Good morning fellow leaders and influencers, I hope this note finds you well. The rain has returned here, but summer is just around the corner!

I love the CBC, especially the radio programing and now podcasts are a big part of my travel regimen. This past Sunday morning, on his show, Michael Enright interviewed Al Gore, the former Vice President of the US about his new book, “The Future.” Intrigued, I bought the e-book within 24 hours. This is an important book for all of us as leaders. It’s not a fluffy, astrological look into our future. It is rather a sober and well-reasoned look at the forces at play in our world that are driving some likely future outcomes. I find it actually a very good description of the emerging zeitgeist. And for strategic thinking for leaders, it presents some interesting scenario perspectives. 

Gore argues that there are six drivers at work (and I’m quoting these from the publisher):

1. Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
2. The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
3. The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
4. A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
5. Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
6.  There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

Now, that’s a pretty big mouthful, and I’m sitting here thinking, yikes, what do I as leader do with this?

Here are 3 questions that I think will serve us all well:

1. What is our organization’s or my team’s relationship to Earth Inc. and the Global Mind? Or what are the possible impacts in the coming years on our group in a much more holistic world? How many of us for example are checking the labels of the clothes we own or the clothes we may be buying after the tragedy in Bangladesh?
2. How is our organization plugged into your local community? As much as we are inextricably connected to Earth Inc and the Global Mind, alternative economic models, including ethical products and services are growing  http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2011001/article/11399-eng.htm   and locally operating small businesses account for just under 30% of the nation’s GDP http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/061.nsf/eng/02722.html In other words, we appear to live into the old phrase, “think globally, act locally.”
3. What is our relationship to businesses in medicine, agriculture, energy, transportation or construction?   As these vital industries change, are we keeping up with those changes? What knowledge do we need to catch up on? Are those businesses shifting away from the models to which we’ve been accustomed, a la “Who Moved My Cheese” http://www.spencerjohnson.com/Book-WhoMovedMyCheese.html

Our experience of the world is changing, what we had assumed to be normal might be obsolete. All of us as leaders need to keep a “weather eye” on Gore’s observations. On Earth Inc. and within the Global Mind, we are really becoming a global village, and as anyone with any village/small town experience knows, what happens at one end of town is soon felt by the other end of town.