A lot has changed since Fuse 08. It reminds one of the ancient Chinese proverb (which many think is actually curse): "May you live in interesting times!"

Has your life been "interesting" in the past year? Mine has... I'm not just observing and analyzing the trends this year, but as an entrepreneur in this new market environment, I feel like I'm in the vortex... living the trends firsthand.

In the fall of 2008... what I'm now calling BC (Before Crash)... in addition to the election, Global Warming was the dominant topic. Does it exist? What can we do if it does exist? How much time do we have left to course correct?

So I decided to take an educational excursion up to the Arctic to see for myself with, among other experts, Harm de Blij, one of the world's leading geographers. When people asked why I was taking this trip, I half jokingly said I wanted to see the Arctic before it melted.

Despite that thought, I really expected that the trip would be full of grand images of unbroken horizons of ice. What we actually saw were broken ice floes, beautiful... but not very cold. And by the way, Greenland, which is not supposed to be GREEN (that was Viking propaganda to get people there from Scandinavia) but was so brutally frozen and WHITE, that even the Vikings bailed. Now it is indeed more and more green.

Yes, the Arctic IS melting but there was a glimmer of good news at the center of what we learned. The earth is entering a mini ice age (as it does every 20,000 years) but all of the warm CO2 in the atmosphere is counteracting the freeze, in effect creating what Thomas Friedman calls "Global Weirding," which we witnessed first-hand. While Greenland is becoming warmer, Iceland is becoming colder... and this winter was REALLY winter in the midwest and northeast.

Why is that good news? The pull between freezing and warming is buying us a bit of time to work things out (approximately 100 years according to Jim Dator, head of Future Studies at the University of Hawaii). It's now a "survival" imperative that we be innovative and develop creative solutions.

I didn't realize how immediate that need was going to be. We came home Tuesday September 16 to find that Monday the stock market had tanked, dropping over 500 points into virtual freefall. Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch collapsed and Washington Mutual/AIG were on the brink.

The New Normal

A few days later, I had dinner with a friend who had just been laid off from a senior position at Martha Stewart. Yes, she was remarkably upbeat and was no longer spending without real mindfulness. She said that was the "old normal" and she was embarking on what she called the "new normal" - spending more time with family, reconnecting with friends live and in-person, making things herself (like dinner), going to museums, Central Park during the daytime (what a concept!), essentially doing things that didn't cost much but were great experiences. I LOVED the "new normal" because it signals an immediate collective behavior shift AND because it feels like a positive reinvention rather than penance.

So what are the top 2010 Societal Transformations?

Recession

• National Unemployment since FUSE '08 has jumped from 5% to 8.5%
• Mortgage foreclosures have increased 46%, and are climbing
• The Fortune 500 earnings dropped 84.7% from 2007, from $645b to $98.9b, the worst drop in the 55 history of the Fortune 500

Upside Down = Right Side Up

"The World Stands on its Head" (Die Welt Steht Kopf) House, on the Baltic Sea Island of Usedom, stands nearly completed (as of September 3, 2008), in Trassenheide, Germany. The upside-down house, complete with upside-down furnishings, is the brainchild of Klaudiusz Golos and Sebastian Mikiciuk, and will be a tourist attraction that will open to the public tomorrow.

The WiiCession

Consumers have responded by playing Wii. Anecdotally, people I talk to everywhere and across generations are hanging at home. Sales of Wii are surging in the USA. Mike Duke, CEO of Wal-Mart, said sales of Nintendo's Wii, plus other things that make HOME A HAVEN, like flat screen TVs and home electronics, are surging, as people cut back on going to movies, dinner or on vacation.

Gloom to Boom

Platitudes proliferate in times of turmoil; they teach us about what's going on and give us some solace, such as:

• Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
  - proverb
• There is no education like adversity.
  - Benjamin Disraeli
• The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.
  - Seneca
• Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.
  - Horace
• Sweet are the uses of adversity.
  - Shakespeare
• Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.
  - Francis Bacon
• If you're going through hell, keep going.
  - Winston Churchill

Bloom

The burgeoning "green economy" will be a strong force in the "New Normal" and new ideas are coming from creative visionaries at the periphery of the culture.

• Solar balloons: Dubbed Sunhope, the project is showing great promise as a low-cost deployable system to harness solar energy while maintaining a minuscule environmental footprint.
• In WIND TECHNOLOGY, GE is training 1,600 new hires in turbine technology every year for the forseeable future. The new V-Wing Turbine can generate wind energy from the oceans.
• AUTO INDUSTRY must reboot... and is starting to get an infusion of innovation from unlikely places like their own intern programs and outside entrepreneurs who are changing the DNA of cars as we know them. In 20 years "cars" will be "digital hydrogen electric," highly sensory computers 3000 times smarter then today. They will drive us versus us driving them, sense traffic, our moods, become work/entertainment pods increasing personal productivity while decreasing emissions. It will become a WorldWide Vehicle web or mobile technology platform. How cool, a car that can heal itself, sense your mood and adjust the interior to suit, change colors on the fly. Just download style preferences like you currently download ringtones.