Sam Conniff Allende

We’re all set for faster, bolder, shorter adventures

Where once there was hierarchical structure, a long slow climb up the career ladder, a culture of internal competition combined with deference to remote leaders, bureaucracy and that’s-just-how-it-is attitudes, there will now be collaborative skills, responsive mechanisms and shared principles to live and die by. Put like that, the future sure sounds a lot like the true history of the Golden-Age of pirates.

Who is your navy, pirate?

Power makes a Gollum out of most of us in the end.

Ask the Zapatistas, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela or a long list of freedom fighters turned politicians if they’re pleased with how their revolutions turned out. It’s very hard to play nice with power.

Leadership and knowledge sharing were once always top-down concepts, but they’re shifting to a horizontal perspective as the leadership role models of today are more likely to be peers that you can access than figureheads who seem so far out of reach and out of touch. If you’re seeking someone to look up to in the twenty-first century, instead look sideways to your peers and inwards to yourself, because there’s an absence of inspiring and progressive leadership up ahead.

Individual businesses and politicians can succeed despite an apparent lack of innovation and entrepreneurialism, but it is the absence of optimism and empathy in the system as a whole that might cause fatal damage to the broader structures of conventional mainstream society, in the hearts and minds of the coming generation who expect compassion.

The Aspirationals report is the result of a partnership between New York-based consultancy BBMG and global research company GlobeScan. From representative research in over twenty countries, the report categorizes an emerging mindset they named the ‘Aspirationals’ who are defined by not just a desire for but also an absolute expectation for ‘Abundance without Waste’.4

‘The harder we compete, the less differentiated we become. As brands sell on functional benefits (what the product is and does for me) and emotional benefits (how I want to feel in this occasion), category after category is being filled with nearly similar products. Large established brands are losing loyalty and market share to newer smaller brands that offer social and cultural benefits.’

‘With Aspirationals, the sustainability proposition has changed from being the “right thing to do” to being the “cool thing to do”.’