Future

A long time ago – so long ago that most people reading this weren’t born or had just started school – I said to my boss that cash machines were dead. At the time, I worked for NCR which stands for National Cash Registers, the cash machine company. The comment was not a popular one….

I often refer to Bernard Lietaer, my late friend, and his work on community currencies. You can read his book for free here. It got me into a whole load of other areas from the Long Now to time as a currency. Have you thought about time as a currency? Maybe my favourite example of…

Talking about time, I got a nudge from Bloomberg about an artist in time. The story is about Max Büsser who, with his band of revolutionaries, made products they wanted themselves and built a huge fandom on the way. What’s the product? A wristwatch. Max worked for luxury jeweller Harry Winston but was unhappy. He…

One of my favourite series, Black Mirror, is about to return to Netflix for Series 6. So, it made me think about the future world and thought I would give an outline of an episode. I’m no screenwriter but … you never know. Black Mirror, Season 7, Episode 3: The Office I’m living in a…

I received a bunch of interesting pings this week, but a few stood out. The main one was about the climate impact of crypto: Ethereum has managed to massively decrease its annual CO2 emissions as it has moved to a proof-of-stake blockchain. In 2021, it was creating a huge 21.95 million tons of CO2, which…

As I watch various series about office politics, it makes me wonder who really thinks this way. Who really thinks about destroying a competitor or a company or a colleague? I guess many of us do. But, do you do it in a collegial way? For example, if Jane is likely to be the next…

I just got pinged by a bunch of reports about 2023 looking forward and felt it worthwhile to share those that hit top of my desk. I guess the first one I’ll pick is from Deloitte, who cover all aspects of the main financial markets: Retail banking: Envisioning new ways to serve and engage with…

This week is Davos week when the mega-rich and powerful gather in a mountaintop miles away from any airport access, apart from private aircrafts of course. The theme of this week’s Davos is Co-operation in a Fragmented World “We see the manifold political, economic and social forces creating increased fragmentation on a global and national…

It’s pretty obvious that technology is changing how we relate to each other. From social media and trolling to creating avatars and the metaverse, our world is moving rapidly to one where we could feel more engaged with a hologram than with a real person sitting next to us. These things are illustrated by so…

I found it interesting to post that Société Générale is launching a new retail bank in France … “By 2025, the merged entity hopes to have 25,000 staff and operate 1,450 branches” … at the same time as another headline announces that bank branches are needed now more than ever … “The most popular reason for turning…