A few years ago McKinsey published the evolution of the Earth’s economic centre of gravity (the image reproduced here by the Economist)……
The Industrial Revolution was one of the main forces in moving our centre of gravity from Asia across Europe towards the US. Two hundred years later, we have another revolution occurring…
In their 2015 book “No Ordinary Disruption” McKinsey continue to outline “Four Global Forces Breaking all the Trends” as:
- The Age of Urbanisation
- Accelerating Technological Change
- Challenges of an aging world
- Greater Global Connections
By 2025, for the first time in history, we’ll have the majority of the planet as consumers. 3 Billion of them being added in the period 1990 to 2025.
So as the Earth’s economic centre of gravity hurtles back to Asia, global trade flows have changed significantly and rapidly.
McKinsey Global Institute:
Global flows in a digital age: How trade, finance, people, and data connect the world economy, 2013
Manuel Lima is profound in his analysis of the power of networks. The network effects of social media, global trade, improved technologies and communication are all speeding up change, just as a catalyst does in a chemical reaction.
As this Planet Plexus revolution speeds up, we need to spend, carve out, fight for, prioritise a far more rigorous external view of our world of business. We need to look along the global shifts in technologies and demographies, the global flows of money, goods, people and communication and, we need to understand the networks we are involved in, to forage for the networks we want to be ingrained in. Our markets are changing and we need conscious effort now to SHIFT our eyes up and out from our desks to plot the ramifications for our new world of work.
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