Boomer Tsunami

Every seven seconds, another Baby Boomer turns 50. The unprecedented size of the “senior” population has M.I.T.’s AgeLab and other research centers around the country scrambling to develop new products and services for an age group that will include 71.5 million people by 2030. The boomers will require not only solutions for their serious health issues, but also some innovative gadgets to help them ease into old age. A USA Today article describes the senior explosion as “a tsunami coming at you. You know the tidal wave is going to hit, and it’s a question of whether we’ll be ready.” Ron Crossland raises the same question and provides some answers in his web seminar 2010 Why Leadership Development Matters.

TomSpeak

“We’re discussing Re-imagine! at a meeting and we don’t know what Q.E.D. means,” J.B. Blosser Bittner, chief of the Oklahoma News Bureau, asked us in an email. Good question. Mathematicians and philosophers of yore wrote Q.E.D. (short for quod erat demonstrandum, what was to be proven) at the end of their work to indicate they had proven their point. You don’t get smarter by pretending to know more than you do, so asking questions is good.

Q.E.D.

Happy Birthday, Walkman

Would a Walkman by any other name sound as sweet? Plenty of its imitators do, but I’ll bet you can’t name a single one of them. Since Sony introduced the little masterpiece 25 years ago this month, we’ve called them all Walkman … just as we call all gelatin Jello and all facial tissue Kleenex. Brand recognition doesn’t get any better than that. This branding comes from Sony’s commitment to cool design, cited by Tom in his appearances, with this quote from retired Sony chairman Norio Ohga:

At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.

Training with Yoga

This article by Manika Gupta in the Financial Express profiles a “train-the-trainer” program in India that combines teachings of Tom Peters, Bob Pyke, and yoga. Let’s all breathe together now.

See Tom Speak, LIVE!

Coming to London in October! Don’t miss your chance to be inspired and energized by what Tom has to say about the future for business. Bookings are now being taken for this premier European event being held in London on 1 October 2004.

Millennium WOW!Project


Today’s Wall Street Journal beautifully tells the story of Chicago’s new Millennium Park. Nothing other than WOW! can describe this 24-acre landmark. Take a few moments to compare it to another millennium project, the dome in Greenwich, England.

The Naked Crowd

Jeffrey Rosen laments personal branding in his Spiked essay.

Anxious exhibitionists, trained from the cradle to believe that there is no more valuable currency than personal exposure, are not likely to object when their neighbors demand that they strip themselves bare. But just as public intimacy is a kind of delusion, so is the hope of distinguishing ourselves from the crowd by catering to the crowd’s insatiable demands for exposure … As both spectators and actors in the Naked Crowd, we are too willing to surrender privacy for an illusory sense of emotional connection and security. Perhaps we will realise what a poor bargain we have struck only after it is too late.

The Politburo and You

The San Antonio Express-News reports on the U.S. Department of Labor’s Workforce Innovations 2004 conference currently being held in its city. After commenting on remarks by the Texas Governor, the article cites Tom:

Business book author Tom Peters was another conference-opening keynote speaker. He told the conference that “we have a hell of a lot of work to do” to meet the challenges of training the work force of the 21st century. He cited a recent conference in Aspen, Colo., where he and former President Clinton were asked if the United States would still be the world’s economic leader in 2104. Clinton said yes, but Peters said, “I’d put my money on China. … The decisions the Chinese politburo will make will be more important in the United States than the ones (Federal Reserve Chairman) Alan Greenspan makes.”

Event Slides: NAWB

NAWB Workforce Innovations 2004 in San Antonio, TX, hosts Tom. You can download the slides here.

Tom on Martha

Tom writes about Martha Stewart in Re-imagine!

Until very recently, we lived in a world where “assets” were “things you could touch.” A smokestack. A conveyor belt. A bricks-and-mortar store. Then, quite suddenly, we entered a world where the assets of, say, Martha Stewart Omnimedia where things like … “Perception of Martha.” Thus:
Ubiquitous Martha = Billions in Market Capitalization
Martha-as-Indicted-Insider-Stock-Trader = Far (Far!) Less.

And it looks like “Martha-as-Sentenced” will be somewhere in-between.