Gregor has sat on the IP3 Global Industry Council since 2010.

We combine these insights with the powerful tools of the modern social web to engage customers and get our utility partners the results their regulators demand.

Bailar is excited to be one of Simple Energy’s founding advisers.

Within the next century, the world’s population will likely swell to 9 or 10 billion. And according to new research, we can feed them all if we make some radical changes in the way we grow our food.

As the world’s population approaches 7 billion, 1 billion of those people continue to go hungry. It’s a huge problem around the word—from the deadly famine in Somalia to the dismal hunger statistics here in the United States. Meanwhile, annual increases in agricultural yields have begun to slow down, and our methods of cultivating crops continue to degrade land, water, biodiversity, and climate. It’s not hard to imagine a dystopian future where huge chunks of the population will suffer from chronic hunger while our natural resources are depleted.

But Nature magazine brings some good news to the age-old battle between civilization and Earth: It’s not a zero-sum game. Scientists have figured out how we can feed a growing world that doesn’t come at the expense of the planet. There are a few basic (but radical) steps we can take to sustainably double our food production. Here’s the strategy:

• Halt farming in places like tropical rainforests and wild lands, which are ecologically valuable but have low food output.
• Make underused expanses of land in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe more efficient, boosting current food production by nearly 60 percent.
• Make better use of water, fertilizers, and chemicals
• Stop eating so much meat, especially in developed countries.
• Stop wasting food—about one-third of all food grown is either discarded, spoiled, or eaten by pests.

In order to make room for several more billion people, we are going to have to drastically change the way we produce food and convince people these issues are a matter of physics, not politics. It’ll be an uphill battle. But according to this group of optimistic scientists, it’s necessary, and it’s possible.

The Planet Will House 10 Billion People, and We Can Feed Them All – Food – GOOD.

Gregor joined the BTC board in October of 2011.

Senior executives and their teams at the world’s leading organizations use actionable insights, analytic tools, and advisory support from the Corporate Executive Board to help them drive corporate performance. CEB products quickly and confidently focus efforts on what they need to know, and do, next. CEB provides essential information by analyzing and disseminating the most successful practices from their connected global network of clients.

Gregor has been on the CEB Board since 2007 and currently serves as Chair of the Audit Committee.

Corporate Executive Board

Gregor is honored to sit on 10×10′s Advisory Board

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Employees are distracted from work, distrustful of executives and looking for solid ground in an otherwise shaky situation.  They are worried about their own skills and whether or not they will be relevant as we come out of this recession.  At the same time, this is the most critical time in corporate history to re-invest in efficiency, to get costs right and to get “ready” for an innovation upturn – a task that often calls on the CIO and their staff for heroic efforts.

It is also the most critical time for a CIO to be in-tune with his/her business which is likely to be flip-flopping on priorities looking for ways to stay afloat.  On top of this already tall order, we have yet another hyper-urgent “risk” management death march underway in response to the economic downturn and the inadequate practices revealed in its origins. And this is creating new compliance programs and “transparency” efforts which generally come with less than adequate funding and immature business “process” expertise. These efforts put further tension on balancing business priorities with the resources available to the CIO and the technology staff. And this can lead to confusion, misdirection, loss of productivity and frustration in the IT staff.

So, more than ever before, CIOs need to focus on leadership, on messaging, on clarity, and direction.  These skills are critical in staying in-tune with their staff, their colleagues and their superiors.

Of course, the use of external services of any kind is diminished at the moment.  But if there is an area to reserve some external time for, this is it. Seek out someone who can complement your skills, work with your style and help augment your blind-spots. Give yourself space to see beyond the fray and gain a broader perspective and work on engendering an infectious leadership style that will cascade down to your staff and out to your peers.  Be genuine to the situation and authentic with your feelings. Be empathetic to your people, but pragmatic and clear about commitments. Find a colleague, a peer or a CIO at another company who can hold a mirror up to you and help you ferret out your most critical leadership agenda and then clarify a plan for that work to be put into action.

The key here is that it is about leadership – which starts with developing relationships, prioritizing work, clarifying purpose, being responsive to interpretations and anticipating reactions.

1. The practices of effective management have improved significantly over the past 10 years.
2. The culture, roles and relationships of workers and management have dramatically changed.
3. The tools available to leverage suppliers, technology and clients/constituents have expanded and in many cases been re-invented.
4. Government can be more effective, more efficient and more responsive to its challenges and opportunities through a transformational re-invention of itself through the adoption of these contemporary practices.

New Practices
Innovation, efficiency and controls have seen new and different pressures, requirements, challenges and advances throughout this period.

Innovation has been stimulated by both the rise and fall of the dot.com era, the “flattening” of the world and the explosion of open development platforms, social networks, micro-segmentation and low-cost distribution and logistics leveraging Internet technologies.

