Monthly Archives: June 2017

Every Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and compliance practitioner who thinks about their compliance program one, three or five years down the road is a budding futurist. The Compliance Week 2017 Annual Conference opened this year with a Futurist, Dr. Brian David Johnson, who talked to the assembled group about where the compliance profession might be heading down the road. I thought about Dr. Johnsons talk when I read an article in the most recent issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review by Amy Webb, entitled The Flare and Focus of Successful Futurists. One of the things that struck me was her opening line which reads, Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting signals, which are harbingers of whats to come. They look for early patterns pre-trends, if you will as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream.

While futures forecaster may sound exotic, Webb cited to one theoretical physicist for about the most down to earth explanation I have read. She quoted Joseph Voros who related that forecasting informs strategy making by enhancing the context within which strategy is developed, planned, and executed. That is about as straight-forward a description of a CCO as one can find.

Webb believes the greatest problem for futures forecasting is the variance of logic based forecasting and creative based forecasting. She calls this the duality dilemma as the creative people felt as though their contributions were being discounted, while the logical thinkers whose natural talents lie in managing processes, projecting budgets, or mitigating risk felt undervalued because they werent coming up with bold new ideas. Your team undoubtedly had a difficult time staying on track, or worse, you might have spent hours meeting about how to have your next meeting. She goes on to say that one can harness both strengths in equal measure by alternately broadening (flaring) and narrowing (focusing) its thinking.

To overcome this duality and help move forecasting forward, Webb has developed a six-step approach for forecasting methodology. I found it useful for any CCO or compliance practitioner to use when forecasting where your compliance program will be one, three or five years out.

What I found most interesting about Webbs process is that it allows you to consider compliance innovations looking at outliers and seeing where technologies and services might take you. Obviously, the use of data beyond simply numbers of training sessions or calls to the hotline can inform a wide variety of business processes. This will further allow the operationalization of compliance. Webb ended by noting you can create the future in the present tense.

And what of the Futurist, Dr. Johnson at Compliance Week 2017? He related the importance of compliance would grow, together with the increasing importance around ethics and corporate governance. He believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will increase the speed at which business decisions could be made will make a robust compliance program, operationalized into the fabric of an organization more critical. AI will first allow more and quicker business decisions. It will be the compliance program which is most closely integrated into the DNA of an organization so it can respond to ever-shifting market conditions. Not simply in sales but moving seamlessly between third party sales representatives and those from the Supply Chain. A robust compliance program does not slow down a business but, properly functioning, allows it to move more quickly and more nimbly.

Dr. Johnson sees the necessity for compliance to be integrated into an organization. The Department of Justice (DOJ) says compliance should be operationalized into a company. It seems that the legal side of things is pointing the direction in which you should be moving your compliance regime. I think both Webb and Dr. Johnson would agree.

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The CCO as a Futurist - JD Supra (press release)

Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental Victorians and the modern man of government; shark art dealers and the atrocious Royal Academy; compilers of honours lists and editors of literary reviews; thin flapper girls and the fat Belgian bumpkins of Peter Paul Rubens; men who read detective stories and women who liked bowl-of-apple paintings by second-rate Czannes. People who lived in Putney.

The poet Edith Sitwell, who sat for an unfinished portrait by Lewis, was one of his most hoary, tried and reliable enemiesI do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwells favourite enemy. Sitwell was a fierce opponent. When worsted in argument, she throws Queensberry Rules to the winds. She once called me Percy. He had been born Percy Wyndham Lewis (18821957), but was Wyndham by the time he was old enough for Rugby and the Slade.

His best enemies were the Bloomsbury Set, those Fitzroy tinkerers and conscientious objectors, who spent the war pruning trees and planting gooseberries in Sussex, while he watched rats bicker for cheese at Passchendaele. The Bloomsbury grievance kept him going for decades. Roger Fry, director of the Omega Workshops, was a Pecksniff, a hypocrite, a shabby trickster, whose chairs stuck to the seat of ones trousers. The critic Raymond Mortimer was a middle aged man-milliner. Virginia Woolf was a timid peeper at the lives of others; her A Room of Ones Own a highbrow feminist fairyland. A Lewis review never failed to give Woolf one of her headaches. Ive taken the arrow of W.L. to my heart, she wrote after one attack in 1934. She was decapitated by him in 1938, and awaited his poisoned dart in 1940.

