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 ...]]> 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 years. This reality is only now being discussed and accepted.  Two years ago, this forecast was doubted.  What led me to make this forecast?

The social concept of jobs, careers and companies really developed over the last 300 years in the Industrial Age. Before the invention of the steam engine, the centralization of industry, and the urbanization of the developed countries, people were artisans, cobblers, blacksmiths and farmers. One apprenticed with a master and gradually learned the trade. Craftsmanship and high-quality work were prized; scale was small and individualized. People plied their crafts on a one-to-one basis.

The 100 years from the Civil War through the 1950s was a time of scale, mechanization, centralization and the creation of vertical hierarchies that rapidly became bureaucracies. People started at the bottom, or if they had a college degree, slightly above the bottom, and over time, moved up the career ladder in a life-long sequence of promotions, often moving wherever the company told them to. The apotheosis of this was post-WWII America, with its triumphant manufacturing power that was the envy of the world.

The 1970s ushered us into the Information Age – with computers and communications satellites – and started the transition from production of goods to the generation of information at ever-increasing rates. An economy based on atoms was ceding to an economy based on digits. Waves of technological innovation across all sectors of the economy provided us all with moments of Toffler’s “Future Shock.”  The future kept showing up and altering our life, work and behavior.

The last decade of the 20^th century, with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, unleashed globalism and the global economy. Work began to transcend national boundaries. The birth of the Internet launched the connectivity revolution, which is playing out to this day. Technology moved from the desktop to the briefcase, and now to the pocket. It moved from the office to the home. The clear consumerization of technology is flowing through the global workplace.  People can now sit in a coffee shop or on a park bench and run companies, create products, collaborate globally.

In the Industrial Age, machines replaced manual or blue-collar labor. In the Information Age, computers replaced office or white-collar workers. Hardware and software replaced people doing jobs.  The Internet connected the world, so the lowest-cost producer became ascendant. Now in the Shift Age, all is in a state of shift. Instead of hierarchies, silos and vertical management structures, we are becoming a global net of connected work.

Jobs have less and less value, which is why people who have lost their jobs in the recent Global Financial Crisis cannot find jobs that pay the same as the ones they lost. It is time to let go of the concept of a job and think of becoming a node in the global network of commerce, of creativity.  What might be your highest value to others? What is your greatest passion? What is it that you do well?  What can you give to others in the connected global economy that will give you money in return? What is your innovative idea? In the Shift Age, wealth will flow from IP, intellectual property. What is your IP?

Stop looking for the “job” that is increasingly hard to find. Create your own job.  Become the job you are.

In 2007, I forecast that humanity, and particularly the developed countries of the world, would enter the “reorganizational recession of 2007-2010.” Considering that this is a blog that looks into the future, it might seem contradictory to be looking back at this event, but by doing so, I can explain why it was accurate and why understanding it will help us better navigate and understand what lies just ahead.

The reason for the length, breadth and depth of the 2007-2010 recession was that it was a reorganizational recession between the Information Age and the Shift Age. Most economists look at recessions through the eyes of history, measuring whatever recession we are currently in against past recessions. Phrases such as “this looks to be another jobless recovery similar to the recessions of the 1990’s” or “the recovery will be on the back of the consumer – when the consumer starts spending, we will emerge from this recession” (both paraphrases) are common and represent economists looking at economic downturns purely through economic filters. That is why they have had to keep revising ...]]> In the last column here, I pointed out that a number of my Shift Age forecasts have come true. I wrote about several of them and how I get an odd sense of déjà vu when these forecasts become reality. In this and coming columns, I will revisit them – not to gloat, but to provide explanation, because people read and hear forecasts differently from explanations of the actual events they become.

In 2007, I forecast that humanity, and particularly the developed countries of the world, would enter the “reorganizational recession of 2007-2010.” Considering that this is a blog that looks into the future, it might seem contradictory to be looking back at this event, but by doing so, I can explain why it was accurate and why understanding it will help us better navigate and understand what lies just ahead.

The reason for the length, breadth and depth of the 2007-2010 recession was that it was a reorganizational recession between the Information Age and the Shift Age. Most economists look at recessions through the eyes of history, measuring whatever recession we are currently in against past recessions. Phrases such as “this looks to be another jobless recovery similar to the recessions of the 1990’s” or “the recovery will be on the back of the consumer – when the consumer starts spending, we will emerge from this recession” (both paraphrases) are common and represent economists looking at economic downturns purely through economic filters. That is why they have had to keep revising their forecasts. The Great Recession of 2007-2010 was more than just a bad economic recession; it was a reorganizational recession.

When the world drifted into recession in 2007 and then went into economic free fall in the fourth quarter of 2008, I said that it was not only reorganizational but that it would last longer than any recession in memory.  I also said that it represented a transition from the largely 20^th-century way of doing business to the new 21^st-century reality of the global economy. The analogy I’ve used is the 1970’s, and the multiple recessions that occurred from 1973 through 1982. During that time, the developed countries of the world went through the very painful reorganization from being purely Industrial Age economies to becoming Information Age economies.  Economies based on atoms to economies based on digits. This took a decade to occur.

