Most of these books had dedicated websites, however I have now consolidated all the resources on one book page on this site, giving access to free chapters, reviews, contents and other resources from each book. Please feel free to explore and download the resources.

Here are a few thoughts on each book in the context of the others, with links to the resources:

Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships

The subtitle to the first edition of this book was “The Future of Professional Services”, laying out the thesis that the intersection of knowledge and relationships would be where almost all value would be created in professional services, and digging in detail into how to make this happen in practice.

This, my first book, in fact sold more than any of my other books, being the #1 seller in Australia on Amazon.com for over a month, and the top selling book from publisher Butterworth-Heinemann for a year. It continues to be used by professional firms in developing their client relationship programs.

Chapter 1 lays out the foundations of the concept of “knowledge-based relationships”, while Chapter 6, new to the Second Edition of the book, provides a highly practical overview of how to implement key client programs in professional firms.

Living Networks

I am probably best known for my book Living Networks, which sold reasonably well but not spectacularly when it was released smack-bang in the middle of the dot-com bust, though supported by very nice testimonials from the likes of Seth Godin and Don Tapscott. However in the years after its publication it gained visibility as having effectively anticipated the rise of social networks and the networked economy before LinkedIn, Facebook or any of today’s social networks existed, being a valuable platform for my blossoming work as a futurist.

Today, 16 years after its publication, the themes and content are all extremely relevant. Only the examples and case studies are out of date.

Every chapter of the book is available for free download, so you can form your own judgement on how well it has stood the test of time.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 was in fact more of a report than a book, priced at US$195, but continued to focus on providing useful, actionable insights. A key reason I liked the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” at the time was that for me it represented not so much the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, but more the next version of organizations as they shifted into social technology-enabled networks. While Living Networks delved substantially into how organizations would change in a networked world, Implementing Enterprise 2.0 took this to a substantially more detailed and practical level.

In the free chapters, on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise, Key Benefits and Risks, Governance and Social Networks in the Enterprise, you will see the pragmatic, structured approach I took to help leaders of enterprise transformation to take effective action.

Getting Results From Crowds

Getting Results From Crowds, which as Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships has now been published in a Second Edition, looked into the future of work and organizations, foreseeing a major shift to crowds and distributed work.

It was written to provide highly practical advice, often step-by-step, on how to create the most value with crowd work, very importantly for all participants. It included coverage of the rapidly developing field of crowdfunding, however the intent was to examine the full spectrum of opportunities from “tapping the power of many”, as I defined crowdsourcing.

The free chapters, on When to use crowds, Specifying tasks, Using competition platforms, and Crowd business models, as in Implementing Enterprise 2.0, are designed to be as succinct and useful as possible to those looking to tap the potential of crowds.

What’s next

To be frank I am disappointed to have written only four books over this extended period.

I am now in the final phases of defining my next book project, which I intend to sell and write soon, having made some more space from the too many ventures I have undertaken over the last decade.

Hopefully more news on my new book here before long!

The delight and enticement of all the possibilities of a rapidly evolving world are irresistible to me.

Pushing back at the startup mantra of focus

Having spent many years ensconced in startup communities I have heard over and over again the mantra of Focus Focus Focus.

I always pushed back at this, at one time considering writing a book titled ‘Unfocus’ to help balance out the conversation.

In many ways I don’t believe in focus. Certainly the only way I can do my job of futurist properly is to be all over the place, pushing out in different directions and following intriguing ideas.

Also I simply lack the attention span; I couldn’t spend all of my time and energy on a single endeavor.

The lure of parallel entrepreneurship

For a couple of decades now I have been strongly attracted to the idea ‘parallel entrepreneurship‘: building multiple ventures simultaneously rather than one after another as is the case for serial entrepreneurs.

In more recent years ‘company builder‘ has become a more common description for the model. I have spent some time delving into the enablers of the company builder model (more on that another time), and how the intrinsic lack of focus at the group level can be addressed.

The perils of lack of focus

The business model for Advanced Human Technologies Group was explicitly as a company builder, with multiple scalable ventures funded by cashflow from our (non-scalable or partially scalable) services businesses, and the underlying premise relying almost exclusively on globally distributed part-time talent to enable full scalability.

I always acknowledged that it was an extremely ambitious model, but I thought that it was possible and it was an undertaking worth trying, in demonstrating the viability of a highly non-traditional organizational structure.

