Ch-ch-changes

The McKinsey Quarterly’s free articles are a good read. The current issue’s Ten Trends to Watch has some intriguing observations.

Technology is not as important as the behavior it provokes.

We work not just globally but also instantaneously. We are forming communities and relationships in new ways (indeed, 12 percent of US newlyweds last year met online). More than two billion people now use cell phones. We send nine trillion e-mails a year. We do a billion Google searches a day, more than half in languages other than English.

The places value is created will shift both globally and regionally.

Today, Asia (excluding Japan) accounts for 13 percent of world GDP, while Western Europe accounts for more than 30 percent. Within the next 20 years the two will nearly converge.

(Whew! I thought it would be sooner.)

Good trainers won’t go hungry, for we’re facing massive talent shortages among knowledge workers.

Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The increasing integration of global labor markets, however, is opening up vast new talent sources. The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones.

Here’s McKinsey’s take on knowledge creation. I agree that companies must master the new knowledge universe, but I’m not ready to discount the role of the individual in making that happen.

New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations. Knowledge production itself is growing: worldwide patent applications, for example, rose from 1990 to 2004 at a rate of 20 percent annually. Companies will need to learn how to leverage this new knowledge universe—or risk drowning in a flood of too much information.