“We buy because we want to portray an image to the rest of the world. We do not buy food at a premium price because we think it’s better or it tastes better. We think we do it, by the way, because of that. But typically it’s actually to show to the world that I can do it, I can make it, I can finally afford it, or by the way, this is who I am. So brands would not exist if you were the only one on planet earth, because you wouldn’t care then about what brand you would wear. You only care about that when you have people around you. So that´s the core concept of brand building.”

Martin Lindström, Marketing Guru and Author

“Human beings can become so enthusiastic about a technological breakthrough that it sometimes ends up with too much enthusiasm, which we then call hysteria or a bubble. In a certain way, bubbles are very well known to provoke a lot of damage financially, but in fact the progress that we make as human beings and as an economy, often goes through bubbles, through massive hysteria and optimism about new technologies, about something new. Then people invest massively in this new technology, and we call that ‘a bubble’. But on the other hand it’s also a breakthrough, a step-up to a better economy.”

Geert Noels, Economist and Author

“I think that if in more traditional times we were officially supposed to believe - you went to church - but privately we didn’t believe, everybody mocked religion, the paradox today is that I claim it’s the opposite. What is repressed is not our non-belief, but our belief. People publicly pretend, I’m cynical, I don’t believe, but secretly you believe. This mode of ideology I would call cynical, or in psychoanalytic terms fetishist. When somebody claims that he is totally cynical - I don’t believe in anything - you should look for what is his or her fetish. All these great cynics, if you look at them closely, have a private secret, something which is really dear to them, which they don’t want to talk about and believe in.”

Slavoj Zizek, Sociologist, Psychoanalyst, Philosopher, and Cultural Critic

“I used to be a Marxist myself when I was about fifteen. I think it was easier to believe in Marx at that time, before or during the Second World War, because there had been this slump in the 1920’s. I lived in the north of England where mining and shipbuilding were major industries, but when I was young, they collapsed. The pound was overvalued. I was used to a situation seeing a lot of unemployed people picking up cigarette butts. To my mind at that time, capitalism had no future. But when I worked in OECD I changed my position. It seemed to me that capitalism was not dead or dying. I think what has happened to the communist countries since 1990 or so shows that that system didn’t work.”

Angus Maddison, Economist

“The self is whatever we sense we have of ourselves at any given moment. And we draw that from our experiences. Experiences that are shaped by our identity. And our identity is a great muddle of things, a great many possibilities. That selves end up looking like an English home that was started in the sixteenth century, through a wing in the seventeenth century and then they thought ‘Well, why don’t we just connect the barn’. That kind of aggregation goes on until you have this wonky kind of building where you can’t get from one end to the other without going through all these little rooms. It’s a complicated apparatus, very different from the modernist idea.”

Grant McCracken, Anthropologist, Blogger and Author

“A maverick company, for me, is a lot of things. The one thing that sets maverick companies apart is that unique, original, point of view. This blue print, this idea, set around ‘How can we shape the future of our industry?’ The sense of mission beyond just creating a high performing company but actually advocating a cause in the world. It’s something that’s very clear, that introduces a whole new way of competing in an industry. And really just captures the imagination of employees, of customers and of the wider marketplace. It goes back to that traditional definition of the maverick. It’s a very American term. Basically, the animal that’s unbranded, and doesn’t run with the herd. For me, that’s just a great way to work, and compete, and to win.”

Polly Labarre,  Business and Innovation Expert and Author

A recent local debate was dedicated to the future of education. English sociologist Frank Furedi argued for a return to conventional and traditional values like the authoritative teacher, knowledge as truth and the challanges of intellectualism. On the other side of the spectrum education futurist John Moravec arguedd that knowledge is becoming widely available through new technology and that education will become more about being able to process that knowledge into creative and innovative ideas. What’s your opinion?

In our future studie “Future of Network” we discuss the upcoming network society, a paradigmatic change that moves from atomic scientific universal thinking to fragmented contextual contingent thinking, or as Alan Moore calls it: from straight line thinking to no straight line thinking. Some artists are visionaries, ahead of time, and give us an insight in the future. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was such an artist. His life and work are the embodiement of the paradigmental change we are wittnessing today and the exhibition in the Kunsthal, the first Giacometti exhibition in twenty years in the Netherlands, can be considered in my opinion a sign of the new thinking emerging. Do you see other signs around you in the public sphere?