In our latest Voices from 2020 interview, guest David Sibbet, the founder of The Grove Consultants International, shares a wide-ranging interview with hosts Firehawk and Bill Veltrop on how small business will evolve between now and 2020, becoming more localized than ever before and yet more networked than we here in the world of 2007 can only imagine.

Learn how this might come about and what it means to the changing relationship of small business and big business. You may also want to consider how your business may also want and need to change to keep pace with this incredible world-shift.

We welcome your comments on this episode, including what you think your business should do to prepare for coming changes in the entire world of business.

You can listen by clicking on the link below:

Voices from 2020, Vol. 8, “The Coming Bifurcation of the World of Business”, with guest David Sibbet, interviewed by hosts Firehawk and Bill Veltrop

You can also learn more about David Sibbet and The Grove Consultants International by visiting his blog at:

www.davidsibbet.com

In this eighth episode of Voices from 2020, hosts Firehawk and Bill Veltrop interview Diego Navarro, Founder and Director of the Digital Bridge Academy at Cabrillo College in Watsonville, California. The Digital Bridge Academy is a highly innovative program designed explicitly to help accelerate the readiness of students who are “under-prepared” for college in any number of ways (including “at-risk” students, who make up sometimes over 90% of the student population). Amazingly, the Academy does this not in years, but in only one semester!

Sound amazing? As with anything that “digs deep”, it’s about reaching into the hearts of the people involved and bringing the whole spirit of the person into the process. As William Butler Yeats put it many years ago, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” And so it is that, in the first few weeks of the Academy’s program, the challenge is as much assessing where the students are in their preparation as it is about igniting that spark in their souls — and fanning the fire bright. Even now, in 2007, just five years from the time of the first funding for this creative entrepreneurial effort, the success rate is amazing.

In this episode, learn about how the Academy “Lights the Fire for Learning” in these students, and how it has transformed the whole concept of education – and the lives of many – by the year 2020.

If you want to learn more about the Digital Bridge Academy, you can check out their website at:

Cabrillo College’s Digital Bridge Academy

and read Mr. Navarro’s excellent article on the concept and the process behind his academy, from the August/September 2005 issue of Community College Journal.

“Digital Bridges to Community College”, by Diego Navarro

Voices from 2020, Vol. 8, “The Digital Bridge Academy”, with guest Diego Navarro, interviewed by hosts Firehawk and Bill Veltrop

Please let us know your thoughts about this amazing program, and how it might be applied for students in your part of the world — by entering your comments to this blog entry.

In the photo, from left: Bill Veltrop, Firehawk, Mike Thomas, and Peter Gaarn. In this seventh episode of our Voices series, the four founders of the Monterey Institute for Social Architecture, including our podcast regulars plus Mike Thomas and Peter Gaarn, held a roundtable discussion on how the essence and aims of corporations have evolved since 2007 — and up to the present day of our current podcast, brought to you from the year 2020. In their conversation, they assert that competition will have been replaced by strategic partnerships as “the order of the day” throughout most business ecosystems as of this time, and it will be the goal of each business to actively ensure proper care and attention to each of its stakeholders — even more so than in the past.

We’d like your thoughts on their conversation, as well as how you see the current potential for future evolution of the modern corporation. Please DO let us know your thoughts by writing comments to us below.

You can also click on the link to “listen again” to this episode, just in case you missed it.

Voices from 2020, Vol. 7, “The Ideal Corporation in the Year 2020″, with guests Mike Thomas and Peter Gaarn

In our most recent Voices from 2020 episode, guest Stu Winby (left) was interviewed by hosts Firehawk (center) and Bill Veltrop on the challenging field of collaborative innovation. Mr. Winby’s innovations in this area, including the concept of the Decision Accelerator, have helped many organizations enhance their own creative processes.

Since Innovation in Collaborative Groups is such an important topic for all of us leading Strategic Innovation, we’d like to hear from you on how it is different to work with groups to innovate when compared to inventing as individuals, and about your own experiences in this area. Please DO take the time and write us some comments below.

