The Eurozone is a mess.  Mathematics, common sense, recognition of a changed reality, and, yes, democracy have all taken a back seat to a deep-seated, ego-related loyalty to a broken idea from the 20^th century.  This is one of a number of situations today where legacy thinking from the last century is propping up institutions and ways of looking at the world that will soon dissolve in the face of new forces and ways of thought of the 21^st century.

In January, I started to say that we should stop calling it the “Greek Debt Crisis” and start talking about it being the potential death rattle of the Euro.  In August, I suggested a 30%-60% chance the Euro would collapse.  A couple of weeks ago, when the “Euro solution” was widely trumpeted in the media, people who knew of my view of the situation sent me links about it.  Not so fast, I said.  This is not the final answer; it is a temporary delay of inevitable further mass meetings of politicians to try to save face.  There was no solution there, just an agreement to move forward and hope to arrive at one.

I have long suggested that the Eurozone should allow Greece to become the third-world country it seems to want to become.  When was the last time the terms “innovation,” “strong work ethic,” or “growth economy” were accurately used in the same sentence as “Greece”?  In a country where 10% of the work force is employed by the government, …

It is time to slowly say good-bye to the “job” as it has been known in our lifetime and the lifetime of our parents.  The parents of baby boomers were the first full generation that lived with the general concept of “life-long employment.” Baby boomers left college and stepped on lower rungs of a “career path.” Now, after three consecutive “jobless recoveries,” it should be clear that jobs as we had defined them are disappearing.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost three years ago, a number of people who had recently lost jobs due to downsizing, bankruptcy and lack of funding, have asked me where they should look for jobs.  My answer has been consistent: become your own job.

What is it that you love?  What is it that you are good at? What are your most marketable skills? What is your greatest value to the marketplace? If you stop and think about it, there should be a lot of overlap in the answers to these questions.

It is time to become the job you are.  It is time to embrace being a free agent.  It is time to be a one-person company.  It is time to let go of the concept that there is a job out there that provides security.

As early as late 2008, I forecasted that the unemployment rate in the U.S. would push through nine percent and perhaps reach 10 percent.  I further suggested that the country would stay close to these historically high levels of unemployment for …

In the past I have written that as a futurist, it sometimes feels like I live in a state of déjà vu. I spend a lot of time researching and looking into the future to develop the forecasts and trends that I write and speak about. I experience them, see them, and have varying degrees of certainty when I publish or present them.

Since 2011 began, so many of the forecasts and trends I predicted over the last four years are coming true, I feel as if I’m in an almost constant state of déjà vu. Now, as I spend some 22 hours traveling from Chicago to Singapore, scanning stacks of periodicals from around the world, this feeling is amplified.

I will write a lot in the coming weeks and months about all these forecasts and trends. As a futurist, I should be judged in part on how accurate I am, so it is indeed gratifying that many of the events/trends I predicted have become reality in 2011. The purpose of all these upcoming columns is to be able to point to actual events as the manifestations of what I have been speaking and writing about since 2006, when this blog began, and 2007, when I wrote The Shift Age. This will help explain the truly transformative time we are now entering. In a few years, the world will look quite different from what it did in 2010. The early evidence is everywhere in 2011.

Here are some of the trends and forecasts …

As a futurist I often feel as though I live in a déjà- vu world. I write about something and then months or years later it occurs or becomes something that is on the minds of a lot of people.

This is the first of what may be occasional columns from years past written here that, for one reason or another, are relevant to what is currently going on in the world.  As a futurist I try to write “ahead of the curve” or to take a “future look at today”. Sometimes old columns resonate today.  This is one of them.

The recent – and ongoing – flap about privacy settings on Facebook is just the latest incident that makes us think about our privacy in this age of connectivity and social media.  When we are confronted with this issue, predictably we seem to recoil and speak about invasion of privacy.  We get upset that our personal data is or could be shared with people we don’t know.

Facebook, with  almost too numerous to count privacy settings, is clearly a conflicted company when it comes to privacy.  It has a culture, purpose and business model that is completely about sharing, or sharing completely.  A complete surrender of privacy is the ideal.

To focus on Facebook and other social media as a place of concern for privacy is myopic.  We all long ago gave up privacy for the sake of convenience.  In the larger scheme of things we have willingly, if not fully consciously, …

In my last column I wrote about Dubai and that it is a 21^st Century city.  As a futurist I felt at home being there as it feels like a city that is fully looking forward rather than stuck in a legacy past.  In this column I want to take a look at some of the dynamics that have shaped this city to be so forward facing.  Too many cities in the world are stuck in the past, the recent past or are looking into the future completely through present day problems.  What can other cities learn from Dubai?

Dubai exists today because of the vision of a city that was birthed and built by three successive leaders who systematically implemented that vision.  The Al Maktoum family has ruled Dubai for the past 200 years.  In 1958 Sheik Rashid took over as the ruler of Dubai and was a very hands-on ruler, making twice daily trips through the then small town, seeking interaction with the populace.  He saw that the future necessitated the construction of infra-structure, services, and an open policy towards the rest of the world.  His view seemed to be decades ahead.

In 1968, the United Kingdom decided to end the treaty it had in place with the seven emirates.  Three years later in 1971 the United Arab Emirates was formed and the seven states put in place a Supreme Council that oversaw all the general policies of the U.A.E.  This council operated – and operates …