Uncharted
How to Navigate the Future
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3.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Excellent (and very timely).” —Financial Times * “Smartly assembled case studies and insights.” —Publishers Weekly * A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Former CEO and popular TED speaker Margaret Heffernan offers powerful and practical tools so you can face the future with confidence and courage.
Most of us are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t provide that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. History doesn’t repeat itself and even genetics won’t tell you everything you want to know. Tomorrow remains uncharted territory, but Margaret Heffernan demonstrates how we can push aside uncertainty and forge ahead with agility.
Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.
Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The future is unpredictable, but wrestling productively with that unpredictability can help one grow and learn, argues entrepreneur Heffernan (Beyond Measure) in a wide-ranging outing with relevance both for businesspeople and general readers. Overreliance on apps, she proposes, has trained people to see the future as being knowable and to get frustrated when it inevitably isn't. However, this thinking has deeper roots, as Heffernan illustrates by recounting various failed attempts at prognostication throughout history, such as by "exuberant forecasters" of the stock markets, from the field's beginnings in the late 19th century to contemporary gurus like Jim Cramer. She also discusses how people can more productively deal with uncertainty, with examples from both business and other spheres of life. Heffernan looks at how Nokia rebounded from its disastrous loss of the smartphone market to Apple by "constructing and testing out a variety of scenarios," rather than trying to formulate a "single, perfect plan." Elsewhere, she describes how, over a century, the citizenry of Barcelona has sustained construction on architect Antoni Gaud 's extravagant, controversial, and still-unfinished cathedral, Sagrada Familia. The cumulative result of Heffernan's smartly assembled case studies and insights is a thought-provoking look at how readers can face down a sometimes frightening future with courage and grace.