In short I effectively failed. The group grew to five companies, yet I was still spending half my time working globally as a futurist, with the remaining 50% of my time split across a dozen ambitious projects across these companies. A couple of our ventures succeeded on a small scale, but my attention and our resources were divided too thinly for the rest to get traction.

Pushing the model further

Given this situation I accepted an offer to become co-founder of a new future-focused agency and ventures group Rh7thm, drawing on its significant capital and broader resources.

The key challenge for me was that in my role of ‘CEO and Chief Futurist’ of a growing group of companies I was effectively in the same position that I had been before, stretched too thin and unable to do either of those roles properly.

Back to the future

After spending over a decade as a ‘futurist and entrepreneur’, with many lessons learned from both of those domains and their intersection, I decided that I needed to be more focused, and left the group to concentrate fully on my work as a futurist.

As has been reported on my move I noted that:

“The reason for this shift is that for too long now I have split my time between my futurist and entrepreneur roles.

“While I will never be able to hold myself back for too long from entrepreneurial ventures, I have not enjoyed having more on my plate than is possible to do.

“I deeply love working as a futurist – it is my truest calling – and for now I want to focus on that rather than trying to run multiple ventures simultaneously.”

Focusing on the future

I am now more focused than I have been for well over a decade, putting all my energy into my role as a futurist, including working globally as a keynote speaker and strategy facilitator and creating future-focused content and insights for major organizations.

Our future-focused publications are doing well, so I still have some scalable ventures running, but all within the futurist fold.

This focus on my work as a futurist of course can hardly be described as overly narrow. Exploring the future requires an unlimited purview. Which is why it suits me perfectly – I can be focused, certainly relative to the last decade of my life, without feeling constrained.

Searching for the balance between focus and unfocus

Today I acknowledge more than before the importance of focus. It is almost certainly the heart of growing a successful business from scratch.

Yet I certainly don’t envy those who have an overly tight focus for years – and often more years – on end. Life is an adventure, and you need not only to look around, but also to delve sometimes in different directions.

For each individual that balance between focus and unfocus will be different, and will change over time. For me I will always be drawn to broader vistas.

For now I am completely focused on the future. But I know I won’t be able to keep myself away from other ventures indefinitely.

Being conscious about how focused you choose to be

What is most important is to be conscious about what you gain and lose through your degree of focus. There are choices to be made, so choose well how focused or unfocused you should be at this stage of your unfolding career and life.

Image: HiggySTFC

One of these phrases was ‘The only thing you can change… is the future’.

It struck me as immensely apt to my work today, so I put it in a shareable image, shown below.

In this format sounds like a general observation, though absolutely true.

However when I wrote this it was not as message for others, but as a personal exhortation to myself to motivate the actions that would create a better future for me. I wanted to make myself focus on what I could change, to realize I had the power to create a better future for myself than my past.

Caught in the past

Humans all too often get caught in the past.

For example, ‘sunk cost fallacy‘ is a very dangerous but pervasive cognitive bias, which leads people to continue putting effort, resources or money into projects or investments because they don’t want to give up on what they have already put in.

What has happened in our past is (largely) irrelevant. It doesn’t tell us who we are or what we are capable of.

What has happened has happened, and we can’t change it. But we can change how we think about it. And the value of that is that it helps us to avoid making the same mistakes, repeating the same patterns, and to do things differently so our future is in fact something we can shape.

Focusing on what we can change

As individuals we need to be focusing on our future rather than giving undue import to the past, and on what we can do to make that malleable future what we want it to be.

Collectively it is far harder, because we have different visions for what we want the future to be. This is why we need to build coalitions of those who think along similar lines, so that we can align our thinking and action on a common vision that catalyzes action.

There is only one thing we can change: the future. We just need to realize it.

On the left is just one of many pages I wrote when I was young about my dreams for my life. As I found and read this recently I reflected that I have certainly brought to life the essence of the dreams that I captured on this page, with some elements still in the process of being created.

Keeping a journal has undoubtedly been a massive help in bringing my dreams to reality.

The first wonder of a journal is that the very act of writing it helps clarify your thinking. Putting ideas into words makes tangible the amorphous daydreams that inhabit our mind day by day.

The second wonder of a journal is that it provides a reference and reminder to what you were passionate about at that point in your life. The idea or the passion may be forgotten, but a journal keeps in store what you at some time felt to be a powerful vision, something important, that you can later revisit and rediscover.

