Jim Harris: Change is Inevitable; Embrace It!

Jim Harris is one of North America’s foremost management consultants, public speakers, authors and thinkers on change and leadership. He is also another local Canadian thought leader that I discovered during the World Future 2012 conference where Jim made the closing keynote speech. His speech was so entertaining, informative and illuminating that I instantly decided to invite him on Singularity 1 on 1. During our conversation with Harris we cover a wide variety of topics such as: technology as a major driver of change in our society; how a company (or our civilization) can appear to be healthy while actually being dead; the limits to growth and the ways we get Blindsided; Jim’s 13 Laws of accelerating change; why most organizations are incapable of innovation and adaptation; what Jim calls The Learning Paradox – learning, changing and accepting uncertainty; why being green is not some hippy ideology but a very profitable business decision. One of my favorite quotes that I will take away from this interview with Jim Harris is: “We need a silver buckshot, not a silver bullet.” (As a way of emphasizing the multiplicity of approaches necessary to adapt to accelerating change and address our environmental and economic meltdowns.)