TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

FutureThink
by Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown
ISBN 0-13-185674-X
286 pages; hardcover; $24.99
Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 2006

What’s going to happen tomorrow? How about twenty-five years from now?

Don’t know? Neither do the authors of FutureThink, though they’re willing to put forward more than a few theories.

Despite authorial hubris, the point of FutureThink is not to unleash your hidden inner psychic, but to present a set of thinking skills that can help you deal with whatever changes are in store. And those skills can be useful. After all, while you may not know for sure what changes are coming, you’re probably pretty certain there will be plenty of them.

So how can you start planning for the future more effectively? Here’s one technique: Instead of viewing historical cycles as pendulums, think of them as spirals.

The difference? A pendulum invokes the image of cycles swinging back to where they started. But a spiral incorporates the changes that have occurred since the last cycle and takes into account the fact that nothing can ever be the same as it once was.

Other tips include overcoming the negative connotation of finding the least common denominator, and stepping back far enough to see the big picture.

You’ve probably heard some of the ideas before. No doubt you already know staff reductions and cost cutting mean customers are doing more, companies are sale-oriented instead of service-oriented, and technology often does not make your life easier. As is typical of the genre, FutureThink tends to state, restate and overstate the obvious.

Still, the book may give you fresh insights for assessing change and analyzing trends. Maybe you can’t predict the future. But you can learn to think about it.

 

Review originally published April 2006.