The third wonder of a journal is that it keeps you accountable. If you had and captured a dream, it is there for you later to compare yourself with. Possibly you will change as you grow older and no longer value the same things, in which case you can reshape your vision. Or maybe you will be reminded of values and dreams that you need to be reminded of when you contrast what you aspired to and where you are.

The fourth wonder of a journal is that it shows to you the richness of your life in the present. Every year when I re-read what I have written during the year, I am astounded by the amazing richness of the life I have lead. It is so easy to forget the power of the ups and the lessons of the downs that we all live through. We may often feel that our lives are not what we want them to be in any of a myriad of ways, but if we capture the flow of our experience we can far better appreciate what we do have, both relative to our dreams and as the absolute of the pure beauty of being alive.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” quoth Socrates.

Keeping a journal is probably the most powerful way to allow us to examine our lives – in depth if we choose.

That makes our lives not just more worth living, but also helps us to define and capture our often-evanescent dreams and bring them to life, making our own lives richer and reaping wonderful benefits for those around us.

Image: Uzi Yachin

I have for too long had too many ventures. I desperately needed to limit the scope of what I was doing, which I have done. (More on that in another blog post soon.)

Focus on the future

This allows me to focus on being the futurist, thinking and communicating in multiple formats about the future and what we need to do now to create the future we want.

It also gives me that modicum of space to come back to the path of self-discovery that is at the heart of all our lives.

Rediscovering myself through my journals

I have kept a journal in various guises since I was 16. Simply putting thoughts into words on paper can immensely clarify your thoughts and feelings.

Keeping a journal also allows you to read back to get perspective on your life, and recover ideas and attitudes from your younger self that would otherwise likely be lost.

Over the last couple of months I have been reviewing some of my journals, particularly from my early 20s as I entered the workforce.

One discovery is how true to the aspirations of my younger self my life has turned out. My attitudes and thoughts then planted the seeds for who I have become.

Compelled to write books

Since I was young I have wanted to write books. The publication of my first book in January 2000 was a marvelous threshold to reach.

I imagined that I would write books consistently for the rest of my life. I have been very disappointed that I have only written 4 books so far.

This has been not least because I have undertaken too many ventures and not had the time to write. One of the most important reasons for me to restructure my work to give me more space was so I can write my next book this year. (I’ll share more on this before long.)

While until recently I hadn’t looked at it for some time, over time I compiled a list of titles of books that I wanted to write. There are over 100 book titles on the list.

Of course I will never write more than a small fraction of the those books, but I do hope to make a little dent in that list.

Continuous sharing

I’ve recently realised that it is crazy for me to wait to share my ideas until I can write a full book on these topics.

I have the early workings of many of these books, some in note form, some just in my mind.

I also have many ideas recorded in my journals that are early seeds, and need to be developed a lot further. However it is far better to share these ideas in their formative shapes rather than wait until they are fully developed, which quite possibly will never happen.

New phase of blogging

Since I have changed the structure of my work I have been a far more active blogger, after doing very little for several years before last November.

From now I intend to share far more of myself, writing about ideas and personal reflections I’ve captured in my journal over the years, and the topics that really matter to me.

I am very fortunate to be a futurist, in that everything is relevant to my work, including my own personal journey from past to future.

Stand by for some – at times – quite different kinds of content on this blog. As everything I’ve shared since I started this blog in 2002, it will all be true to myself, just sometimes more personal than it has been before.

Thank you for being with me on the journey! :-)

Image: Marcus Sherwood – photo of me and Ian busking in Molard

Soon after I arrived in Tokyo I found a Zen master, Nishijima-Sensei, who held weekly meditation sessions followed by lectures in English on Shobogenzo, the foundation text of Soto Zen.

Later I lived for a year in his Zen Dojo, commuting to my day job as a financial journalist, following the center’s principles of meditating twice a day and doing the daily chores that sustained the community, and taking the Soto Zen Buddhist precepts.

This time helped me resolve one of the issues I had grappled with since I had entered the workforce. Zen teaches us that the only thing that exists is the present. Yet if there is only the present, how and why should we work in the present to create the outcomes we desire in the future?

The answer is simple, though it took a long time for me to truly understand it.

Work is central to Zen practice, you cannot have true Zen practice without work. When I went on sesshin – intense retreats in Buddhist temples – the days were filled not only with meditation and lectures, but also work such as sweeping or preparing food. The work was not just an activity, it was a form of meditation. We were to be fully and completely engaged in what we were doing, existing purely in our activity.

