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.

#Hashtags and the #Twitter Power of Simplicity

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Someone famous once said (was it Einstein) that we must seek not the simplicity that lies on the nearside of complexity, but on the far side. This isn’t a comment on our political malaise (though it could be) but on the best example the digital world has yet produced of the astonishing power that lies on that desideratum of a far side. And it’s called . . . Twitter.

I have written about this before, and I shall again. Here is the before:

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

The hashtag, whose potential and practical application is laid out in this brilliant post, just exemplifies the principle: utter simplicity (say, 1000 times as simple as Facebook) that enables us to engage the exponential explosion in data of all kinds and knowledge in particular. Twitter offers a Reciprocal Knowledge Engine.

And as @rorysutherland recently was quoted as saying, this could mean it is worth a lot more the Facebook. http://viggoandersen.visibli.com/share/3C4fe4

Twitter Hashtags 101: Complete Guide to Discovery and Power | Internet Media Labs Blog.

Why Spaces, Places, Matter – and Questions #SOBCon #risk #strategy

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I’ve just emerged from SOBCon in its hometown, Chicago, with gratitude to @LizStrauss for the invitation and her colleague Terry @Starbucker St Marie.

Some quick thoughts after a remarkable weekend as the long tail of posts, tweets, texts, continues to flow. More thoughts may follow.

SOBCon is a conference like no other – in which infinite effort has been spent on process as well as content; a fulfillment, at one level, of the generally frustrated vision of unconferences to draw on everyone and avoid the fallacies of schooling; a pudding rich but never quite over-egged; a place, a space, a gathering of people decidedly in community. As I just shared with a new friend, I’m not sure if I spent the weekend being remade or beaten up. OK, you get the picture.

Here just one comment, about SOBCon as a space. The lush, deeply engaging, very personal presentations I leave for the moment to others to discuss, though they make sense only inn the context of the space. (Check the #SOBCon hashtag to get a whiff.)

But this. SOBCon is a place. A space. With rich features evident to newbies as they walk in. The air has been specially treated. The food infused with secret sauce. A magical kingdom, in which the quality of relationships new and old, and – because this is always how it flows in our human community – the character and depth of the communication, are heightened.

To those for whom conferencing is all in a week’s work, including some of the finer efforts, it is always striking when a space is created in which persons and ideas can actually engage; strangers can be open with each other; bonds can spring up almost as fast as cards are exchanged. Well, this weekend in Chicago that was true to a high degree. What’s especially interesting with SOBCon is that this is not the result of its being carried on in secret. I am no great enthusiast for the “Chatham House Rule” that is sometimes used to encourage candor and honesty – which basically renders an event and its participants off the record. SOBCon was streamed. I know because I got message from people saying they could see me in the crowd. The on/off the record approach has value in enabling officials to be interesting and remain employed. It has little impact on the quality of the engagement. Conversely, there can be engagement of a special quality without its illusions.

That’s why in our work at C-PET we have placed much effort and emphasis on the quality of the community we bring together to address the great questions of tomorrow and today. These are not communities of old friends, though they are enriched by such relationships scattered through them. They include many who are strangers. And what is said in public is not private. But the cultivated space means that trust, even between strangers, is set high. So in conversations public and private there is candor. And, as well we know, when one person is candid, shares personally, confesses challenges and discusses defeats, the resonance is potent and the character of the conversation infectious.

At SOBCon this goal of, shall we say, a cultivated public/private inter-personal space for ideas – was achieved to a high degree, spurred by the fact many participants had been SOBConners before, and the social setting over several days – which went all the way to karaoke (some pics from that are in the tweetstream!).

Our business and policy worlds are full of answers. What we need most are spaces in which we can pose questions. Questions can only be properly posed when the space is right. And while this has always been true, as Moore’s Law drives exponential technological change and human events move at a pace faster than we have ever known the questions become more important, and the need for a space within which we can gather to consider them more pressing.

So huzzah to Liz and Terry, and the SOBCon community. As I move back and forth between the worlds of policy and business I know there is nothing we need more.

Chicago 2012 Program | SOBCon.

#Bubble Talk – and the problem of #disruption – and Life in the #Kink

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Henry Blodget has just posted a slide deck detailing start-up financing and arguing against the Bubble hypothesis. Here it is:

http://www.businessinsider.com/state-of-startups-2012-5?op=1

Fair enough.

