Lessons from the Future: Making sense of a Blurred World - Hardcover

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Stan Davis is an author and acclaimed public speaker based in Boston, Massachusetts. This is his eleventh book. Some of his previous books include Future Wealth, the best-seller Blur, the landmark Future Perfect, 2020 Vision, and The Monster Under the Bed. He is also an independent strategy and management consultant to both major corporations and fast growing enterprises, and part-time Senior Research Fellow at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation.

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"This unique and well-tested voice consistently arrives in the future much earlier than anyone else." Nicholas Negroponte, Co-Founder of MIT's Media Lab "Stan Davis is a master at linking abstract truths and discoveries to specific business applications. What could be more useful? He is a national treasure." John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends and Megatrends 2000 On Blur: "Blur is fast, smart, and useful-a decoder ring that any business person can use to make sense of the turbulence in the world of work today." Alan Webber, Founding Editor, Fast Company "...should be required reading for the millennium." Walter B. Wriston. Former Chairman and CEO, Citibank On Future Perfect: "If you want a hint of what's going on in the new economy, this vintage book will clue you in." Kevin Kelly, Executive Editor. Wired On 2020 Vision: "...a provocative masterpiece." Tom Peters, Author and management guru On The Monster Under the Bed: "...the single best book I've read in years about how all enterprises had better gain and deploy knowledge." Warren Bennis, Author and leadership expert "...a must for understanding how learning technologies are transforming our work and our play, our businesses and our schools, our entire lives." John Seely Brown, Former Director, Xerox PARC "...future visioning at its best." Peter M. Senge, MIT and author of The Fifth Discipline On Future Wealth: "...a valuable guide to the far-ranging, sometimes daunting financial and social transformations ahead." Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Former Secretary of State "...maps out many astounding and profound societal changes likely to result from the Internet revolution." Frederick W. Smith, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Federal Express "...a mind-stretching look at how an efficient, transparent Internet-connected economy could work." Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma "...a compelling vision of our financial future." Art Ryan, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Prudential Insurance Company of America "...a formidable manual on how to make sense of risk and opportunities... it will make you work smarter as well as harder." Rudi Dornbusch, Ford Professor of Economics and International Management, MIT "...this book is essential reading if you want to master the new economy." Ken Lay, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Enron Corporation "...stimulates readers to think about how the revolution in information technology opens up new contracting possibilities for their human and financial capital." Bob Kaplan, author of The Balanced Scorecard

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lessons from the future Stan Davis is quite simply one of the world's greatest futurist. His books have sold over a million copies worldwide and are published in fifteen languages. They include the worldwide best-seller, Blur, Future Perfect (winner of the Tom Peters Book of the Decade award) and, most recently, Future Wealth. He has written for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company and numerous other international business magazines. Lessons From The Future combines new writing with the very best of his unique body of work. In this single inspirational book, Davis addresses issues that are still playing out and still lie in the future, as well as the present. It contains some of the most visionary business thinking of the moment, including mind-stretching pieces on the information economy, the foundations of wealth, the next bio-economy, connectivity, emotional bandwidth and mass customisation. Lessons from the Future also includes a unique article by the author reflecting on his own work and the value of ideas in the new economy. Stan Davis is the world's highest profile new economy guru. He is 6'7" and prefers sitting on two stacked chairs. When people do a double take, he explains that chairs are built for average-sized people 5'7" who can't sit in kids' chairs built for 4'7"-size people. He looks at business the same way, finding opportunities by seeing situations in new ways. His creative thinking makes practical connections to new business opportunities. Lessons from the Future will help managers and entrepreneurs identify the business and social sea changes that are transforming everything, everybody and every enterprise.

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PART I How I Come Up With My Ideas

When Capstone Publishing asked me to do a book of my selected writings I was flattered. Then I thought how strange it was for someone who writes about the future to assemble work from his past. Would it still be interesting and relevant? Wrestling with the challenge, I was reminded of the quip about the physically challenged futurist who saw far into the future, but just a little off to the side. So how to chose the material?

Reviewing my writings, I realize that much of what I've said still lies in the future because it is still unfolding. The pieces I've selected for this volume generally fit in that category, and continue to provide lessons from the future. They were predictions about what would happen that are still in the midst of happening, still marvellously playing themselves out.

I've been fortunate in the topics I write about. In my last five books, for example, these included a focus on any time, any place, as well as coining the term "mass customizing" and labeling a "new economy" as early as 1987; describing the coming shift from the first to second half of the information economy in 1991; stressing the importance of knowledge based businesses in 1994; emphasizing the blur from speed, connectivity and intangibles in 1998; and the shift in how wealth is created and controlled in 2000. I'm blessed with a field that is constantly creating and expanding.

Since I often get asked "How do you come up with your ideas?," I've long wanted to capture some thoughts on how to think about the future, and pass them on to others in the hope that they work for you. This introduction seems like a good place to do just that. I also want this volume to be about how to generate ideas.

You might ask, when you make a prediction, how do you know you are going to be right? How do you avoid being that peripheral futurist? One guide I've long used is this:

Life is complex, the truth is simple.

Of all the lines I've written, for me, this one is the best. I wrote it about fifteen years ago and never published it. It has always been my touchstone for knowing if I had it right about anything. It says to me that if something is complex to you, you are not yet at the truth of it. When you are at the truth, there is an ease and clarity, and it seems simple. I've found this a wonderful signpost through the years, for personal as well as professional decisions. It's a great aid for problem-solving and for gauging the future accurately.

For me, 'are you right about what you did say' is more important than 'did you get it all?' Like all of us who study the future, I miss lots of what's coming. In 1991, for example, I accurately predicted the shift to the second half of the information age within a few years, yet like just about everyone else at that time, missed foreseeing the internet as the specific vehicle.

One way of increasing accuracy in prediction, and a "Top Tip" for wanna-be futurists, is to focus on discovery and eschew invention. I admire inventors greatly. They're true creators of something out of nothing. Entrepreneurs are brilliant this way. Discovering the future, however, is a far less amazing skill than inventing it. The thing discovered already exists, you simply see it before most others do. Often it is a new piece of technology that makes it possible for something to happen on a large scale. So, find a direction things are moving and spell out the ultimate logic or conclusion. If you're right there will be early examples of the thing already around. You're not creating the trend, you're simply spotting it before others.

Churn, for example, is increasing in the number of companies people work for in their careers. It's gone from one-or-two to ten-or-fifteen jobs within a few decades. Today, it's far more common to only stay with a company for a few years, and to move up by moving on. What's the ultimate logic? How much more churn has to occur before you get who you're really working for... yourself. Then you're no longer an employee, you're a free agent. This is partly why we predict a day when "The Wall Street Journal reports that 45 percent of the American workforce are free agents" (see page TK [reference "Basic Changes in the Foundation of Wealth" in this volume]). Then you search for more supportive evidence and related developments, such as: boundaries are more permeable and alliances replace integrated stand alone companies. People churn fits closely with this fundamental shift.

The simplicity/complexity and discovery/invention rules are two specific ways I come up with ideas. Another element is that the answer lies in self-taught skills more than in intelligence. Here, I have to be autobiographical. My career had two major turning points. They led to different tracks, each travelled for two decades, first as an academic and then as a free agent.

My undergraduate degree was in the social sciences, with a strong emphasis on what was then called '"intellectual history" or "the history of ideas." It was the late 1950s - early 1960s and I studied under many great thinkers, several of whom were European refugees from World War II and steeped in the great books of antiquity. When I got to graduate school, however, instead of big thoughts and theory I was schooled in little thoughts and researchable hypotheses about testable variables. Boring, but I got my union card. Now I could teach.