Since Enron and heightened in the current environment, controls have taken on a new dimension. Sarbox, Basel, regulatory transparency, privacy and shareholder activism have dictated heighten controls but with maturity they have also increased focus on incorporating controls directly into the product and services life-cycle to create an efficient benevolent cycle.

Efficiency in this hyper-competitive environment has gone beyond 6-sigma into full-life-cycle redesigns incorporating user self-service, LEAN and Agile product development and a deeper involvement of supply chains and new technologies. These efficiencies free up more effort for innovation and differentiation and allow for R&D into the Next Big Thing.
 

New Culture
The age of the life-long employee has passed and the era of “portfolio” careers is here. The relationship between employer and employee focuses much more on the value of the experiences an employee can gain, the environment they operate within and the opportunities for challenge and advancement than ever before.

Gen-X, Y and beyond have shorter horizons for seeking fulfillment and demand to be heard and challenged. Generational gaps related to concepts of respect, experience, use of technology and methods of relating can lead to inefficiency and reduced productivity – especial when compared with organizations where these issues have been overcome and turned into advantages.
 

Tools
The tools for managing the explosion of information, the understanding of needs, the targeting of services and the integration and distribution in the new “connected-world-order” are changing quickly and accelerating innovation at speeds well beyond those in the past. Companies and services that lead the growth curves and mind-share of consumers were non-existent only a few years ago. And the methods by which constituents learn about, obtain and recommend these services are in there infancy as well.

Riding the wave of Internet connectivity, social networks, and supplier networks, open markets for ideas, tools and information have emerged where only a limited number of less-powerful proprietary services existed.
 

Action
The Next Big Thing for Government is all about leveraging this new fabric of access, entrepreneurship and customization and tapping the unbridled power of networked collaboration and interaction. Organizations enabling catalysts for collaboration with the crowd will create unimaginable opportunity for both – even with the challenges that must be overcome.

The revamp of the air traffic control system will not proceed in this fashion. We have to keep 8000 planes flying on radar and radio towers each day while launching GPS-based systems that can take advantage of safer, more efficient routes. New regional, hub-based systems will increase the number of planes, reducing costs, increasing efficiency – but also complicating the overall situation.

The revamp of our electrical systems means finding new ways to clean our coal-fired generation plants immediately, while we find the next best solutions for powering our country in the fastest way possible (solar, hydro, nuclear, etc.). This will require new technologies in generation and in environmentally sound cleaning. It will require that we look at where the generation is and where the people are and build or revamp transmission facilities in an economical, safe and environmentally sound way. The full solution for a more efficient and stable electrical infrastructure will require the use of “Smart” metering at the home for instantaneous monitoring of our electrical use. These meters will give consumers the ability to see the direct effect of their usage immediately and will allow them to buy the cheapest, greenest energy and use it wisely. It will involve exploring nano-technologies for more efficient solar power. And it will require a country-wide focus on conservation and awareness of our energy use.

With the US drinking more bottled water per capita than most of the rest of the world, (according to www.worldwater.org) the most “developed” country in the world has a water crisis. Whether this is just a social/cultural issue or an issue of real health concern seems to depend on your economic status or daily consumption of self-help literature, but either way we have work to be done to make our water sources safe, to communicate this and to eliminate our addiction to this irresponsible environmental irrationality.

The ever marching “advances” of cellular (now going open source, multi-network and exclusively digital – making obsolete any remaining analog handsets) and television, (also going “open” at the set-top and shutting down all analog transmissions) will create a wave of new technologies and new interaction models that will open yet another flood of communications channels for us to figure out, to exploit, and to manage.

The second family of transformations center around taking action against climate change – the “green revolution”. There have been few issues that are in so much need for endemic change across all political boundaries as does the need to combat climate change. No matter what your proof that it is happening or your conclusion as to why, the reality that we have to learn to manage our environment better, waste less and preserve more is clear and it is a national and global concern. The need for innovation in this space is awesome: from new ways to carry our groceries, to packaging, building materials, lighting, clothing, production, transportation and farming. You name it and it can probably be created, used, re-used and recycled cheaper, faster and with a smaller carbon footprint than it is now. With additional motivation from prizes such as the Ansari X-prizes and research and government grants, this will be a hotbed of innovation over the coming years at a time when we need it most.

So, we could be entering an era reminiscent of the golden infrastructure days of railroad, telephone, interstate highways, and moon shots with jobs-a-plenty and innovations everywhere. Or, we could slumber and stumble into a spiral of international alienation and forgotten technologies akin to east Germany in the height of the cold war.

Oh, and mentioning war, if you are wondering where some of the funding for these monumental efforts might come, consider the fact that we are spending somewhere around $1 Billion per DAY on military activities at the moment.

There are many clouds over the US at the moment but as is evident from this simple discourse, there is also incredible hope for the US economy and for technology as a fuel for recovery. Success will only come if each and every one of us takes action and commits to working toward a more responsible, more tolerant and more sustainable future. Each in our own way, to the best of our abilities.

Now.

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