Work can be sweeping, cooking, gardening or motorcycle maintenance, or it can be planning, writing, coding, designing or selling. Work of course should be always worth doing, driven by a desired future, whether it is a cleaner room, a useful software application, or a better society.

This doesn’t mean that all work is done with the spirit of Zen, in fact little is. Work is often done in a distracted state, disturbed with irrelevant thoughts about places, people and times that are not in the present.

Work must be done for its own sake. It has an intent, but that is not relevant in performing the work. If it is done begrudgingly or only in order to create outcomes at another time, it takes you away from the present, away from the only moment that exists.

As such the focus is on doing the work to the very best of your abilities, completely immersed in the now of the work, knowing but not necessarily even being aware in the present that it is to create a future that is better than now. That focus and frame means that the work and outcomes are usually far better than if they are done in a distracted state.

Understanding this is not to say that I live it fully each day. However even with my constant future focus I strive to live and work completely in the present.

There is no conflict between living fully in the present and working towards the future.

In fact doing that creates not just a better future, but a life that is truly lived in the eternal now.

Image: el_ave

It is now over 20 years since I left employment and started building the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies, which spanned professional services, publishing, events, apps and software development. We had many landmarks and successes along the way.

The reason to bring these ventures into a new group is simply to enact the same vision I have long had on a larger stage and scale.

Genesis

Early last year I met Julian Ward at an entrepreneurial meetup I had organised in Bondi Beach. We started discussing the world of marketing, and by the end of our first meeting had agreed to build a publication on the future of agencies.

Julian was already developing plans for a new style of company relevant for a fast-changing world. As we discussed it, it was clear that we not only had exceptional alignment on our vision, but also highly complementary capabilities. We have brought together our visions and I have integrated my existing active ventures into the new group.

Rh7thm is born

The new ventures group based around Rh7thm has been operational for over a year now, however we have chosen to work in stealth mode until now so we could build the vision and foundations to a point where the group is ready for prime time. Apologies for not being more forthcoming about my ventures for the last year.

Part of that journey has been bringing into the executive team a set of exceptional, highly-experienced leaders, including Rosanna Iacono, Rob Shwetz and Phil Brown.

To understand Rh7thm it is best to explore the company website. Our launch video below also provides insights into our work.

In essence the group brings together leading-edge marketing and innovation services for high-end corporates with a ventures group, where we earn equity in transformational startups through advisory and investment, and establish and build our own group of ventures aligned with where we see the future going.

The corporate services and venture ecosystem feed on each other, enabling us to keep on the edge of change and help our clients succeed even while the business environment rapidly changes.

Our 7 Drivers of Change diagram below shows the primary domains where we see and tap into opportunities. More on this later.

An exciting journey ahead

My long-standing work as a futurist is central to Rh7thm’s capabilities and positioning, and I will continue to work globally with leading organisations to help them and their clients engage successfully with the future. I will however be increasingly selective on the engagements I accept.

A large proportion of my time and energy will be spent in my primary role as CEO of the R7 Group, the group’s parent organisation, building the platform for the group’s success, and on some of the new ventures that we launch.

I am incredibly excited to be on this new journey. There has been no change to my vision of what is possible as opportunities emerge from the amazing shifts we are experiencing.

The potential of that vision is now amplified as we draw on far greater resources and a far deeper pool of talent.

I’ll keep you posted on the way as we create, discover and learn on the journey.

Passing the threshold of blogging

Which in itself comes to the nub of the experience of blogging, all the thresholds you have to cross to actually start and finish a blog post. What is compelling enough to say that you take the time to write it? How long or polished should pieces be? If I get started writing a post, how much time is it going to take to say what it is I want to say? When do I cut off a blog post and save the rest for the next post?

In a way, the more you have to say, the harder it is to say it, because a book is a more appropriate format than a blog post. Any blog post risks becoming a book. Any topic you choose to blog about, however narrow, deserves deeper inspection.

For the last few years the majority of my blog posts have shared thoughts from my keynotes and media coverage. The preparation for each of my keynotes develops my thinking further each time, and I want to do a blog post to share just a little of what I covered.

However since I have barely blogged for over a year, I have a backlog of 50 or more keynotes from which I want to share thoughts, and other streams of content I am developing. In short despite developing a great deal of content, this has been the year I’ve produced the least content for many years. It is time to get back to sharing.

