Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible
Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible by Daniel Burrus with John David Mann. Harper Business. 2011. 268 pages. $27.95.
We’ve all had moments of “flash foresight”—i.e., intuitive grasps of what is to come—says executive consultant John David Mann in Flash Foresight. The challenge, he adds, is to know when to act on it; sometimes this foresight is counterintuitive and requires doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
You exercise flash foresight when you look to the future and try to discern what you already know. Then, once you’ve established your certainties, you attempt to fill in the uncertainties. There is much about the future that we can predict in advance, Burrus says.
He described real-life examples of people who exercised flash foresight to solve real problems. Apple Computers’ leadership used it to resurge from market failure to market domination. The phone company Mobile Telephone Networks used it to create burgeoning cell-phone markets throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. And Burrus himself used it in the early 1980s to accurately predict the digital revolution, the explosive growth of fiber-optics cable networks, and the sequencing of the human genetic code by the year 2000.
He also points out examples of people who failed to use it. They include the heads of General Motors, who had a hugely successful company in the mid-twentieth century but faced collapse and federal takeover collapse in 2008.
Flash Foresight presents helpful case studies in how decision makers in any industry can more effectively shed light on their futures.
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