The Slow Pace of Fast Change l Bhaskar Chakravorti

Innovation’s encounter with the market results in a game of both high risk and high stakes. Often its outcome defies common sense: Superior new products flop, unlikely ideas become runaway hits, and – despite rapid technological advances and intense interconnectedness – change happens at a snail’s pace. What really happens during this encounter? How can you increase your own odds on this complex game board?
In The Slow Pace of Fast Change, Bhaskar Chakravorti peels back the many factors that govern an innovation’s penetration into interconnected markets – and offers a game plan for successfully steering innovations from the lab to the living room. Chakravorti explains the vagaries of market adoption by highlighting a paradox in the widely celebrated concept of network effects: While everyone loves a great idea, individuals will embrace it only if they believe others will too. In markets with strong interconnections among participants, this "equilibrium" slows adoption and protects the status quo – despite the innovation’s clear superiority.
To win, innovators must unravel this status quo equilibrium and replace it with one built around their own innovations. The key is to imagine a desired plausible endgame, and work backward to orchestrate the network of individual choices to create conditions that make this outcome happen.
Drawing on Chakravorti’s hands–on experience with many of the best–known innovating companies and insights gleaned from his expertise in the practical applications of game theory, this playbook offers go–to–market strategies for: qualifying endgames to guide current choices, selectively enabling "influencers" to propagate the innovation across the network, closing deals with influencers that are "win–win," and judging the nature of uncertainty to decide how firmly to commit to the strategy.
The Slow Pace of Fast Change shows how to leverage interconnected individual choices in ways that ensure your innovation will win when it meets the market

Inevitable Surprises l Peter Schwartz

One of America's foremost prognosticators and author of the bestseller and management classic The Art of the Long View discusses the big surprises ahead, the resulting scenarios that are creating the future of our world, and what they will mean for you and your business.
The world we live in today is more volatile than ever. At times it seems that the only constant we can rely on is change itself – and what the future will bring appears to be anybody's guess. But Peter Schwartz, one of the most visionary scenario planners of our time, believes the future is taking shape around us now, and that by taking a closer look at the changes in action today, we can predict what the world of tomorrow will be like.
With Inevitable Surprises, Schwartz offers a provocative look at the forces that are dramatically reshaping our world – and shows what we can do to plan ahead for our society, our businesses, and ourselves. Each chapter takes a predetermined new reality that we will soon face–including regenerative medicine, global climate change, an aging population in the West, and the rise of terrorism–and offers critical foresight for the coming decades. Ultimately, Schwartz brings his analyses of these developments together to offer three overarching scenarios that are possible directions for world history in the coming years, and outlines the implications for each.
Timely, thought–provoking, and endlessly fascinating, Peter Schwartz's Inevitable Surprises is a book no one in business – or anyone with an interest in the future – can afford to miss.

What's Next? 2015 l GBN

What's Next? is an unusual business book with insights from a network of 50 remarkable thinkers expressing a variety of perspectives. Rather than focusing on the typical concerns and common preoccupations of companies today, it looks outside the traditional business realm at the broader forces in the world that increasingly are influencing the business environment. What's Next? includes a range of powerful insights into increasingly important fields?such as science and technology, culture and civilization, geopolitics and the environment?that will shape the decade to come.
Even before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we could see signs of turbulence ahead. The global economy was showing signs of stress; the stock market's long bull run was winding down, the dotcoms were fizzling; and the corporate accountability crisis was beginning to unfold. It's increasingly clear that we're heading into a decade of great uncertainty, with both incredible challenges and huge opportunities.
For the last 15 years, GBN has nurtured a global network of many of the leading thinkers?some famous, some still to be discovered?in the fields where the future is being created. In What's Next?, fifty of these network members point out the key developments to watch and the critical issues to track in their fields and the world at large. What's Next? takes fresh insights and ideas that emerged from a series of interviews and weaves them together in an innovative format that gives a multiplicity of views organized around major themes. This expansive conversation includes Mary Catherine Bateson on the difficulties of cultural change; Paul Hawken on the anti–globalization movement; Francis Fukuyama on the politics of biotechnology; Jaron Lanier on the social ramifications of telecommunications; Kevin Kelly on the rise of competing values; Peter Schwartz on the next scientific revolutions; Bill Calvin on rapid climate change; Amory Lovins on the next big energy shift; Freeman Dyson on the inevitable return of space exploration, and Stewart Brand on long–term civilizational issues