The Rio Olympics are the first true Shift Age Olympics.  While the Beijing Olympics were the first of this new age, the Rio Olympics were the first selected in the Shift Age.  The Rio Olympics point to the fact that we are not only in the global stage of human evolution, but that the major players of the 21^st century will different than those of the 20^th.

In the past two years, I have spoken all across North America about the fact that it is not just China and India that will rise in influence in this new century but that …

The recent election in Japan is extremely significant.  It indicates that the country is beginning to catch up to the rest of the world.  In my book “The Shift Age” and my speech with the same title I speak about the “Threshold Decades”, a 20 year period from 1985-2005 when the developed countries of the world moved from the Industrial Age into and through the Information Age.  Japan at least geopolitically has finally moved into this time, long after it should have done so.

Future historians will look back at the Threshold Decades as the threshold between the room of the …

As a futurist I write and speak about long term trends.  As an advisor and speaker to CEOs, I am looked to for more short term trends and forecasts.  Last September, when the growing recession went into a global financial meltdown after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I was constantly being asked about what was going to happen economically, about what was going on, how bad would it be and how long it would last.  This led me to look both deeply and widely across the global economic stage to develop forecasts and predictions.

As I consume media widely these past …

In the last column I looked back at the history of K-12 education in the U.S.  This was to provide background and context for this and future columns.  I also mentioned in that last column that I was fortunate to participate in an exciting conference of people committed to creating the 21^st century K-12 campus that took place in Columbia S.C.  How this conference came into being is a wonderful story.

[Regular readers will find this a distinct departure from the usual columns here.  This will be one of several columns about the creation of a task force …