My passion is helping groups to creating new opportunity space. As consultant, entrepreneur and facilitator I?ve found myself looking to the future, bringing the outside-in and managing radical innovation and organizational change projects. Today while I still love Consumer Products my focus centers more on the underlying technologies that are creating and accelerating change in our consumer society.  The impact of ?presence? (beyond simple IM), ?mobility?, ?VoIP? through social media.

In 2000 while at GBN I wrote a paper on communities of consumers gaining collective power. I worked with top teams at General Mills, Motorola, and Dow Corning where in each case new ?insights? made the difference.  My speaking, strategy and scenario change programs have evolved in design, towards more open space and simply learning by doing. During the dotCambrian explosion eBay, Napster and Stupid Networks influenced my thinking.  Today social media and radically lowered communication costs are accelerating this trend.  Like my blogging colleagues - a network of truly remarkable and wonderful people I see us all at the threshold of thousands of new solutions for co-creating value.

I began blogging in 2002, in the rough times post dot believing I?d find new rules for marketing and probing the future. My blog Unbound Spiral has focused on looking upstream.  First hand from assembling the pieces to writing I leaned how new behavior is accelerating learning. I was using my blog as a scanning tool, and relearned the importance of ?focus? discovering Skype just two days after it launched.  For much of 2003 and 2004 my blog was Skype focused, I?ve lived as consumer evangelist and advocate. I translated that learning to companies like Cheskin. I recently wrote that I?m giving up traditional blogging. Unwritten in that post was the energy and commitment we are putting into Yi-Tan.   

In Yi-Tan we are both exploring the future of work and creating solutions on a daily basis. In an emergent world studying ?your market? consumers is a route to likely failure.  One must minimize risk and create the ?Sony iPod? before it is Apple?s.  It is not enough to study and research consumers one must seek contrarian views and emergent breakpoints.  I?m a synthesizer I believe that Skype may break ?telecoms? as we have known it.  I?ve worked across the globe in professional services, consumer products, communications, retailing, and technology. In each one I led large innovative marketing and sales teams beyond achieving multi-million dollar budgets often from ?turnaround?  to new direction.  Across cultures I learnt that leaders of tomorrow ?facilitate? change, and motivate though story-telling, examples, learning journeys and personal example. In the end it is who asks the better questions faster that wins.

Nothing turns me on like innovation and research projects that go beyond insights and turn into real products.  The harder the problem the greater my curiosity.   The conversations that matter are the one?s that we can take further, take us through change and keep us wanting more.

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