Press Room
Alvin Toffler Keynote Address: “The Economy of the Future,
Not to be Confused with the Future of the Economy”
Futurist and author Alvin Toffler delivered the day’s keynote address to a packed Grand Ballroom. His presentation included a discussion of how our fundamental understanding of the economy may not be keeping pace with the revolutionary changes taking place globally and in order for our society to remain competitive (or even functional) we must reorganize our public institutions, embrace the “pro-sumer” and overcome resistance to change.
Toffler touched on U.S. public institutions, which said are built according to an industrial model of top-down, bureaucratic management. Toffler pointed to failures such as post-Katrina recovery and poor care of Iraq veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and suggested that these disasters and institutional failures like them are related and systemic—the result of an industrial organizational model that stifles innovation and paralyzes organizations.
Private enterprise has already moved rapidly from an industrial age to a technology-driven, knowledge-based economy, Toffler said. But our basic societal institutions lag far behind. Toffler warned the audience that the U.S. will continue to see a series of “institutional Katrinas” unless we address this fault with our public institutions changes.
Next Toffler introduced his concept of the “pro-sumer.” That is, the individual who is motivated both by production and consumption, but not necessarily by the traditional economic measurement of value: money. Toffler singled out the invention of the open-source operating system Linux as an example of pro-sumer innovation, reminding the audience that Linux’s development continues to be spurred not by the goal of monetary gain, but by a simple desire to create a better piece of software. Toffler said that in order to achieve economic growth, governments must remain open and free to the transfer of information within their society and must recognize the value that pro-sumer innovation brings to their economy.
Toffler encouraged his audience to prepare for the resistance that organizations and individuals may put up against the change he see in our near future. With the type of revolutionary, social, political and economic change our society is facing, it is inevitable that conflict will occur within companies and within communities. People resist change in a variety of ways, Toffler said. However, we cannot continue to do business and expect our work to pay off, socially or economically if we do not change, beginning first with a reorganization of our institutions.
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All photos by Kaveh Sardari. These and many other high-resolution images from the National Conference on the Creative Economy may be viewed and purchased from www.sardari.com.
