“Your attitude should get you everything!” – Futurist Jim Carroll The business of recruitment is broken. In the last many years, much of it has moved to a world of automated resume processing, analytical examination of talent and skills, and the dominance of cold, hard statistical analysis. Many companies simply demand a cover letter and a LinkedIn page. Quality candidates often never make their way through the assembly-line methodology of calculated inference – instead, those who best match the algorithm are those who get the chance of an actual interview. By and large, it’s been doing the s ..read more

“Even when you think you have nothing, you’ll always have something!” – Futurist Jim Carroll That’s because the possibilities are infinite when you start with nothing – there’s nowhere to go but up! It’s a simple fact that when you have absolutely nothing, you still have the chance to have everything! Nothing? I started my day today without my normal inspiration post idea ready to go – normally, I would at least have pulled together the image for my post the day before, but it was a busy travel day so I was a bit out of sync. Then, the smoke detector went off at 130am for some unknown reason ..read more

“Never have just one comfort zone!” – Futurist Jim Carroll If public speaking ranks high on the fear list of many people, where does working on a film production rank? Yesterday was a wildly exciting day down in San Jose as I moderated a panel discussion on – what else! – artificial intelligence on an HP production in partnership with Intel. This wasn’t my first video rodeo; indeed, as I described over on the page Custom Corporate Projects, I’ve had a few such projects along the way, a few of them involving very detailed and nuanced corporate projects. (Including one highly embarrassing but ..read more

“The best way to find creative solutions to your real-world problems is to listen to the wisdom of those who have already found them!“ – Futurist Jim Carroll You know you’ve been a real road-warrior speaker when you check into your Hilton hotel in San Jose and get a feeling that you’ve been here before! You look back in your email, and realize that it was once a Fairmont hotel and that you spoke in this exact hotel at an event in 2006! This happens a lot – I figure that I’m about 2,000 events in at this point, having been appearing on stage for close to 33 years – and so as they say, I’ve bee ..read more

“You’ll never find your opportunity in the depths of your despair!” – Futurist Jim Carroll I’m down in Silicon Valley in California today, where I’ve got a last-minute film project with Intel and HP on what else – artificial intelligence! More to come on that project in the days to come. But while walking around yesterday after our flight in, I was reminded of the 80s song that features the phrase “Always something there to remind me” – because it seems anywhere I go, there’s always something there to remind me! That’s certainly the case with the world’s hi-tech hotspot here in the Valley bec ..read more

“Motivation is overrated in the face of better insight!” – Futurist Jim Carroll “Are you a motivational speaker?” Hell yes! But not really. That’s the question I always get from new people I meet when it comes around to the topic of what we do for a living. The question quite possibly could drive me nuts, because  I think “motivational speakers” like Tony Robbins and others who encourage people to walk across the fire to discover their ‘internal strength‘ are just a bunch of crackpots! And I know that I’m now headed into the season when I’ll get asked the question a lot – with my golf se ..read more

“It’s better to construct an understanding instead of manufacturing fear!” – Futurist Jim Carroll I’ve got a steady stream of keynotes on the books going well into the fall. One of them, in October, will be for the Chicago-based Great Lakes Construction Association. This is a union-based contractors association, so it’s fair to say that there will be a lot of sensitivity to the labor issues of AI in the room. Five other similar organizations are joining in with the event. We began to explore topic issues, areas of focus, and opportunities during a call yesterday, and I must say, I’m quite lo ..read more

“One day soon, we’ll recognize that at this very moment in time, we were on the edge of the arrival of the end of reality – and didn’t have a plan to deal with it” – Futurist Jim Carroll So this happened. You can scan to about 0:28 on the timeline for the actual incident – with the whole thing being captured automatically on 4 of the cameras on the car when it happened back on February 4. A Tesla Model 3 actually has 8 cameras though – and so I filled out the form on the Tesla site to get additional details of the crash, and received back this video, among a rather massive data set conc ..read more

Simply put. This was the reaction of a recent client. I take tremendous pride in my work and the level of customization I put in. I couldn’t have received nicer feedback for this event I did last month! Jim quickly became part of our team. He did not just walk in to give a speech, he wanted to understand our group, what their expectations were and what are their backgrounds. We worked together as a group to share what we thought we wanted and interactively worked together to produce something so targeted to our group it was remarkable. Communications is obviously one of his great skills but ..read more

“To be a part of tomorrow, you need to be a part of the journey!” – Futurist Jim Carroll An organization will never successfully get to where it needs to go if it doesn’t have the full support and understanding of its team – and in some cases, my role is to help to build that support and understanding. Here’s a photo from when I was doing a stage check on Friday in Birmingham, England, before my keynote Saturday for service managers of KwikFit, an automotive services company with hundreds of locations throughout the UK. It was a pretty large crowd, with about 500 of them in the room; my keyno ..read more