The accelerating speed of change suggested to me that humanity would pass through a period of five or six years and would emerge economically into the Shift Age. Some economies will emerge in 2011 substantially different from what they were when they entered the recession four years ago. Entire industries have entered the creative destruction phase. New dynamic business sectors based on the accelerating electronic connectedness of humanity have taken root. These are Shift Age companies. New businesses based on non-physical realities are now thriving.  They are Shift Age companies. The ascendancy of entirely new businesses and business models is the reality today, just as it was in the 1980’s, after the decade of economic upheavals between the Industrial and Information Ages.

Hundreds of CEOs and business leaders have told me that this concept of a reorganizational recession is the context that has helped them understand the disruptions they confront in the marketplace. When asked, “When will things come back?” my answer has always been, “They will not come back.  It will get better, but it will be in different forms, shapes and ways.”

Oh yes, remember that chestnut that we will exit the recession when the consumer starts to spend again? Since 2008, I have strongly said that “thrift will be the new cool, the new extravagance” and that the consumer has been scarred, and this scarring will last for years. I have continually forecast that consumers will not lead countries out of recession as quickly as they have in the past. The parents of the early-stage baby boomers lived through the Great Depression, and that scarred them for life. It affected the way they looked at the world for the rest of their lives. Well, consumers in general – and in particular, the American consumer – have been scarred by the Great Recession of 2007-2010 because the things we believed in, such as ever higher real estate values and ever increasing 401Ks, were proven false.

The Shift Age is about saving more, living with less, owning less, living in smaller homes, driving smaller cars, having fewer physical goods and more digital goods. Growth for the sake of growth – an economic axiom prior to this reorganizational recession – is now seen as hollow in a world whose very existence depends, to some degree, on sustainability.

As we emerge from the Global Recession of 2007-2010, we see a changed landscape from what existed before. Welcome to the Shift Age!

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 ...]]> 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 I have made, listed with the events that are now making them real for the world and a déjà vu experience for me flying at 39,000 feet.

-Humanity would not globally exit the Great Reorganizational Recession of 2007-2010 until 2011.

Clearly, we are slowly and tentatively exiting the reorganizational recession this year.

-Accelerating Electronic Connectedness, one of the three fundamental forces of the Shift Age, would manifest itself in part with great political upheavals as connected individuals blow down the walled gardens of ignorance and political tyranny.

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya as the beginning. The nervousness in  Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China is palpable.

-Oil would trade in the $90-$120 per barrel range for most of 2011 and would cross $100 a barrel in the first half of the year.

As of this writing, the price of Brent crude is $104 a barrel and $94 on the NYNEX

-The warming of the planet, climate change and increasing abnormal weather would have a profound upward effect on the price of food commodities, with possible dire economic consequences.

Corn, wheat, and rice futures are way up compared with 2009-’10, and current estimates are that some 40 million people in developing countries will fall from the middle class this year because they have to spend the vast majority of their household income on food.

-Work and Place will separate.

Cisco’s Telepresence suites and those of its competitors are being built around the world in ever-increasing numbers; Skype just came out with group video service; and as of last year, more than 50% of IBM employees worked from home.

-High Tech/High Touch – Technology will become ever more tactile and personal.

I checked in at the airport yesterday with a touch screen, used my iPhone at the airport, and my wife is playing a scrabble game and surfing the Internet with her fingers on our iPad. Sometimes it looks like people have a deeper personal relationship with their touch-screen devices than with the humans around them.

-Volatility in metal commodities and global stock markets will be the constant for the next few years.

Google or Bing the last six months of trending for global stock markets and the futures price of practically any metal.

-States and Municipalities would face and declare bankruptcy.

Just look at and read the media every day – a very serious stress on our country.

The above is just a partial list of the forecasts I’ve made – the ones that everyone can now see, not just this futurist. Déjà vu all over again! Watch this blog, my Free Newsletter, and the Shift Age Trend Report for deeper discourses in the coming weeks and months.

Welcome to the Shift Age!

I have written extensively about humanity being in transition between the Information Age and the Shift Age.  Those who have heard me speak or read my writings come to understand and accept this.  That said, this is a higher concept than the simple reality of the calendar.  No one can dispute the numerical fact that we are 10% into the 21^st Century, unless you want to debate whether the scientific concept of linear time verses the older concepts of cyclical time or chaotic time.

Once you start to look at the world, its’ institutions and both business categories and specific companies, through this 20^th versus 21^st century filter, things become clearer.

Here are some examples:

I could go on for pages, but the lists above should both provide clarity and food for thought.

A very simple way to look at the world is through this filter as it will bring clarity as to what will last and what won’t, to what will be significant and what will not be.  It is clear that companies created in the 20^th century that ...]]> In the past year I have found that framing conversations about certain topics with the context of being of the 20^th century or of the 21^st century to be clarifying for most people.

I have written extensively about humanity being in transition between the Information Age and the Shift Age.  Those who have heard me speak or read my writings come to understand and accept this.  That said, this is a higher concept than the simple reality of the calendar.  No one can dispute the numerical fact that we are 10% into the 21^st Century, unless you want to debate whether the scientific concept of linear time verses the older concepts of cyclical time or chaotic time.

