"Excellent (and very timely)." -Financial Times * "Smartly assembled case studies and insights." -Publishers Weekly * A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Former CEO and popular TED speaker Margaret Heffernan offers powerful and practical tools so you can face the future with confidence and courage.
Most of us are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won't provide that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. History doesn't repeat itself and even genetics won't tell you everything you want to know. Tomorrow remains uncharted territory, but Margaret Heffernan demonstrates how we can push aside uncertainty and forge ahead with agility.
Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.
Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in. Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, chief executive, and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland, and educated at Cambridge University. She worked for the BBC and developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors, and The Learning Company. She has served as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation, and iCAST Corporation. The author of Beyond Measure, Willful Blindness, and A Bigger Prize, among others, she blogs for HuffPost, CBS Moneywatch, and Inc.com. "Entrepreneur, author, and management professor Margaret Heffernan is a naturally confident speaker, but her assertive delivery never upstages the power and flow of her thinking. Her crowd-pleasing performance is perfect for the kind of clever observations and intellectual sound bites that populate this guide to the unpredictable future. Yet the audio goes well beyond entertainment because, with her solid background in management science, it offers a highly useful guide to where civilization might be headed. Get ready, she says, for a world far more unpredictable than the experts want us to believe. Citing past economic predictions that have repeatedly been wrong, she promotes the skepticism, tolerance for ambiguity, and can-do spirit you'll need to keep your sanity in the unstable times ahead."
