Futurist Andrew Zolli focused on demographics

In the years ahead, what ideas will shape the key citizenship challenges, and just as importantly, the key solutions to those challenges?

The Center offered this year's conference attendees a crystal ball of sorts in the form of keynote speaker futurist Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+ Partners. Zolli spoke about some of the driving forces of change, what they mean for the future of corporate citizenship, and how they can work to reframe brands and markets. He first noted what he called “the great pendulum,” referring to the societal swing between favoring government and favoring markets. In the past several decades, he said, the pendulum swung back and forth every 20 years until the 1970s. In 2000, however, it swung broadly to favoring markets. The result is that businesses are at the commanding heights of their power and reach yet struggling to address new expectations regarding corporate citizenship. Education, health and family, the environment, and so on are now mainly the purview of industry and much less that of government than in the past. Businesses now have the responsibility for addressing these social obligations as well as making a profit.

One of the major factors that will affect business in the next 10 to 25 years is a large demographic transformation. In the next 10 years, a billion people will be added to the planet. Soon more humans will live in cities than in rural areas, with the overwhelming growth occurring in the world’s poorest cities, such as Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. There is now a new model for the traditional population pyramid, which will look different for each country. By mid-century, for example, there will be 2 billion teenagers worldwide. By 2025 in the United States, the largest number of people will be in the oldest and youngest generations, with far fewer in the earning level. “What race and gender were to the last of the 20th century,” said Zolli, “age will be for the beginning of the 21st.”

Age issues will have a myriad of effects. Family structure will change, and age issues will have an impact on organizational structure and have consequences including immigration and outsourcing, and a shift in consequences for the environment.

Considering the environment, Zolli noted three generations of ideas about its stewardship. In the ’60s and ’70s, he said, conservation was the overriding concern. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was sustainability. In the years 2000 to 2010, Zolli says, the focus will be on “ecovation,” in which, although conservation and sustainability are still important, the natural world is viewed as a library of innovations. “We have the tools for understanding the things we’re shepherding,” said Zolli. “Our ability to look at the natural world with new eyes for innovation will define corporate citizenship.”

Zolli predicted that we’re headed to another pendulum swing. We’re at the end of one swing and not quite into the next curve, he said. Values, metrics, accountability, sustainability, citizenship, responsiveness, transparency—all these are becoming increasingly important. Posing several questions that are relevant to corporate citizenship, Zolli asked: Is financial growth the only measure of a company? Is profit only financial? Are we only consumers, or are we also participants? Is size the enemy of accountability? He believes that we’re entering a new era, one of a participation economy. “We’re at the end of the era of companies thinking about people just as consumers,” he said. They’re now becoming participants.

Zolli closed his remarks by quoting Global Business Network's Eamonn Kelly: “We’ve pushed market wisdom and moral wisdom as far apart as possible. The next chapter will be dominated by the painful process of bringing them back together.”