Chamber of Commerce looks to future at annual breakfast

The Sarasota Chamber of Commerce looked at the future of business during its annual breakfast on Feb. 21 at the Hyatt Regency Sarasota. 

The 100th annual event saw a crowd of 500 members of the Sarasota business community. Guests spent their morning catching up over coffee and scrambled eggs before the keynote began. 

Futurist David Houle, who has worked at NBC, CBS and helped launch MTV, Nickelodeon, VH-1 and CNN Headline News, was the guest speaker. He explored what the 2020 decade would bring to the business world. 

“Reality is always changing. The reality you have today is different than the reality of 10 years ago, or 100 years ago,” Houle said.

Houle encouraged business owners to stop looking at what they have around them to fix a problem and look to the future instead. He spoke on how the best business owners know how to learn, relearn and unlearn what they know after sharing the quote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn, ” from Futurist Alvin Toffler.

“For CEOs and for business people, the most important word there is the word ‘unlearn.’ It is the verb you will have to learn,” Houle said. “You're going to have to be able to unlearn what you have learned to really learn what you need to learn.”