Future Savvy: Identifying Trends to Make Better Decisions, Manage Uncertainty, and Profit from Change - Adam Gordon

Overview

There's no shortage of predictions available to organizations looking to anticipate and profit from future trends. Apparently helpful forecasts are ubiquitous in everyday communications such as newspapers and business magazines, and in specialized sources such as government and think-tank forecasts, consultant reports, and stock-market guides. These resources are crucial but they are also of very mixed quality. While everyone knows a future-focus is crucial for strategic vision and organizational readiness, what information from the endless sea of sources is valid? How do you know which predictions to take seriously, which to be wary of, and which to throw out entirely? Which ones do you let guide your decisions?

Future Savvy provides a hands-on approach to judging predictive material of all types, including providing a battery of critical tests to apply to any forecast to assess its validity, and judge how to fit it into everyday management thinking.

In a colorful book with many examples, Adam Gordon synthesizes information assessment skills and future studies tools into a single template that allows managers to apply systematic "forecast filtering" to reveal strengths and weakness in the predictions they face. The better leaders' view of the future, the better their decisions - and successes - will be. Future Savvy empowers both business and policy/government decision-makers to use forecasts wisely and so improve their judgment in anticipating opportunities, avoiding threats, and managing uncertainty.