Finding your blogging voice and behaviours

The standard advice to anyone starting a blog is that you need to find your voice, and the only way to find your voice is to blog. As you write, you find what works for you.

For ages I have wanted to try to catch fragments of thoughts as they happening, capturing them as a brief snapshot, quickly written. I have a tendency to want to keep on going when I write a blog post, and almost every post refers to other posts I intend to write that will go into more detail, that almost invariably I never get around to writing.

I was always trying to change my blogging habits, to tend to capture these very brief ideas rather than feel I had to go into detail. So now I am relaunching my blog, this is an opportunity to change my behaviours, to try to blog more.

However one reason that I have blogged less over the last years is that I am simply so busy, I take on a crazy amount and blogging is never top of the priority list when you have client deadlines and many projects being launched. But I just need to prioritise blogging, as a way of letting my thoughts flow more, be more visible rather than it only coming out in more structured work such as frameworks. I am launching an ambitious new set of ventures (more on that later) so the pace is not letting up, but I want some kind of content to consistently spin off what I do.

The rise and retreat of blogging

As I write this post I realise it has been 14 years since I launched my blog. Since then I have written 1,793 blog posts. Those were fairly early days in blogging, well before any significant social media platforms had emerged. While it took a few years before I really got going with it, for quite a few years my blog was central to my identity and visibility, core to building my global work.

I resisted Twitter until mid-2008, believing that it would take away time from my blogging, but as soon as I started I realised how complementary blogging and Twitter are. However over the last few years Twitter has become by far my dominant social channel.

A number of years ago my New Year’s resolution was to spend more time on Facebook. Over the last year or two I finally am doing that. However Twitter is certainly my primary home, with still all my tweets being funneled through into my Facebook stream, just adding an occasional post directly on Facebook.

Of course other blogging channels have arisen, notably LinkedIn and Medium. There is a strong case to just blog on those channels than your own blog, as there is the potential for far wider distribution. But other than reposting a few posts on LinkedIn, I haven’t used those channels yet, I prefer posting on my own blog.

With the rise of a multiplicity of other social and content-sharing channels including Instagam, Snapchat, YouTube and many others, it seems far fewer people are blogging than back in blogging’s heyday. But a blog still has power today.

back to blogging?

I have been able to easily write this blog post as a stream of consciousness (section headers added later) as I sit in the airport lounge, seizing the opportunity of fractional space in my schedule. I hope that I will get my blog going properly again, sharing in new and easy ways, seizing the opportunity of relaunching my blog to reframe how I use it, what new blogging behaviors I can take on. Among other things, I want to try to make it more conversational, as in this post.

I wouldn’t hold your breath given my record over the last few years, but perhaps I will find my blogging voice again. :-)

Image: Jacqui 1686

I set up my blog Trends in the Living Networks in 2002 to accompany the launch of my book Living Networks. A bit later I set up rossdawson.com as my speaker website, and kept the blog on a separate domain, running the two sites in parallel for many years.

Time for a refresh

However this year I have blogged the least I have for well over a decade. My blog virtually ground to a halt. One reason was that I have simply been too busy to take the time to blog. But to be frank I was also embarrassed by my out-of-date blog website, I didn’t really want people to see it.

My speaker website – where I also put some posts and research from my team members – was also well overdue for a refresh. So I decided to redesign and relaunch both my personal site and blog into one site, in hindsight something I should have done a long time ago.

For the last year I have been wanting to write many blog posts, but I kept waiting until my new site was done, which of course took longer than expected.

Back to blogging

So now I have a big backlog of posts I want to write, including sharing snippets from some of the many interesting client engagements I have been doing this year. I’m still flat out, but now that I have a nicer-looking website, I am far more highly motivated to write the posts and get them up.

Of course, please let me know if you see any issues or have any suggestions on the new website – I know it’s not quite there and still needs a bit of tweaking. :-)

So hopefully back to blogging with some more posts up here before long!

Image: Epic Fireworks

It is certainly not intended to be rigorous, but simply to give an indication of how influential futurists are on social media and the web by combining a few key indicators such as Klout, web traffic and Twitter followers, using a simple algorithm.

No doubt we are missing quite a few futurists who should be included on the list. Just let us know if there’s anyone we should add to the list.

Feel free to embed it on your site if you wish.

Enjoy, and be sure not to take it too seriously! :-)