Trends Analysis, Business Consulting and Writing
Patrick Dixon now advises large corporations in many different industries on trends, strategy, risk management and opportunities for innovation, giving keynotes to thousands of business leaders at corporate events each year.
Since the 1990s Dixon has written 15 books covering a wide range of issues and macro-trends including social media, multichannel marketing, consumer shifts, demographics, rise of emerging economies, health care, biotechnology, social issues, sustainability, politics and business ethics.
Futurewise, first published in 1998, uses the word FUTURE as a mnemonic standing for "Six Faces of the Future" which will impact every large business: Fast, Urban, Tribal, Universal, Radical and Ethical. Dixon is optimistic about the capacity of human innovation to solve complex challenges:
This millennium will witness the greatest challenges to human survival that we have ever seen, and many of them will face us in the early years of the first century. It will also provide us with science and technology beyond our greatest imaginings, and the greatest shift in values for over 50 years. Futurewise, page xi
Building a Better Business, published in 2005, describes a new approach to leadership, management, marketing, teams, brands, customer relations, innovation, strategy, corporate governance and values. The book applies lessons from volunteering and non-profit organisations in motivating and inspiring large numbers of people to achieve great things. In it, Dixon argues that all successful leadership derives from an appeal to a common desire for a better future—for customers, workers, shareholders and communities. He attacks the "dangerous" obsession with shareholder value in many global corporations:
"Our society has come to see that a strategy to build shareholder value without a clear mission based on robust ethical values, is a complete nonsense. In fact it has proved one of the fastest ways of destroying an entire global business."
Sustainagility, published in 2010 and co-authored by Johan Gorecki, describes green technology and innovations across a wide range of industries, which Dixon believes will help to transform and protect the world.
Read more about this topic: Patrick Dixon
Famous quotes containing the words trends, business, consulting and/or writing:
“Thanks to recent trends in the theory of knowledge, history is now better aware of its own worth and unassailability than it formerly was. It is precisely in its inexact character, in the fact that it can never be normative and does not have to be, that its security lies.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915)
“I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.”
—Paul Horgan (b. 1904)