When it comes to job titles, ‘Future Historian’ is absolutely fantastic. However, as one of the leading practitioners of this fascinating craft, Dr. James Bellini, can testify, the description can lead to some misunderstandings: He is definitely not, for example, a magician.
“Let me be clear: I don’t have a cape, a pointy hat and a magic wand,” Bellini jokes, and he can’t tell you who’s going to win the 3.30 at Ascot. What you can do, however, is build on a career spanning decades of award-winning research and analysis, networking, and creative endeavors to produce assessments of the likely state of the future that are as informed and entertaining as any other. meeting.
When SSON meets Bellini, the good doctor, whose doctorate “in military material” comes from the London School of Economics, has just finished presenting himself at the VIII Annual Shared Services Week in Sitges, near Barcelona. His talk, the first plenary of the event, ranged from early business history, through demographic change in modern Europe, through ‘Gutenberg 2.0’, to the emergence of a new wave of consumers and the recruitment challenges posed by the appearance of ‘Generation C’ – and has scattered some pretty tricky stats along the way.
For example, those of us in the audience now know that by 2040, if current trends continue, Italy will have 20 million fewer inhabitants; that “in 1965 there were 10,000 people for each computer, but by 2015 there will be 10,000 connected devices for each person”; that “more than 50 percent of the planet’s population has never made a phone call”; that in 2020 Japan will be the oldest society in the developed world and the United States will be the youngest.
It is from a vast archive of such data, analyzed through methods over many years in refinement, that Bellini is able to create the “works of informed imagination” that make up his futurological production. Facts and figures, he says, are the bargaining chip of futurology and he declares that like a magpie, he will “steal anything without remorse,” which will contribute to his understanding of the myriad forces that will shape the times to come. .
This understanding has developed over a distinguished and varied career that has seen Bellini succeed as an academic, think-tank analyst, television reporter and presenter, author, storyteller, and of course, public speaker. However, if this suggests chameleon professional tendencies to accompany his corvino approach to data, Bellini’s wry smile, piercing gaze, and uncompromising wit marks him as decidedly human, as does his unwillingness to indulge in social niceties: His latest book, addressing corporate deception and the pervasiveness of misrepresentation in the corporate world, is appropriately titled The Bullshit Factor.
Bellini went from college (St John’s College, Cambridge) to advertising, among other duties, but was in Paris as the first British member of the highly respected Hudson Institute (co-founded by Bellini’s first mentor, nuclear strategist Herman Kahn ) where he won his spurs and applause, with a series of predictions for the main European economies, starting with France. He and his colleagues were well ahead of the curve in anticipating the French economic revival of the 1970s and 1980s, and their success did not go unnoticed; Hired by the BBC as a consultant on a similar predictive article on the British economy, Bellini ended up running the show as lead reporter. Perhaps unpredictably, even for the most promising of seers, television and a modicum of fame had come to the door.
Although he speaks of his successes with captivating humility, Bellini’s television career left him much to boast about: seven years as a studio host with Sky News and Financial Times Television; seasons featuring Panorama, Newsnight and The Money Program; and a host of awards, including the Prince Rainier II Award at the Monte Carlo International Television Festival and a special award given by the United Nations for his work on the epic documentary series The Nuclear Age, as well as less brilliant roles such as presenting a Version for Cluedo TV. In the meantime, he continued to predict, analyze, and publish, with a series of well-received tomes hitting shelves from the 1980s onward.
By now, Bellini had earned a reputation as one of the most insightful and intuitive experts on the circuit today, and the move to public speaking to complement his burgeoning literary career was logical. His natural talent for business (he has held executive positions in numerous companies) and communications, combined with his specific spheres of interest, mean that although he is equally happy to show up to companies like Greenpeace “for a cup of tea.” – Your natural constituency consists of relatively powerful entrepreneurs with a keen interest in understanding the foundations of the future (exactly the kind of people who attend Shared Services Week, in fact).
And some future will be. Bellini paints a fascinating picture of societies, companies and economies on the brink of truly fundamental change; while maintaining that, in general, “nothing is really new; it may be different, but it is not new,” at the same time it raises developments that, in terms of the way organizations are structured and managed, are as new as any which has preceded them since the Stone Age.
