple-Foxconn- Fair Labor issue. Once again these companies, locked in a commercial embrace, are in the spotlight, as another organization reports on working conditions and claims to have interviewed scores of Foxconn employees. http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/values-and-the-value-chain-apple-foxconn-and-the-new-csr/

Three observations.

1. Apple’s decision to sign on to Fair Labor was bold but savvy. Growing global transparency driven by the very technologies that have powered the firm offers huge issues of reputational risk as the image of the smartest, high-end western tech company and a vast, sprawling, Chinese manufacturer move into a single frame. But it’s just the start of a process of engagement and openness.

2. Labor standards vary much around the globe, which is (of course) one reason that manufacturing in country A is cheaper than in country B. That is not the only reason, but it is one. At the same time, while human rights are not relative, cultural experience is: A good employer in A may have requirements that would make the firm look a thoroughly bad employer in B. That is separate from specific cultural issues (confessions, and the like) which may or may not be seen as appropriate. Point is, the comparison – like every cross-cultural comparison – needs to be analogical. To use the powerful verb that heads up the article we are discussing, “gruelling” means different things in different places. It just does.

3. That having been said, the effort to integrate “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) into the value chain of the company, illustrated here, is not something to be done in half measure. I have no means of knowing who and how these matters are arranged at Apple. But it is my hope that Tim Cook has people as smart and as powerful in his executive suite handling this set of issues as are handling design and engineering and marketing. If he does not, the effort at alignment between Apple’s spiffy image and the manufacturing behind it will come adrift. The scrutineers have just started their work. The need to integrate “CSR” values with value will prove only more important with the passage of time. Time passes increasingly fast. Secrets hard to keep now will be twice as hard in a year’s time. And the smarts that have aligned design and engineering in the Apple products need to be addressed to an equally strong alignment with the people and their toil who put together these remarkable machines.

I stated earlier that the Apple move to engage Fair Labor could lead to a revolution in Chinese labor standards. I am sticking with my story. By bridging outsourced Asian manufacturing and the elite market for their products Apple has taken a deliberate risk. In a long-term perspective it is an obviously sensible choice. But it will only help if it is relentlessly followed through. Apple does not need more discordant reports like this one. Someone who has Tim Cook’s ear needs to make sure the Foxconn connection is driven with the same energy and passion and resources as every other department of the company. Apple can survive Siri issues. It might not if the “sweatshop” charges started to stick.

Apple’s efforts fail to end gruelling conditions at Foxconn factories | Technology | The Guardian.