Once you start to look at the world, its’ institutions and both business categories and specific companies, through this 20^th versus 21^st century filter, things become clearer.

Here are some examples:

I could go on for pages, but the lists above should both provide clarity and food for thought.

A very simple way to look at the world is through this filter as it will bring clarity as to what will last and what won’t, to what will be significant and what will not be.  It is clear that companies created in the 20^th century that do not transform themselves are at high risk.  While going from good to great, searching for excellence or re-engineering corporations were all good for 20^th century businesses, only transformation and on-going re-invention will keep companies competitive in these next ten years.

People, societies and businesses can often get stuck in a context largely created in the past.  The ‘as long as it seems to be working, let’s keep doing it’ mindset hasn’t served large 20^th century industries or companies very well these past few years.

On 01/01/10  I suggested  here that the 2010-2020 decade would be the Transformation Decade.  The definition of transformation is “a change in nature, shape, form or character of something”.  Any company, any business that does not do this in the next ten years will likely not be around in 2020.  This of course is particularly true of anything created in the 20^th century.

Start to look at the world through this filter of is something 20^th century or 21^st century and you will start to suddenly see the future separating itself from the past as the past quickly falls away.

The Big Three auto companies had an insular culture that didn’t pay attention to outside forces.  They only focused on the fact that they could make $1,500-2,000 profit per SUV and pick-up trucks, so they just kept making them hoping – not thinking that is for sure – it would all continue.  We know where that led.

Conde Nast took pride in its’ high level extravagant culture.  Bright and shiny and expensive always worked in the past, so hey, we’ll be ok in the future.   Whoops! It looks like we have to shut down some new and iconic titles as they are no longer viable businesses.

Business Week, one of the iconic business publications of the last half century was sold for $5 million.  Sounds like what was a good revenue week three years ago.  Who bought them?  The well diversified, global, multi-media, multi-revenue stream Bloomberg.  Just think about an on-line and video, global weekly news and feature product called Business Week, served up on consoles and ...]]> To many, the absolute collapse of the magazine industry in 2009 may seem stunning.  What is stunning to me is that the industry didn’t see it coming and take steps to avert this collapse.  Once again, another industry can only see a year ahead and thinks that a down year – 2008 – would be followed by a flat or up year. Historically in the advertising business that has been the career experience of the senior executives, so why not look to the past for reassurance?

The Big Three auto companies had an insular culture that didn’t pay attention to outside forces.  They only focused on the fact that they could make $1,500-2,000 profit per SUV and pick-up trucks, so they just kept making them hoping – not thinking that is for sure – it would all continue.  We know where that led.

Conde Nast took pride in its’ high level extravagant culture.  Bright and shiny and expensive always worked in the past, so hey, we’ll be ok in the future.   Whoops! It looks like we have to shut down some new and iconic titles as they are no longer viable businesses.

Business Week, one of the iconic business publications of the last half century was sold for $5 million.  Sounds like what was a good revenue week three years ago.  Who bought them?  The well diversified, global, multi-media, multi-revenue stream Bloomberg.  Just think about an on-line and video, global weekly news and feature product called Business Week, served up on consoles and computers around the world.

The Land of OZ is the reality, Kansas is gone.

It has been more than a year since I first wrote that the current recession would be a reorganizational recession for the media and advertising industry.  I forecast that it would last for at least two years and that when the single digit “recovery” occurred, many familiar faces would be gone.

In the current Shift Age Trend Report [see end of this column for how to get a free download of this Volume 1] I wrote:

“The current ‘reorganizational recession’ continues to eviscerate media properties with many magazines, newspapers and even radio and TV stations closing their doors. “

and

“The media and advertising businesses of the 20th century are disintegrating and dissolving in this recession. The 21st century versions of both are soon to be formed. That is why this is a historic, reorganizational advertising recession.”

That is an easy metaphor to understand what is going on.  There was the 20^th century media business and there will be the 21^st century media business.  The people who have been running the media companies that thrived in the 20^th century did not see that the new century is and will be different.  They clearly didn’t see the end of the Information Age and the beginning of the Shift Age.  Why is it called the Shift Age?  Because everything is in a state of shift

In this same Trend Report, I wrote:

“We are in an age of great transformation. It is often not enough just to “reengineer”,“search for excellence” or try to be “good to great”.  Those terms are either motivational or mechanical. We are not only moving into new century, we are moving into a new age. The Shift Age is and will be a time of greattransformation. This means that many companies, to succeed, grow and prosper inthe 21st century, must under go a transformation to face forward in this new age.”

The top executives running all media companies need to realize that if they are not in a state of transformation, they may not survive.

To the publishers of magazines that have ceased to exist I ask the question:

Dorothy knew she was no longer in Kansas, why didn’t you?

[To obtain a free download of Volume 1 of the Shift Age Trend Report, quoted above, please go to the pass word protected web site: www.theshiftagetrendreport.com and type in Username: DavidHoule and Password: ShiftAge [no space, case sensitive].  In the top of the download is a promotional code allowing readers of this column to get a $50 subscription discount.]