He styled himself The Enemy and imagined swaggering out in a Stetson, a cigar between his teeth, swinging bandoliers loaded with vitriol. After breakfast raw meat, blood oranges, a shot of vodka he talked of taking pot shots at the sub-Sitwells and sheep in Woolfes clothing of literary London.

A picker, too, of the wrong side: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain. Having fought in the first world war, he didnt want a second and thought these men were the ones to stop it. That lonely old volcano of the Right, W.H. Auden called him. Nothing fired him up like a quarrel, a squabble, a skirmish. But war was another matter.

In this, the centenary year of the Battle of Passchendaele, the battle-bog in which Lewis saw his fellow gunners shelled and drowned, the Imperial War Museum North has mounted a superb retrospective of the artists life and work. It makes no apology or excuse for him. The exhibition opens with broadsides from choice enemies. A malicious, thwarted and dangerous man, said Sacheverell Sitwell, brother of Edith. A curious mixture of insolence and nervousness, said E.M. Forster. We do not have to like him for his writing, painting, pamphleteering, to think hes worth remembering.

The war, wrote Lewis, was a landmark as tremendous as the birth of Christ: We say pre-war and post-war, rather as we say BC or AD. Pre-war he had been a troublemaker. He had fallen in with Augustus John at the Slade and travelled to Holland, France, Germany and Spain on his allowance. He returned in 1908 with an exotic wardrobe, an absurd haircut and a moustache. He fired his first shots, made early enemies: I am all in favour of a young man behaving rudely to everyone in sight. This may not be good for the young man, but its good for everyone else.

England was in a somnolent state, still mooning over the pale aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Kate Greenaways syrupy infants. In July 1914, he launched Blast a battering ram of a magazine and with it the vorticist manifesto a mass of excited thinking, of wild and whirling words. Vorticism was a queasy, uneasy art. Paintings were tipped on their axes, the viewer left motion-sick and dizzy. Bodies and landscapes were angular and abstracted. The mathematician Euclid was one hero, Andrea Mantegna, with his crisp, etch-like outlines, another.

Eleven artists, among them the poet Ezra Pound and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, signed the vorticist manifesto. Lewis would later claim the movement was all down to a very vigorous One.

Vorticism was written up as an English off-shoot of Italian futurism, but Lewis was against Marinetti and his gang. He wouldnt dignify them with the name futurist. They were Milanese automobilists obsessed with speeding cars and aeroplanes. When Marinetti lectured in Bond Street, Lewis went to heckle. Never had he heard such a lot of hot, noisy air: a day of attack upon the Western Front, with all the heavies hammering together, right back to the horizon was nothing to it.

Blast and vorticism had short lives. Wars have made it impossible to get on with anything for very long, but I am glad that I got in, at the very beginning, a resounding oath. The blast was heard beyond Londons squares and salons. Drilling his squad at Mentsham Camp, Lewis was called over by the adjutant and sergeant-major. Bombardier, said the adjutant, what is all this futurism about? They thought it a great joke. Was this funny gunner really the revolutionary they had read about in the papers? In his war memoir, Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis noted that the sergeant-major was killed within a fortnight of being sent to the Front.

The war was a stupid nightmare. He had a row with the war artist Sir William Orpen, who insisted: war is hell. Lewis wouldnt accept this infernal clich: I said it was Goya, it was Delacroix all scooped out and very El Greco. But hell, no.

He did not paint the war like Goya, but in the fidgety, jagged style of vorticism. It was right for the pitted, splintered, broken landscape of France, and the shell-shocked, sleepless men who fought there. He could not, he said, have begun to paint a milkmaid in a field of buttercups, but when Mars with his mailed finger showed me a shell-crater and a skeleton, with a couple of shivered tree-stumps behind it, I was still in my abstract element. In paintings like Shell-Humping (1918), Officers and Signallers (1918) and A Battery Shelled (1919) the men arent quite human. They are metallic and riveted with howitzer arms and bayonet legs.

