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.

How to Become a Social Business

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This compact article by Christine @comaford tells much of there is to tell about how vital it is for a business to engage with social media, and how to go about it. It’s a challenge and a primer (scroll down for link).

And in a context in which most business organizations are either not engaged or engaged in a sloppy and amateurish manner, it points the way to significant competitive advantage that, pretty much independent of industry, will follow from closing with the opportunities of social.

Two disturbing points I have noted in the past.

1. There is growing evidence that businesses are not anywhere near where they need to be in their use of social data. So, 69% of B2B companies have no way of systematically assessing social response. https://futureofbiz.org/2012/06/05/69-of-global-b2b-orgs-ignore-social-feedback/

2. Back of this, the evidence is that very few CIOs are personal engaged/competent on social media. The numbers are dire. Of the Fortune 250 CIOs, 25 are on Twitter, and 4 have their own blogs. They are therefore quite unable to make informed judgments about social, even if they hire people to handle it.

Social Risk: Seems CIOs think Social is beneath them

If You Aren’t Social, You’ll Shrink: 10 Steps To Becoming a Social Business – Forbes.

#Rioplus20 “marks a beginning for the world”?

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The UN Secretary-General has spoken in these ringing terms of the Rio event taking place this week – in which key world leaders such as President Obama decided not to take part.

My view is that we need to start over. The process is essentially running backwards. Whatever one’s take on the three core issues in the debate – whether the world is warming (looks like a Yes), whether humans caused it (lots of evidence, yet some smart people don’t buy it), and whether we can do much about it (hence Rio – and, note, the absence of key leaders, government and corporate) – we face growing issues of global risk (from financial collapse to nanobots) and the world needs to organize itself around sane and consensus risk assessment and mitigation processes. This issue is in fact one among many.

Here’s what I wrote after the Planet under Pressure prep con in April (expanding on the remarks I was invited to deliver). https://futureofbiz.org/2012/04/13/global-risk-planetary-pressure-and-rolling-down-to-rio20-2/

UN Secretary-General says Rio+20 marks a beginning for the world | United Nations Radio.

Three Caveats for Social Search

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Many strands are brought together in this smart review of the coming merge of social and search, which will take much further the secondary role social is already playing in some search engines.

It raises 3 core questions.

1. I am entirely happy that clever algorithms should put together the strands of my digital (and analog) life to my benefit. I am entirely unhappy if there is no clear way found to keep this info entirely, forever, private to me; unless I choose to part with it for cash or some specific service.

2. I am also happy to have a tailored version of search operating in particular situations (so when I search “weather,” the first hit is my local weather not the dictionary of meteorology. But in less obvious cases not only do I want a choice, of social search and, as it were, asocial search; I want a flashing light to remind me that my private universe is being mined, not the universe out there.

3. There’s a fundamental distinction to be drawn between biographical, geographical, or personal preferences in matters of, say, food and music; and broad issues of information and opinion. So it is not at all OK that a Democrat should get a view of history and politics designed to be favorable to him or her; or that doubters of human causation of climate change should receive preferentially material favorable to their cause.

Search and Social: How The Two Will Soon Become One | TechCrunch.

via Three Caveats for Social Search.

Spreading the Word: Knowledge Diffusion now we’re Digital

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I recently addressed a conference on global education, and was asked to look in my keynote at the special situation of “resource-poor” areas. I don’t think my approach went down very well (one senior figure in the room, a former UN official, described it sweetly as “crap”), but I still think I’m right!

What I said was that the digital revolution, combining the digitization of books and the spread of mobile in Africa, was re-weighting educational resources; and would soon allow the delivery of high-level educational programs with almost none of the traditional resource pre-requisites in place.

Here’s a case in point: Nice report on the use of e-books in exactly that situation. At the other end of the opportunity scale we have the new programs being launched by Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. But we have just made a very small beginning. In general, education has been very slow to be disrupted, and my sense is it will change very rapidly over the next 10 years – on the same scale as publishing at the moment. This will not all be good, but it will be enormously good for distance delivery at very low cost of what have been expensive western educational perquisites.

Worldreader: An E-Book Revolution for Africa? – WSJ.com.