But as I have argued before, there is a core problem attaching to the mega-brands and, of course, on all our minds, at the moment, Facebook. Which is that disruption is the principle – not the replacement of yesteryear’s blue-chips with tomorrow’s. Sorry, I tend to giggle when I hear smart folk discussing when Facebook will hit X billion. And I guffawed last year as IBM celebrated its centenary and the blogosphere asked the question: What great companies will be around in 100 years’ time? Someone needs to go Google “exponential.”

Point is that as we look back we witness disruptive change at expo speed. Looking ahead? We smooth the curve. We live in the kink. If you like, here’s a definition of the present: Life in the kink. Here’s what I wrote a year ago. I’m sticking by my story.

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/where-the-past-meets-the-future-life-in-the-cosmic-kink

#Digital Imperatives? #CMO

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

What astonishes me is that “digital” is seen as some sort of novelty. It’s been the core of our communications and the driver of business for nearly a generation. Bizarrely, it still looks like tomorrow. It’s today. Um, yesterday.

So: What we need is integration to the degree that digital/social is seen as the baseline like the USPS.

Of course, that entails leadership that will make the point. Mark Fidelman’s HBR blog polling Fortune 250 CIO’s was not encouraging – 4 had blogs, 25 were on Twitter. It would be interesting to know more about the personal digital engagement of these three digital leaders. Digital/social, as I keep saying, has to be personal. Like saying sorry, you can’t hire someone to do it for you.

How to Deliver With Digital: 8 Imperatives for CMOs – Velocidi.

Placing a price on research; #HBR blog on #innovation and the long term . . . .

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Anne Marie Knott from Wash U biz school raises briefly a profound question: how to maintain a major R and D budget when returns are graded quarterly and markets fluctuate by the second. Which always makes me realize how much better, in fact, is our corporate decision-making than it really should be. Out there is one alternative universe in which is really is the current stock price and the next quarterly report that shape every decision.

I’ve written elsewhere that, as it happens, the principal-agent problem (both here and also in the political realm) ends up helping to mitigate short-termism, since executives (like pols) want careers, and careers require reputations for long-term effectiveness. There are other reasons too, the most legitimate of which lie in the minds of long-term investors (of whom there are still a few).

The point Anne Marie Knott makes tellingly here is that what she terms the research quotient (RQ, a way of measuring research commitment/effectiveness) offers a different slant on capitalization. My somewhat broader point would be that the market needs to find ways to place a more reliable value on both such balance sheet commitments and the willingness of the executive team to take short-term hits for long-term value. That might involve polygraphs in the C Suite. It certainly (sigh, don’t we know) involves coming up with salary and bonus structures that deliver what is needed rather than what gluttonous execs feel is their desert for a good day’s work. This may seem like rocket science, but as Elon Musk is demonstrating, rocket science isn’t necessarily, well, rocket science. And the growing shareholder revolt on executive remuneration, reaching most recently to Barclays and now very much a mainstream effort, can’t fail to help.

At the core, it’s all about the long term. And the fact that as change comes faster innovation becomes both more necessary and more risky is driving a very different kind of corporate culture from that to which big companies used to aspire.

Don’t Cripple Innovation for the Sake of This Quarter’s Numbers – Anne Marie Knott – Harvard Business Review.

Rupert #Murdoch ‘s Unfolding Disaster #CSR

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

How to Hit an Iceberg: Rupert Murdoch’s Unfolding Disaster

Reposted from 7/28 2011

As events have unfolded in the News of the World scandal I have kept being reminded of a phrase that explains much of the appeal of that (now defunct) newspaper: the fascination of the horrible. Really grim things can grip. That’s 50% of the key to “tabloid” newspapers and their stories. (The other half is celebs; and when celebs hit scandals, tabloid sales get supersized.) It is a delicious irony that the most celebrated scandal-sheet on the planet has fallen rapid victim to just the kind of story it has always loved to report. The fact that it also saw itself as a campaigning newspaper – crusading on the side of truth and goodness as it drove up sales –further seasons the feast. There’s nothing more grimly gripping on the planet than a loud-mouthed and out-and-out hypocrite.

