Future Business

Michael D. Watkins, an expert on leadership transitions and organizational success, returns to the page with a new how-to guide for the modern leader. Here, he presents the six disciplines that separate the great from the good. Developed over the course of his storied career, Watkins’ approach to strategic thinking—"a set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward”.

A manifesto on the state of the non-profit arts sector and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity leaders have to redefine the business as an investment in our shared humanity.

We are entering a new technological age in which artificial intelligence and immersive media will transform society at all levels, mediating our lives by altering what we see, hear, and experience. If managed well, this could unleash a new age of abundance. If managed poorly, this technological revolution could easily go astray, compromising our privacy, autonomy, agency, and humanity. Two industry veterans provide a data-driven debate on whether the new world we're creating will be a technological utopia or an AI-powered dystopia and give guidance on how to aim for the best future we can.

For a dozen years as one of the world’s most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. The first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company - and one of the foremost strategic thinkers of our time - she transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence, and a deep sense of purpose. Now, in a rich memoir brimming with grace, grit, and good humor, My Life in Full offers a firsthand view of Nooyi’s legendary career and the sacrifices it so often demanded.

In an era defined by rapid change and unrelenting uncertainty, mastering self-reliance is not just an option—it's a necessity. Maha Abouelenein is a strategic communication and personal branding expert who has been instrumental in orchestrating transformations for clients that include global corporate giants, high-growth startups, sports organizations, governments, and high-net-worth individuals. In 7 Rules of Self-Reliance, she draws upon her vast experience to deliver a profound guide on self-reliance.

If you’re like most people, thinking about tomorrow makes you anxious. You may have dreams of what you want to do or where you want to be in the next few months, years, or decade, but you’re fearful because you don’t know what may await. Unfortunately, this apprehension affects how you make decisions today - the kind of decisions that will impact your life tomorrow.

Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, with Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia, draws on fifty years' experience to challenge all business owners and leaders to rethink their businesses in a time of cultural and climate chaos. The authors describe the current impact of manufacturing, commerce, and traditional capitalism on the planet's natural systems and human communities, and how that impact is forcing business to change its ways.

Raised as a fourth-generation farmer, when Will Harris inherited White Oak Pastures he was a full-time commodity cowboy who played hard and fast with every tool the system offered–chemicals, antibiotics, steroids, and more. His ancestors had built a highly profitable, conventionally run machine, but over time he found himself disgusted with the excess, cruelty, and smalltown devastation this system entailed. So he bet the farm on forging a different way of doing things. One that works with nature not against it, and bridges the quickly widening delta between consumers and their food.

After two decades of personal experience, study, and client work, she is finally releasing her knowledge, wisdom, and practices into a short, powerful book to help people get out of their own way once and for all. Self Sabotage No More are the mindsets and methods that Jennie’s been sharing and using with clients to great success and transformational results.

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

For years, consumers have been promised a simple, carefree digital future. We could live, work, learn, and play from the comforts of our homes, and have whatever we desire brought to our door with the flick of a finger. Instant communication would bring us together. Technological convenience would give us more time to focus on what really mattered. When the pandemic hit, that future transformed into the present, almost overnight. And the reviews aren't great.

The economic ground is shifting beneath our feet. The world is becoming more volatile, and people are understandably worried about their financial futures. In this urgent and accessible guide to the crises and opportunities that lie ahead, economist and former Governor of the Bank of Canada Stephen Poloz maps out the powerful tectonic forces that are shaping our future, and the ideas that will allow us to master them.

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work.

Lawyers. Accountants. Software Engineers. That what Mom and Dad encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of "left-brain" dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers - creative and emphatic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.

One of the strongest drivers propelling corporate expansion in contemporary society is innovation. It is the capacity to develop, and execute fresh ideas, products, technologies, and strategies that boost customer experiences, increase competitiveness in the market, and preserve a competitive edge using which efficiency is enhanced. Companies that give innovation top priority are more likely to be long-term successful, change with the times, and seize new prospects.

From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the 12 technological imperatives that will shape the next 30 years and transform our lives. Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture.

The way we currently do business is undermining the environment, our mental health, and our future as a species. Gadfly has a dream: to change the world, together. We have worked as board-level advisors to some of the biggest companies in the world, and are offering our experience of leading large scale change, so that you can create change in your own spheres of influence.

Our future is written by hopes, fears, dreams, expectations, and decisions made about life. In the same way, organizations have futures written by history, circumstances, culture, aspirations, successes, and failures. These already-written futures determine and shape the level of performance that's possible for individuals and organizations. Authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan crack the code on rewriting the future for people and organizations, elevating performance to unprecedented levels.

With emerging technology transforming customer expectations, it’s more important than ever to keep a laser focus on the experience companies provide their customers. In The Customer of the Future, customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines 10 easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with effective strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective.

Traditional talent processes served the purposes of the last decade, the last millennium even. But we have reached a point where people practices must become more human-centric, intelligent, more robust in their skills and capability matching, more learning and growth-oriented, more enabling, more rigorous in their transparency and inclusivity and better able to deliver the talent optimization that organizations will need in the coming decade. Organizations who are fair, transparent, inclusive, respectful of their people are the ones who will thrive into the future.