The future

When asked, I describe myself as an optimist. The future to me looks bright and positive. Many of us in business have a similar outlook but for us there is an important caveat to this optimism: it is coupled with a pressing sense of responsibility to bring that future into existence. Very few of us would commit the kind of hard work and devotion required to run a business if we didn’t believe that these platforms could make an impact. Optimism becomes necessity.

It is easy to curtail this optimism by reducing the scope of ambition for the impact we want to see. Global goals turn into local reach as the demands of the everyday result in a crisis of imagination. We all know those moments when thinking bigger seems to be a luxury.

I want to mitigate these moments by pushing myself and our community to open our minds, and even sometimes our hearts. Florence Guild’s facilitated series is the contribution we make to serve our optimism and to broaden the thinking around the impact we can make.

Technology, of course, is the great enabler of our time. The critical aspect of our interaction with technology, however, is our conscious control of its power. The ethical application of technology in our businesses – and in our everyday lives – will determine the outcome of its impact.