We don’t know where this will end, and neither do Mr. Murdoch, his executives, shareholders, and those who wish him well or ill. What we do know is that we are looking at a corporate empire under threat. We don’t have to speculate about the potential use by U.S. prosecutors of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (which makes bringing foreign officials, like British cops, a particularly nasty federal offence) to note the potential impact of public sentiment on a corporate empire. Or, in other words, of values on value. We may find it curious that the public seemed to care little for the hacking of celebrities’ cellphones – which was round one of the scandal – but was thrown into rage by the use of that same news-gathering technique on a victim of crime. But for the very reason that the British public is a vast consumer of “tabloid” news its appetites are fed by sensation and sentiment. Sentiment has swung with a vengeance. Murdoch’s big move to control the key satellite broadcaster has been condemned by all political leaders. The police have placed several of his top execs on notice that they are being investigated. He and his team are being invited to be quizzed by parliamentarians. And here in the United States, Congress is waiting in the wings.

What’s the moral? Well, first, look at the impact of technology. Before there were mobile phones all we had were clunky answering machines. Now there are great vats of highly sensitive and potentially valuable private information digitally accessible from any telephone in the world – if you punch in the right sequence of digits. Asymmetries are breaking out all over. Low-level people under pressure for stories break the rules. High-level people may pay the price and market value may be destroyed. What’s the moral? Simple, really: the leveraging that emerging technologies are bringing to business make it far more important for values to be aligned throughout the organization than they were before. Dumpster-diving for discarded correspondence is one thing; pumping 4,000 names into a spreadsheet, bribing the Head of State’s security detail, eavesdropping on the victims of crime and terror, and hacking the phones of cops who are investigating, is quite another. That’s the power of the handset in the hand of the representative of an organization that, at some level, has been shown to be corrupt.

Sure, you can argue that every organization has bad apples. In the nature of the case scandal-focused journalism operates on the edge. The boundaries overstepped did not look so big at the time. All correct. But some lessons learned. First, bad apples are now far more toxic to organizations than they used to be – because of the combination of technological leverage and reputational damage so devastatingly demonstrated here. When all is said and done, the little nexus of private detectives and journalists at the heart of this story may end up destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value. Second, the edgier the effort – whether sensationalist publishing or, say, healthcare systems where physicians can be rewarded for the denial of care – the more central the need for unambiguous, enforced values to pervade the organization from head to toe. Third, just as corporate leaders are now post-Enron required to sign off on the accounts, they need to sign off on the values that pervade their entities. Not because Sarbanes-Oxley requires it, but for an even more pressing reason: their building sustainable value for investors does. We don’t need a SOX for values. We already have one. It’s called the bottom line.

Go figure. And watch News International’s value in weeks to come.

First posted on the US Chamber of Commerce BLCL site.

Unilever’s #CSR #Sustainability Marketing Push

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Unilever plans corporate sustainability ads | News | Marketing Week.

It’s an old principle that if you don’t actually keep your good deeds entirely to yourself, at least don’t flaunt them all over the place. (Jesus said quite a lot about that.) In general, companies have been cautious about claiming too much for their efforts in philanthropy and corporate social responsibility (CSR), partly as they have often borne not a lot of relationship with their brand (with the move to CSR this has shifted somewhat), partly because they can draw critical attention (hard this: you want to be noticed but not too much).

It’s not new for a major corporation to try greening its image, though the example we all remember is (ahem) Beyond Petroleum, Lord Browne’s effort to reposition BP as one of the good guys, which finally blew up in the Gulf.

Yet the context is shifting fast, as brands get weaker, transparency strengthens, uppity customers engage in energetic social media, and a new premium is placed on alignment between social mores and the values of the each stage of the value chain. Apple has recognized this in its rather bold move with Fair Labor and Foxconn (smart business move to contain social risk to the planet’s leading and most profitable brand, though with its own hazards).

So Unilever’s decision to push sustainability into its advertising is notable. It will encourage scrutiny of its claims and more generally of the company behind them (CSR is, at the end of the day, like all values efforts, indivisible). It also sends a message to the gazillion workers at all levels in the corporation that the C Suite is serious about this re-messaging and what needs to lie behind it. And it offers a good example, as Susan McPherson @susanmcp1 of Fenton has noted on Twitter, of the steady mainstreaming evident in CSR.

