Keynote on future travel industry trends for American Express / TAP in Moscow, by Patrick Dixon, conference speaker. Future of hotels, airlines and travel agents – innovation in the travel industry. Future of business travel and leisure travel. Travel industry continues to be vulnerable to major shocks – politically, global economy, environment or other factors ranging from volcanic eruptions to the Arab Spring. Strategies of travel companies and global corporations are being overtaken by events. Impact of energy prices on future of aviation and global travel. Expect spectacular growth of aviation and rail travel in emerging economies such as China and India. The irresistible human desire to travel, explore, and gain new experiences will underpin consistent global growth in travel and tourism, despite new carbon and aviation taxes. Globalisation will also continue to force executives to sacrifice home life for travel, despite growth of teleworking and virtual teams. Business travel will grow every year over the next 20-30 years, powered by growth in emerging markets, while travel within the EU and the US will remain relatively static. Russia internal and international air travel will also grow rapidly. Asia will represent more than 40% of the global economy in Purchasing Power Parity by 2015. China travel bookings are already worth more than $100bn a year of which $15bn was booked online in 2012 – up 500% on 2008 figures. Expect huge changes in how people are organizing their own travel. What is travel really about? Business travel is dominated by one word – not economics or saving money, but by the same issue which is driving leisure travel. One single word is influencing all of human history. That word is emotion: related to passions, desires to breathe the same air as the people we work with or talk to. That is why audiences don’t like listening to keynote conference speakers on a video relay. Travel is about building trust with business colleagues. Emotion is about understanding local cultural context, about relating to customers in a deep way. It is true that videoconferencing is growing 20% a year but not enough to curtail business travel. Most people do not enjoy video conferencing and prefer to talk on the phone – unless video is between family members. In the workplace, most people are relatively uncomfortable to perform in front of a camera. Expect that to change, but the fundamental need for human relationships will drive travel. It is ironic that most people have better technology at home and faster bandwidth, than they do at work. They also have better experiences online with things like travel tools – using personal Apps like Tripit which reports with SMS, diary updates and so on with live updates of flight delays, alternative routing suggestions. Virtual travel assistants are a big growth

Future of energy industry in Asia. How HR innovation will solve talent shortages to fill key posts and ensure energy industry projects are completed on time. Keys to change management, motivation, better team performance, lower staff turnover, fewer vacancies and more agile workforce. How to attract the best talent from competing energy companies. Future of oil and gas industry. Shortage of skilled workers in alternative energies, coal, gas, nuclear power. Strategies for a more sustainable future. Patrick Dixon is a conference keynote speaker and co-author of SustainAgility. Presentation for Urban Forum in Malaysia. Every HR challenge and every HR-related global trend is related in our increasingly hyper-connected world so it is hard to list just three challenges in isolation. Here are three issues that closely mesh together. 1. Rapid changes in the global energy markets 2. Rapid changes in national energy strategies in Asia 3. Rapid changes in Asia labour markets / urban migration / demographics The fact is that global energy strategies, which must be built on related HR strategies, are being overtaken by events. The world is changing faster than you can hold a board meeting. A 20 second earthquake in Japan triggered a 40 year change in energy policy in Japan and Germany with far reaching global consequencies for the oil and gas work force. That means a completely new approach to strategy: the days of having only one strategy are over. Agility requires parrallel strategic thinking. 2. The O&G/Energy industry by its nature tends to recruit and promote technical and professional specialists into managerial and leadership positions because they are experts in their specialist subjects, but quite often their leadership/management capabilities are left underdeveloped. This can result in highly logical managers being very good with numbers and science but not particularly good at the things which motivate and encourage people. What are your thoughts on this? The challenge happens both ways round: world-class specialists with less developed leadership skills, and world class leaders with less developed specialist understanding. We need both. Oil and gas industry leaders can learn from other industries such as law, accounting and financial services where history has proven how dangerous it is to build organisations on data , elaborate forecasts and so on, without close attention to how team members feel, whether they believe in what they are doing, and whether they like being at work. I work with many groups of highly analytical leaders to develop their wider people skills. The key is to help each leader understand (often to their surprise) just how often their own personal, day to day decisions are influenced by “soft” emotional factors, and how they can use that understanding to achieve outstanding team performance.