Keynote:
Shifts in the Global Business Landscape:
Opportunities and Threats for 21st-Century Organizations 
Andrea Saveri, Director, Institute for the Future
Introduction:
Globalization raises the stakes. It demands deeper cross-boundary collaboration among people from diverse contexts-social, cultural, technical, and organizational-with shorter deadlines, higher investments, and wider social and organizational impacts. For this kind of high stakes collaboration, organizations need a new social infrastructure.
Traditional organizational boundaries, defined by formal function, position, title, and procedures, are no longer sufficient for supporting high-performance distributed work. Technological infrastructures alone tend to overwhelm workers with information without providing the means to make sense of the various worlds they work in.
Global Drivers of Change:
- Demographics-An Aging and Diverse Society.
Intergenerational issues between the aging developed societies and the young and maturing, developing and emerging economies will continue to frame issues related to business and work. Workers will have longer work lives, and young workers will enter the workforce with distinctly different expectations of employment that are shaped by formative work and technology experiences.
- Globalization of Labor.
As workers in emerging economies continue to complete higher levels of education, they will become part of the skilled global workforce. In the next century, more than half of the employees in transnational companies will be from developing-country affiliates. This trend will continue to emphasize the need for cross-cultural management and work practices. There will be no single context for global work.
- The Rise of the New Consumer.
A new consumer also is emerging globally-with a high level of income, education, and familiarity with information and communication technology. New consumers will demand more access to information and resources to make purchasing decisions, and their loyalty will be to value and performance rather than simply to name brand recognition. Reaching these consumers demands new ways of developing and delivering products and services
- Torrid Technological Growth.
Technology will continue to be a major driver of organizational change and transformation of household and civic life. New technological developments are emerging and diffusing more rapidly throughout society at a global level, changing the context for defining work, relationships, identities, and organizational assumptions. Over the next decade, key technology trends will include increasing connectivity and bandwidth, diffusion of ubiquitous information appliances along with increasingly aware environments, a shift from session-based interface to true interaction, and latent tendencies related to diffusion, adoption, and reinvention.
- The Global Silicon Network.
Innovation will emerge increasingly from many cities located in a new archipelago of global cities through which ideas, capital, people, information, and finance flow regularly. The dynamic of this global silicon network (as compared to a single Silicon Valley or distinct, separate centers of innovation) requires new organizational forms that extend beyond formal traditions and stress adaptive behaviors, abilities to make new relationships based on reciprocity and trust, and loyalty to social networks.
- The New Economy and the Increasing Demand for New Knowledge.
A new knowledge-based economy, driven by rapid innovation in technology, process, and organization, will shift the focus from regional competition of existing markets to targeted collaboration in order to create new markets. Emerging economies that are part of the global silicon network and that have high levels of skilled workers and experience in cross-border work will be well suited to participate in the new economy.
Several driving forces in the global business landscape will continue to shape the context for emerging forms of organization in the next century.
New Global Worker Competencies:
- Be a Skilled Learner and Identify Learning Opportunities
- Develop a Culture of Bootstrapping
- Build Social Capital for Trust and Reciprocity
- Select and Use Communications Methods for Breakthrough
- Develop Information and Idea Literacy
- Know Your Edges to Know Your Niche
To innovate successfully in a competitive market, global workers need to develop a new foundation of social capital: new sets of trusted relationships that extend across traditional boundaries, new values of reciprocity, and new contexts in which to create joint work. This foundation will require a new set of core competencies for knowledge workers that extends beyond discrete skills.