More on this theme in my columns for the U.S. Chamber – http://bclc.uschamber.com/profile/nigel-m-de-s-cameron

Saving the net, one way and another and another

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

“Prove It or Lose It”

I spent much of Sunday afternoon with Gunther Sonnenfeld (@goonth) in Santa Monica, and am delighted to read and recommend his rumination that picks up our conversation and takes it a lot further.

Yesterday was spent crossing the continent, and lunchtime today I was in DC at the Aspen Institute for its launch of a benchmark report on keeping the internet free by continuing the model of multi–stakeholder governance – and keeping it out of the hands of the ITU (the global telecoms regulator run by reps of every nation). Here’s the report: aspeninstitute.org/idea.

It would be totally old economy to speak of bottom-up versus top-down approaches to saving, shaping, working with and within, the internet. But just as we need to cultivate a multi-stakeholder approach to governance (top-down but from, as it were, a bottom-driven top), so in our creative engagement with the net we should be driven by analogical approaches that do not seek to replicate the IRL/analog online but grasp its extraordinary promise to refashion the goods and services that address our wants and needs in a manner that increasingly transcends and re-states them.

It’s when national leaders and those who shape capital markets begin to grasp that point that the economic argument for the net’s freedom will take root. And, just perhaps, that the old argument that we need political freedom in order to have successful economic activity – an argument that China has shown to be naive, like so many western nostrums – will be seen to return in a new and altogether more sophisticated form.

Our Brands, Ourselves

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Brands Under Pressure – The Brand Lives in the Employees’ Voice | Networking Exchange Blog.

Cheryl Burgess’ (@ckburgess) timely discussion of humanizing brands in the voices and persons of employees looks to the Apple “genius bar” as a prime example. I’d assumed it was a reverse riff on Best Buy’s longstanding Geek Squad (not sure if they still use the somewhat off-color accoutrements it used to have – “we can’t get dates” et al.). They both seem to be working, even if Apple’s lacks quite the humor. But Apple has always taken itself rather desperately seriously (that’s another topic).

Never before have frontline representatives been so significant and, often as not, problematic. I’m thinking of airlines, and United in particular, and the very mixed experiences we have at the hands of the motley crews who combine their theoretical safety role with serving us meaner portions, less often, and often as not without much grace. (I had 2 out of 2 rude attendants on a flight yesterday, and I was in first . . . .)

Getting some sort of alignment between the image the people in corporate HQ are trying to present (ahem, the smiling Smisek greeting us on every flight) and the IRL people who follow has never been simple – and has become the hallmark of success for brands who succeed (GEICO’s famous telephone manner – I have in 20 years never had a bad experience with them).

The option here is to go further – to seek to co-opt the voice of those on the team, not simply have them parrot successfully a voiceover from marketing. As brands get weaker for many reasons (only one of which is the click that can send us to the competition) this offers the strongest incentive to build human organizations in which every representative of the company truly, organically, shares its values and transmits them from the heart.

It’s a tall order, and will stay tall for companies that slowly subside in the social-driven marketplace that is emerging. But for those who can align the corporate voice with the personal, competitiveness and job-satisfaction will go hand in hand.

Link

#gov20la – notes on my presentation today

These are notes – for now. . . .

The context for technology is culture and human decision-making. The context for Government 2.0 technologies lies in the contemporary crisis in liberal democracy, of which the United States may have the worst case though parallel problems are evident in democracies worldwide.

3-fold crisis:

1. In process

Confidence in Congress reported as having risen to 17%. Rise of “exopolitics” – Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Moveon.org, No Labels, the grassroots revolt on SOPA, all examples of the decanting of political focus from the center to activity only indirectly relating to traditional political channels and process. Parallel examples: German Pirate Party overtakes the Greens; Uk Daily Mail endorses Marine Le Pen for the French election.

2. In policy

Major party policy packages were formulated in an earlier generation and are increasingly out of kilter with the focus and weighting of issues of the public at large. A fundamental process of transformation is needed to reconnect with core concerns of 21st century citizens.

3. In leadership.

The faster change takes place, the more leadership is needed. It is lacking across the political spectrum. Leaders frame questions, they enable adaptation to change by shaping people’s thinking not simply following it.

In each category, engagement in Gov2.0 is key to enabling transformation.