You can also click on the link to “listen again” to this episode, just in case you missed it.

Voices from 2020, Vol. 6, “Rapid Innovation in Collaborative Groups”, with guest Stu Winby

As the words of our guest Duane Elgin points out in our “Voices from 2020″ interview this week (Part II of the Interview we shared with you last month), when we move from consumption to a more conscious and regenerative lifestyle, as individuals and as organizations, we will begin to see dramatic transformations in the health of our planet, along with the spread of peace throughout the world.

For today’s blog question, we’d like to know your ideas on what strategic innovations individuals and organizations of all kinds (including business) might want to take on to help us realize Mr. Elgin’s broad vision of the future. Please take the time to let us know in the comments below.

And don’t forget to listen in to the Podcast itself, if you haven’t had a chance to hear it yet, please do so by clicking below.

Voices from 2020, Vol. 5, “Our New Relationship with Our Selves, Our World, and the Living Universe”

In this fourth installment of the Voice from 2020 series, evolutionary activist and social scientist Duane Elgin covers a broad canvas of topics in the field of sustainability. He describes how communications and our relationship to self, society & organizations (such as business), the earth, and the universe as a whole are keys to our ultimate evolution to a more sustainable living field for all of us.

We are very interested in your thoughts on this, and especially in some of the steps you are taking in your businesses — and your lives as a whole — that relate to the topics Mr. Elgin has described here. Please do take the time to tell us a bit in the comments section below.

And please do “listen again” to Part I of this important conversation by clicking on the link below.

Voices from 2020, Vol. 4, “Identity, Society, Communications, and Sustainability”

In the third installment of the Voices from 2020 series, hosts Bill Veltrop and Firehawk interviewed social entrepreneur Tom Atlee, the founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, on the subject of how both a systemic approach to leverage our collective intelligence could produce a dramatic “consciously evolution” of all our human systems, from business to society and beyond.

We’d like your thoughts on this provocative episode: how do you think we might make some of the shifts Mr. Atlee suggests might happen by the year 2020, and what might YOU do as a strategic innovator to support this important global shift?

Please click on the title of this post to open up the “write a comment” box — and let us know what you’re thinking. We also would like you to invite your colleagues and friends listening in to comment as well.

You can also listen in to the podcast episode interview by clicking on the link below.

Voices from 2020, Vol. 3, “Conscious Evolution Through Co-Intelligence”

In the latest installment of our “Voices from 2020″ series, guests Jeff Saperstein and Gil Friend explore how the world of business and other organizations will have evolved in a big way by the year 2020, thanks to a more wholistic approach to the metrics we all use as guideposts for leading corporations — and life in general.

We’d like to use our blog as a point of conversation about this, with several prompts in mind. First, how SHOULD our metrics for running business change, so that our overall futures are more bright? And where do you already see examples of that beginning to emerge — in such a way that the changes of 2006 could indeed dramatically transform the world by the year 2020?

Please click on the title of this post to open up the “write a comment” box — and let us know what you’re thinking. We also would like you to invite your colleagues and friends listening in to comment as well.

You can also listen in to the podcast episode interview by clicking on the link below.

Voices from 2020, Vol. 2, “Metrics for Wholeness”

In our latest podcast, guests Bill Veltrop and FireHawk describe a world of the future with dramatic changes in leadership practices and an unusual event they described as “The Infinite Games”.

Unlike “closed-end” events and interactions where “winning” is the primary goal (such as the way many businesses run their enterprises), “Infinite Games” aspire to a more systemic perspective where every part of the business ecosystem, and the world as a whole, thrives.

We’d like to use our blog entries from this episode to hear what suggestions you all have for specific events and festivities that should take place in the entrepreneurial “Infinite Games” our guests described this week. So — please write some of your suggestions in the comments area below.

And if you need a refresher on this week’s episode or haven’t heard it yet, please click on the link below to hear the interview.

Stranova Vol. 23, “Voices from 2020″, with guests Bill Veltrop and FireHawk