The war ended but Lewis carried on fighting with pen and in paint, prolific and furious. He wrote 50 books and left more than 100 paintings and 1,000 drawings. Even after he lost his sight in his late sixties, he wrote polemics by dictaphone. Blindness was like being pushed into an unlighted room, the door banged and locked for ever.

A Self Portrait of 1932 has him scowling under a hat. Who next for a blast? A Woolf, a Sitwell, an Academy stooge? Rage made him bitter and isolated. He was often wrong, occasionally brilliant and always his own worst enemy.

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Flappers, futurists, Bloomsbury and Putney Wyndham Lewis's many enemies - Spectator.co.uk

Rocket ships, brain chips, music streaming, autonomous driving, solar power, underground roads with elevators it might be easier to list all the stuff that doesnt capture Elon Musks active imagination.

Best known as a car mogul, the founder and CEO of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has even teased an interest in building an Iron Man suit for the Pentagon, a fitting venture for a tycoon who may have a Tony Stark fixation (or vice versa).

When he isnt battling existing state laws requiring carmakers to have a separate dealer network to sell, he's doing other stuff.

Heres a brief tour through the varying interests (distractions?) that constitute Musks million-dollar musings.

SpaceX succeeded in launching two of its Dragon 9 rockets over a 48-hour stretch last weekend, one to deliver Bulgarias first telecom satellite on Friday and a second on Sunday. The latter was to deliver 10 satellites for Iridium Communications Inc (NASDAQ: IRDM), which is setting up a global positioning system for commercial aircraft.

Delivering satellites and carrying payloads for NASA to the International Space Station are lucrative priorities reusing rockets and capsules is essential to Musks space business model but he has higher aspirations, such as colonizing Mars.

The stuff of sci-fi, Musks people are working on a neural interface that would allow the brain to directly control a computer and, theoretically, everything a computer controls. The venture even has a name Neuralink, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company, with a target of four years, aims to sell a product for people with brain injuries. It would eventually allow the human brain to connect to cloud storage, turning people into cyborgs with the ability to combat the rise in Artificial Intelligence, brain-for-brain, in a fight for dominance. No, really.

Musk just doesnt want to make autonomous electric cars, Martian colonies and space ships; he wants to get into the media content business, beginning with music.

Recode, quoting music industry sources, said Tesla is in talks with major music labels about licensing a proprietary music service that would be bundled with its automobiles. This report certainly came out of left field, but at this point, the world should have learned not to be surprised by Elon Musk's seemingly limitless entrepreneurial ambitions, Forbes said.

Its not really Elon, but his brother, Kimbal. A year younger, Kimbal Musk, like Elon, worked for a bit on the family farm in Canada. Hes seeking to overhaul the worlds nutritional values and the way the food supply is grown, harvested and distributed. "[My brother] told me it was crazy to get into the food business; I told him it was crazy to get into the space business," Kimbal Musk told CNBC. "It's working out fine."

Its telling that sectors that havent caught Musks attention (as far as we know) are, well, clamoring for it. Some health experts say if Musk wants to colonize the cosmos, hed better get going on diagnostic tools, health sensors and 3D-device printing to deal with specialized health care required for humans in space.

Right, been there. Musk made his first fortune as co-founder of Paypal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL), which revolutionized the way people buy stuff online. Moving on.

SolarCity Corporation, which seeks to monetize and reduce costs of companies switching to solar energy. The multi-billion corporation, which was founded by a couple of Musk cousins on the advice of Elon, is now owned by Tesla.

The Boring Company is looking into boring traffic tunnels underground, where elevators would take multiperson vehicles to traffic-lite thoroughfares and transport people on high-speed sleds. Flying cars also are in the mix.

Related Link: Earth To Elon: Musk Wants To Conquer Music

_______ Image Credit: By Jurvetson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2944375891/, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Everything That Interests Elon Musk Besides Building Cars | Benzinga - Benzinga