Tomorrow’s leadership will be predominantly female

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HR Magazine has a brief report on a study of the respective strengths of women and men in leadership. No great surprises here; indeed mostly statements of the proverbial bleedin’ obvious.

But note that’s going on. The writer is making the best of men’s “strengths,” though they are more strategic weaknesses. Two picked out are making a good first impression, and being good at getting their careers to progress. Yes, well.

By contrast, woman excel at completing projects on time, inter-personal relations, planning, organizing, listening, and on and on.

What the article does not highlight is that these “women” key skills are in higher demand in the context of change. And what’s the watchword of century 21? Exactly. Exponential, disruptive change. So men’s key skills which were a good fit with most aspects of the Fordist mass-production, bureaucratic age (which of course they devised) are now increasingly being marginalized. Which is why the push for diversity in executive leadership and the boardroom does not need to be focused on equity, simply on alignment with the central focus of 21st century business. Diversity as such is more significant in change contexts, but the distinctly female traits are key. That’s where competitive advantage and value will lie.

Sorry, guys.

HR Magazine – Employers urged to recognise men and women tend to excel in different aspects of leadership.

Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy – and Business: 5 Principles

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At the core of 21st century business lies data. And as the digital revolution envelops more and more of our activities that core will only get bigger.

We have become most aware of these issues in the context of social media and the biz models that have grown up around advertising as a way to sustain enterprises that are free to the user/consumer.

But of course it goes deeper, much deeper. National security issues, health, transportation – a thick strand of data/privacy concerns and opportunities runs through sector after sector. In this illuminating piece in the NY Times, the spotlight is on Acxiom, a vast aggregator of consumer data whose name is known to few.

These 5 Principles are clear:

1. Every day, more of our lives will be digitized.

2. Every day, there will be more business opportunity in the mining (refining is the word Acxiom likes) of the data.

3. For a stable business environment to flourish, without GMO-style revolts or data scandals such as have punctuated the short history of social media, we need to move towards consensus policies that give business maximum freedom and citizens maximum control over their lives and their digital output – through the optimal mix of self-regulation and legal oversight.

4. Concerns over cybersecurity are growing. Every expert I know is more more worried all the time – as we aggregate data and in the process raise the risk of its being released by accident (another laptop left on a train) or theft. Some of the smartest people on the planet are entirely focused on hacking into our securest systems, and they keep scoring. Risk assessments need to be candid and – unless this raises its own security issues – public.

5. In these days of globalization and cloud, there is no way to avoid global standards.

Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing – NYTimes.com.

10 Amazing Facts about Twitter

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

10 Amazing Facts about Twitter

1. It is far simpler than Facebook and yet has far more uses.

2. It is accessible from almost any point on earth and at any time.

3. It connects people and knowledge seamlessly.

4. You can have one-on-one chats with friends and strangers 24 hours a day, either in semi-public through @ messages or in private with DM.

5. It supplies me with a free staff of hundreds of expert researchers and communicators, whose chief delight day by day is to tell me what’s new and what to make of it.

6. Twitter relationships can lead quickly to real-life connections, and when you meet a Twitter friend IRL it’s remarkable how much you already know of each other. Whitney Johnson, author of Dare Dream Do, has called this TWIRL – Twitter – In Real Life. Twirl can be an amazing experience. That’s how I met Whitney! @johnsonwhitney

7. As knowledge is expanding exponentially – faster every day – only one thing can enable us to digest, focus, grasp, what’s new and important: The Miracle of Reciprocal Curation. Each of us scans what’s new for each other, in a mutual gift relationship that has enormous power. Twitter is the best mechanism for it we have yet devised. It’s a Reciprocal Knowledge Engine.

8. A Reciprocal Knowledge Engine is key to enabling us to scan the future, as the future is coming in faster every day.

9. Every corporation and government can use Twitter to engage one-on-one with customers, prospects, and citizens. Forget focus groups and traditional market research. And turn elections from 2-yearly, 4-yearly events into continuous engagement.

10. Twitter opens the organizational boundary of the corporation. We now have two-way communication – the key to transformation in every institution, as the values of customers and employees sync – and customer needs reshape corporate culture.