•  “EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES ARE BLURRING TRADITIONAL INDUSTRY LINES, impacting people & organizations.” 2019 Predictions from DELOITTE INSIGHT (by one of the four largest global accounting/financial firms) include: 
  •  —  A growing list of 3D-PRINTABLE materials will push 3-D printers/materials/services above a $2.7 billion sales level.
  •  —  Over 400 million SMART SPEAKERS will be connecting residential patrons, for easy commands from most rooms;
  •  —  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE will penetrate nearly 90% of companies’ services;
  •  —  A couple dozen operators will launch 5G CELL NETWORKS and “profoundly change our interactions & experiences in areas from augmented reality to entertainment to medicine and smart cities”;
  •  —  More than nine in ten of those millennials will spend more time listening to RADIO than watching TV by 2025;
  •  —  SPORTS BETTING will drive 40% of all TV watching by millennial men, two-thirds of whom will bet on the events;
  •  WE ENTER 2019 WITH THE REALITY THAT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY ARE AMONG THE “MOST CRITICAL ISSUES FACING HUMANITY.” Arenas of transition that are on a shorter-term horizon include: (1) ‘Reinvention’ of individual work roles as automation continuously usurps necessity for human functions; (2) Parent/Children relations in a society where aging expands; (3) Harvesting of body organs for transplants “with developing country Body Farms providing parts for rich people in more developed countries”; (4) Culture war between Globalists expecting to continue three-decades of action to ‘more fairly’ balance powers & interests by eroding national sovereignty versus growing Nationalist sentiment (in most western countries) for ‘us first’ decision-making; (5) An increasing trend to actual belief in (socialist) utopia. [WIRED – 9/8/18]
  • BUSINESS SUCCESS IN 2019 WILL, MORE THAN EVER, BE DEPENDENT ON IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE STRATEGY, which can be optimized by viewing strategic choices through four interdependent lenses: (1) Financial – objective forecasting over a minimum of three years; (2) Market – identifying pockets of growth within and adjacent to existing business sectors; (3) Competitive Advantage – evaluating whether to consolidate the current core business potential versus entering new high-growth/high-profit, often high-risk, segments; (4) Operating Model – analyzing whether current people/processes/technology structures are sufficient to support strategic objectives. DCG can help; call us before your reality check bounces!  [McKINSEY – Nov 18]
  • THE NEXT FRONT IN CULTURE WARS LOOKS LIKE GENDER I.D, as “liberal university campuses in America and elsewhere have adopted an orthodoxy that all students should wear ‘pronoun badges’ declaring their ‘preference’ for classification – not according to biological sex, but by whether they ‘feel’ more like a man or a woman or something in between… In Canada, gender ID and expression now have the same status in human-rights law as sex, race & religion. In Britain, legal sex can be changed if two doctors diagnose Gender Dysphoria – distress caused by someone feeling they live in a body of the wrong sex. Australians will soon be able to officially change sex by simple declaration.” In Germany, parents can now ‘declare’ their children as male, female or ‘diverse.’ While the liberal approach is to let anyone present themselves as they wish, the conservative concern is about “forcing everyone else to accept a subjective feeling as reality, and the risks that flow from it, including access to spaces & facilities designated for the opposite sex.”  [ECONOMIST – THE WORLD IN 2019]
  •  THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:  You have never seen card tricks like this: http://digg.com/video/best-magic-trick/                                                                                                                                                                            

      “Any word popular enough to sum up the mood-of-the-year will saturate social media so quickly that it will soon lose its bite.” Nonetheless, newest lexicon includes: NOMOPHOBIA – fear of not having your mobile phone; GASLIGHTING – trying to make someone doubt their own memory or sanity; and INCEL – involuntarily celibate men.  

     “If God created the world, his primary concern was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us.” – Albert Einstein                      

       \Creative thoughts on less ‘cruel & unusual’ lethal injection: http://v.theonion.com/onionmedia/videos/videometa/2047/zen_mp4.mp4