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The Anticipatory Organization
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The Anticipatory Organization

Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage

Daniel Burrus
Greenleaf Book Group, 2017
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8

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Recommendation

New technology, products and services hit the market every year, causing disruptions in current trends and even abruptly changing the trajectory of the future. While some business leaders struggle to keep up, believing the future is a mystery, others learn to see changes coming. Futurist Daniel Burrus offers a guide to predicting the future and suggests ways to capitalize on it. He walks you through “hard” and “soft” marketplace trends, explaining how to leverage them to your advantage and stay ahead of your competition.

Summary

Follow “hard” and “soft” marketplace trends to predict the future.

Predicting the future is a learnable skill that many leaders and their companies have used to their profit. Netflix saw the future of content delivery in video streaming, for example, and Apple delivered the iPhone. People rely on predictable trends to guide them as they invest their time and energy. Business leaders, inventors and marketers make many decisions based on trends they observe and expect to continue.

Product developers look at the marketplace identifying hard trends and soft trends that could lead to profitable opportunities and shape the future. Hard trends are given facts – future inevitabilities no one can avoid. Hard trends include the linear and exponential progression of technology and demographics, such as Baby Boomers’ imminent retirement in the 2020s.

Alternatively, soft trends are less concrete and change easily. They are based on assumptions that may rely on past data or gut instincts or both. For example, Facebook is a preeminent social media platform, and based on its current stats, should maintain that position in...

About the Author

Daniel Burrus is an American technology futurist. He is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible.

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