“Shared services is not the most attractive area of management, but it is one of the most important. It is about creating things that have not been seen before in business history: internal services for profit. However, this is not really revolutionary: however, in the next 10 to 15 years I see a revolution, a period comparable to the beginning of corporate history, “he says. “We will see so many changes [in organisational structure] in the next 15 years as we saw in the last 5,000. “
One of the main enablers of this restructuring is, of course, the globalization of information revolution, which is taking place at a mind-boggling rate.
“The rate of change is becoming much more compressed … Moore’s Law is probably outdated by now. We have to generate new words to deal with the rate at which information is growing,” he says, citing as an example the increase in the “exabyte “- a billion trillion bytes or, in older terms, a trillion big books full of data.
The implications for business of this astonishing acceleration of development are, of course, manifold; But Bellini sees one of the most crucial impacts taking place in the field of hiring and human resources, and beyond that, in the way business is conducted on a personal level.
“The people you employ in the future will be very different from those you employed in the past,” he warns. “Their future talent comes from what some people call Generation Y, but I prefer to call Generation C” – the connected, communicating, fully digital creator-generators who are currently on their way to adulthood.
“They are digital natives, very different individuals, who live, educate themselves and work in digital spaces. Sharing is instinctive between them … It is not about being selfish but about cooperating effectively and efficiently.”
Bellini believes that the arrival of this generation will force employers to re-evaluate age-old practices such as recruiting, interviewing techniques and training. After all, this is a generation with a diminishing attention span but a marked increase in the ability to multitask and move from one task to another very quickly; If a coach begins to lose the attention of his trainees, Bellini asks, who will be to blame? The learners, who have grown up in a fast-changing and fast-paced digital environment, or the coach, who hasn’t? The answer is implicit in the question, and Bellini cautions that companies hoping their new recruits will bow to an established ‘old’ modus operandi will be left behind: “The talent war will only get sharper,” he says, and it’s a war that no company can afford to lose.
The nature of the job itself will also change, the doctor acknowledges. Long-term contracts at fixed locations will become increasingly obsolete; the future will be made up of task-based employment of “clusters” of employees coming together to address specific needs, offering complementary skills for comparatively short and intense bursts of productivity, often working remotely from homes around the world.
For older employees, such a change could represent a great challenge and perhaps an assault on traditional conveniences like job security; However, for Gen C digital natives, such practices will be second nature, and Bellini uses the example of Hollywood film production, which has been from a task-based environment, as the way that entire companies and industries they can work in a different environment. and potentially formidable model.
The future will also bring us a very different class of consumers, Bellini promises. Societies age and older people become more prosperous: in the UK, for example, in this “New Age of Consumers”, those over 50 already own more than 80% of the nation’s assets, and the country has reached a turning point. when there are more retirees than children. Meanwhile, family sizes are shrinking, creating a growing deficit in the future workforce: We are approaching the “post-child future,” says Bellini in a somewhat unsettling way.
“This has huge consequences for everyone,” he says. “For example, R&D: The reason cars are the way they are, with four seats, is because the nuclear family model was dominant when car design was more dynamic. Four members of the family required four seats. Now the nuclear family is not the dominant model: what will be the design of the car of the future? Or take cereal packages: they were the size of a nuclear family. Now that size is no longer adequate. “
Different needs require different provisions, and Bellini urges today’s businesses to plan appropriately for a very different class of consumers. The older generation, who will live longer than any other in human history, will have different high-value requirements that must be met; meanwhile, the younger generation will be comparatively less well off but will have very different needs and will expect those needs to be met in very different ways. Marketing, design, sales – all will have to undergo their own revolutions.
“There is an ongoing conversation, a great global conversation. You will not control this conversation, although it will be about you and it will impact you,” he warns. Of course, this lack of control could terrify many companies and professionals, especially those in shared services for whom maintaining the right level of control over processes is a critical aspect of the job, but it also represents a unique opportunity.
Yes, as Bellini assures us, in the next few years we will have to “revise the idea of how to think”, that reencounter with the processes and the reasons behind them – driven largely by the digital natives that make up the next generation of employees. – It will surely lead to radical changes in almost every aspect of business activity. The cost and efficiency savings currently considered world-class by leading shared services professionals may pale into insignificance compared to the benefits, tangible and intangible, brought by new approaches to the rationale for business and economics. , and by technology. revolution whose ultimate consequences even the most esteemed of futurologists can only reflect from afar.
(The Bullshit Factor by Dr. James Bellini is now available through Artesian Publishing)