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"We live in an age where emergent technologies continue to have massive effects on business and society. Rising complexity requires companies and economies to cope with increasingly interlocking systems. If we keep on considering systems in a traditional, isolated way, this would lead to a totally locked view of business. This new hyper-connected nature of information entails an unprecedented change in business and societal environments. One major consequence for companies is the imperative to learn to anticipate those changes as well as to successfully adapt to them, or being at risk of disappearing."

Digital technologies are enabling us to develop systems with huge numbers of interconnected components and sophisticated software that infuses them with seemingly unlimited capabilities. They are penetrating just about every nook and cranny of the economy and of society in general. And, they are profoundly changing the way all organizations operate, as well as our working and personal lives.

A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

"In early July I participated in the 2013 Roundtable on Institutional Innovation sponsored by the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society Program. The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization that aims "to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues." It holds a variety of seminars, public conferences and other events throughout the year in its Aspen, Colorado and Wye River, Maryland campuses."

Number of followers, connections, reputation, influence... they all become increasingly important social metrics. However, are we measuring the right things?

Design thinking is the new mantra. Redesigning the enterprise and our society. But will it succeed where so many other approaches have failed?

Cooperation, despite being now considered the third force of evolution, just behind mutation and natural selection, is difficult to explain in the context of an evolutionary process based on competition between individuals and selfish behaviour. But this puzzle, that has haunted scientists for decades, is now a little closer to be solved by research about to be published on the journal Physical Review Letters.

"Gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s, cigarette boats, no-income mortgages and private jets should be relegated to the junk heaps of history, or better yet, put in a museum dedicated to never forgetting the greed and avarice that led us so far astray."