Inevitable Surprises Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence

by Schwartz, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781592400270
• ISBN10: 1592400272
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-23
• Publisher: Gotham

Summary

The world we live in today is more volatile than ever. Across the globe, free societies face unprecedented threats to their security, and financial markets are fluctuating wildly. Technological innovations are speeding communications and revolutionizing medicine; massive demographic shifts are changing the makeup and distribution of the world's population and causing social upheaval. In the United States, terrorism has punctured the post-Cold War illusion of a Pax Americana, and we face the prospect of ongoing conflict with an uncertain outcome. The future seems dark -- with terrifying possibilities -- but the only thing that seems certain to many of us is that no one knows what tomorrow will bring. Peter Schwartz disagrees. As chairman of the Global Business Network, he is world renowned for his visionary scenario planning and has been a leading advisor to government agencies and major corporations including the CIA, CEMEX, Boeing, and Texaco for more than a quarter of a century. Schwartz believes that our future is taking shape around us now -- and by taking a closer look at the innovations and dynamic forces at work today, we can discern the changes already in motion that will soon define the twenty-first century. They are inevitable surprises.

Author Biography

Peter Schwartz is cofounder and chair of Global Business Network, part of the Monitor Group. He is the author of The Art of the Long View, and coauthor of The Long Boom and When Good Companies Do Bad Things. He has been a leading advisor to governments and major corporations. A highly sought-after speaker for business symposiums, he writes the monthly "Scenario" column for Red Herring magazine.

Table of Contents

Inevitable Surprises	p. 1
A World Integrated with Elders	p. 19
The Great Flood of People	p. 47
The Return of the Long Boom	p. 71
The Thoroughly New World Order	p. 99
A Catalog of Disorder	p. 129
Breakthroughs in Breaking Through: Science and Technology	p. 161
A Cleaner, Deadlier World	p. 185
Inevitable Stratgeties	p. 217
Notes	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

CHAPTER 1Inevitable SurprisesIn a world of surprises, what can we count on? As I write this, in early 2003, the question has never seemed so relevant. Some have lost their life savings in the economic turmoil of the last few years. Others have seen promising jobs and businesses abruptly disappear. A few of us have lost family members or friends in terrorist attacks. Many of us took for granted the idea that the United States, as the most powerful nation in the world, was virtually unassailable by outsiders. Nineteen madmen shattered that illusion on a September morning in 2001. Has anyone seriously believed, since then, that New York, Washington, or other American cities will never be in danger again? Leaders of organizations, from corporations to government agencies to nonprofits to unions, have seen our financial and market assumptions overturned. High-growth new media enterprises that were about to reshape the worlds of communication and retail suddenly went bankrupt. Time Warner and AT & T may well suffer similar fates to Enron and WorldCom. Latin America's economy abruptly entered freefall last year. Fourteen million African children have been orphaned by AIDS, a disease that nobody knew existed thirty years ago. The global middle class is burgeoning in, of all places, the immense socialist societies of China and India. You may be reading this book a year hence, or five years, or perhaps more, when these specific stories will seem like ancient history. Yet the fundamental point remains: You, too, live in a world of surprises. For surprises are the norm. There will be many more moments to come when the assumptions you've lived by sudden fall away-inflicting that same queasy feeling you get when an elevator drops a little too suddenly, when an airplane hits an air pocket, or when a roller coaster moves past the top of the curve and lurches into its descent. There will also be beneficial surprises to come-when impossible, unthinkable opportunities and technologies suddenly become real, for you (or someone else) to cultivate, develop, and use. Historically, upheaval is not a new condition. To be sure, there have been some relatively surprise-free centuries in human history; life for most people in medieval Europe was much the same as it had been for their parents. But since the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, complexity and turbulence in the world at large have been facts of life, looming larger and larger in people's concerns until today there is hardly anyone unaffected by them. At the same time most of us still feel emotionally that things should be stable and certain; that once we're over the next hump of crisis, life will naturally return to tranquil normalcy. And there are things we don't want to see strapped into a roller coaster: Our country's security. Our companies and jobs. Our retirement accounts. Is there a better way to live with this tension than just to hang on for the roller-coaster ride and react to every new surprise thrust at you? Yes, there is. There are still certainties-still facts and factors that we can rely on and even take for granted. For example, the quality of the natural environment-of air, water, and land use-in the industrialized world will significantly improve over the next thirty years. The use of "soft power" (moral suasion) will be more and more influential in diplomatic and military arenas, even as "hard power" (weapons and military technology) grows more prominent in the American federal budget. And the economy will revive: not in the same bubbling, effervescent form as it took in the late 1990s, but in a form that makes general prosperity seem once again accessible. There are many things we can rely on, but three of them are most critical to keep in mind in any turbulent environment. First: There will be more surprises. Second: We will be able to