By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Every day the artist wakes up and has a choice to make. They and their muse decide what they will paint, draw, sculpt, or photograph today. Similarly, every day leaders wake up and decide who they will lead, where they will lead and how they will lead today. Having just returned from Florence, Italy where I was doing research on “Renaissance Lessons for Modern Managers” I am supremely sensitized to how zeitgeist and personality impacts artistic, political and leadership choices. Ongoing survey research at multiple universities seems to indicate that many contemporary leaders are “running on automatic” and do not realize the degree of agency [i.e., the broad array of choices available to them] regarding how, who and where they lead.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Several colleagues insist on referring to me as a “CIO Whisperer”. One pundit writing for a Northeastern newspaper went so far as to insist that “Thornton is to CIOs what Jane Goodall was to chimpanzees.” I am not certain what exactly that means but I am unabashedly and unashamedly pro-CIO. ... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

We are one year short of the twenty year anniversary of Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. In that work the founder of MIT’s Media Lab prophesized a transition from a world of atoms to one of bits. His leitmotif was the belief that everything that can be digitized will be digitized.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

The Church refused to contemplate Galileo’s heliocentric view of the world. Some may question Darwin’s portrayal of evolution. But NOBODY can argue that our world has digitized. Eric Schmidt, the über-suit-in-residence at Google was recently in London and told journalists that “In the future, children will either be online or asleep.” What does our increasing digitization mean for the future of marketing?
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By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Many years ago [1982], I was THE technology lender at America’s strongest bank. The project at hand was financing the massive build-out of the cable TV infrastructure. That was my last professional interaction with this amazing, huge, totally misunderstood and critically important component of modern existence. Since 1982, I, like most of us have been a paying customer of the cable industry – not really giving much thought to the people delivering bits to my home.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

I believe that the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. At one pole we have literary intellectuals, at the other – scientists. Between the two: a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes, particularly among the young - hostility and dislike. But most of all - lack of understanding.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

As I was writing my latest book, The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics, I came across the concept of Type I leaders [actually I stumbled across the idea of Type I problems and made the inference that Type I problems required Type I leaders]. Type I leaders are unstructured problem solvers. They come into a situation; figure out what is going on and make a determination regarding what is important/what is trivial and lay out a course of action. We are living in a world defined by Type I problems. Unfortunately we also seem to be living in a world suffering a deficit of Type I leaders. Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group, asserts we are living in a “G-Zero” world. What he means by this is that the major nations of the world are essentially operating with ZERO leadership. Organizations need to hire, retain and develop executive development programs that cerebrate and celebrate Type I leaders.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

We take forecasts, forecasters and forecasting for granted – and we shouldn’t. In 2014 I believe the ability to have meaningful conversations with forecasters with an eye toward creating and applying forecasts will be what separates winners from losers.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Even though 2014 is going to be a BIG year for change – even though all the environmental factors contributing to massive change [e.g., dissatisfaction with status quo, disruptive buzzing of new participants deploying new technologies in unique and unorthodox ways, and available/affordable capital] are in massive abundance, EVERYTHING IS NOT GOING TO CHANGE. That is just not the way the world works.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

In front of the Preface of C. Vann Woodward’s masterwork, Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee1 wrote:

"I remember watching the Diamond Jubilee procession [22 June 1897] myself as a small boy [he was born 14 April 1889]. I remember the atmosphere. It was: Well, here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there – forever! There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all that."

History appears to be “happening” to banks and bankers.... Read more