Daniel Burrus

Change in the modern world seems to be happening faster each year. We have had Moore’s Law which predicted the rate of change in computing power and speed, and with the increase in processing power in smartphones, the modern office is in your pocket now. Emails fire at you all hours of the day, instant messaging software is constantly chirping and your notifications from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are getting silly. In amongst all these distractions, there are big changes happening in the world and if you miss them as a business then you are definitely going to be up the creek without a paddle.

In The Anticipatory Organization, Daniel Burrus teaches us to separate what he calls Hard Trends, things that are almost certainly going to happen and cannot avoid, such as regulation technological advancement, climate change, from Soft Trends, which are events that might happen but on the other hand might not. Understanding the difference between them and comprehending the impact on your business is critical. It enables you to expect the unexpected and turn change into a business advantage. There are a two other concepts that he introduces, one of which is quite revolutionary, which is to actually skip a problem, and come back to it at a point later in time; mad as it may sound, it often means that the problem that seemed huge and urgent at the time when looked at later is much less of an issue. The other concept is Futureview; as Burrus' states, you cannot shape your future whilst still looking at your past achievements, instead you need to be looking at technologies and products that disrupt and innovate to be able to make your business a success tomorrow and beyond.

Overall an interesting book on a new way of looking at ways of changing businesses by properly analysing the trends going on in the world and exploiting the gaps that other businesses have missed.… (mais)

Handed out at a NYC Cash Management conference for treasury professionals, The Anticipatory Organization was my subway reading for a week. The book, about anticipating disruption in a time of exponential technological and business change, rather than be waylaid by it, lays out a framework, a trademarked system known as the Anticipatory Organization (AO) model. The book is the static part to whet an organization's appetite. A web-based inter-active program is soft sold in the final chapter. Without going into too much detail AO involves concepts known as Hard and Soft Trends; Laws of Opposites; Future, Present, and Past Mindsets; etc. As someone who is charged in my organization with forward thinking, automation, business process improvement with an eye to new technologies, these pages were particularly relevant. Much of what Burrus writes makes sense, one might argue even obvious. But the fates of companies such as Blackberry, Kodak, Dell, and others which failed to see, plan for, and take advantage of disruption (he argues they had a Past or at best Present Mindset) suggest that these lessons have not always been learned well or implemented by business leaders. Nevertheless, there is something quite fluffy about this book, and one might argue many business books with "proven" techniques. It felt like the reading equivalent of eating cotton candy. I was digesting something but what it was seemed to melt away almost immediately. One concept is quickly introduced, perhaps illustrated with a brief and not particularly detailed example, and then he moves on to the next concept. It's easy to forget what some of his pithy, patented techniques mean, even a few pages on. I found myself drawing a blank at one point when he was referring to The Law of Opposites. Perhaps that is why he includes Appendix B, a Definition of Principles and Key Terms. There is also quite a lot of repetition. This is a quick and fast book. But honestly, since so much of what he says is repetitive, what he has to say could have been said in half as many pages. The infomercial plug for www.AnticipatoryOrganization.com at the end is gratuitous. But Burrus is, if nothing else, an entrepreneur. So give the man his due. The book can add some value to anyone who wants to have greater control over their career and harness, not be overwhelmed by, our kinetically transforming world.… (mais)