A recent client-sponsored walk down Madison Avenue in search of global marketing talent that had migrated to the dark side—working for clients—of brand and corporate communications gave Gustin Partners a fresh, though hardly scientifically valid perspective on the domain.... Read more

Peter Thiel, über-entrepreneur, hedge-fund manager, co-founder of Palantir and PayPal and author of Zero to One once commented, “In reality, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if someone were.” Having read P.W. Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War I have to disagree with Thiel. The authors deliver a highly believable vision for what the next world war could look like. Ghost Fleet is a book serious thinkers about the future need to read. In a quick read you will be exposed to just about every emerging technology on the drawing boards today.... Read more

3D Printing is on every pundit’s list of transformative technologies. 3D Printing IS NOT top of mind with most senior executives. 3D Printing IS going to be part of the future. 3D Printing is something future-focused executives should know something about. I undertook a quick examination of what is known, what is misunderstood and what should be known about this potential disruptive technology lurking just over the horizon.... Read more

The future is binary. Not 1’s and 0’s. “Exploiters” and “Exploited”. When the “One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name” [apologies to Grantland Rice, “Alumnus Football”] he/she will parse executives into two buckets – leaders who knew how to make technology work for them and Morlocks [homage to H.G. Wells] who worked for the technology. Technology Imagination [i.e., what technology can do for us and what we can do with technology] is a business process and enterprise competence that has to be managed, measured and very much improved upon.... Read more