Communicating with the Future: How Re-engineering Intentions Will Alter the Master Code of Our Future
A business that wants to survive and thrive must do more than simply plan for the future, says Thomas Frey, the DaVinci Institute’s executive director and senior futurist. He advises future-wary businesses everywhere to take personal ownership stakes in creating the future.
Trends do not simply appear out of nowhere, he writes in Communicating with the Future: Trends are made. The future will belong to leaders who create compelling visions that attract others to such a degree that they overcome change-resistance within the dominant human socioeconomic systems.
Frey encourages business leaders to publish their own visions for the future. They must do so, however, in light of the changing communications medium, characterized by the declining roles of television and print media and by increased interactivity and “particalization” of markets.
They must also be mindful of the coming disappearance of the hiring and firing system that we have known for the last century. In the future, most work will be project-based, not permanent and full time, and the bulk of professionals will be free agents who move from office to office as needed. A particularly enterprising few will strap on recording gear and earn a steady living as “terabyters,” paid by companies to gather information about their day-to-day living environments [see Frey’s article “The Coming of the Terabyters: Lifelogging for a Living” in the January-February 2011 issue of THE FUTURIST].
No matter what their niche or line of work, the professionals who adapt to the project-based work paradigm will be an influential class—the “futurati.” Companies will revere them as not merely temporary workers, but as specialists who are integral to any business’s success.
Communicating with the Future is a punchy, to-the-point primer on how market pressures today are shaping a radically new business climate. Frey provides a cogent picture of what that yet-to-be-seen model may look like; forward-thinking entrepreneurs in any industry would do well to check it out.
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