Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence

CHAPTER 1

Inevitable Surprises

In a world of surprises, what can we count on?

As I write this, in early 2003, the question has never seemed so relevant. Some have lost their life savings in the economic turmoil of the last few years. Others have seen promising jobs and businesses abruptly disappear. A few of us have lost family members or friends in terrorist attacks. Many of us took for granted the idea that the United States, as the most powerful nation in the world, was virtually unassailable by outsiders. Nineteen madmen shattered that illusion on a September morning in 2001. Has anyone seriously believed, since then, that New York, Washington, or other American cities will never be in danger again?

Leaders of organizations, from corporations to government agencies to nonprofits to unions, have seen our financial and market assumptions overturned. High-growth new media enterprises that were about to reshape the worlds of communication and retail suddenly went bankrupt. Time Warner and AT & T may well suffer similar fates to Enron and WorldCom. Latin America's economy abruptly entered freefall last year. Fourteen million African children have been orphaned by AIDS, a disease that nobody knew existed thirty years ago. The global middle class is burgeoning in, of all places, the immense socialist societies of China and India.

You may be reading this book a year hence, or five years, or perhaps more, when these specific stories will seem like ancient history. Yet the fundamental point remains: You, too, live in a world of surprises. For surprises are the norm. There will be many more moments to come when the assumptions you've lived by sudden fall away-inflicting that same queasy feeling you get when an elevator drops a little too suddenly, when an airplane hits an air pocket, or when a roller coaster moves past the top of the curve and lurches into its descent. There will also be beneficial surprises to come-when impossible, unthinkable opportunities and technologies suddenly become real, for you (or someone else) to cultivate, develop, and use.

Historically, upheaval is not a new condition. To be sure, there have been some relatively surprise-free centuries in human history; life for most people in medieval Europe was much the same as it had been for their parents. But since the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, complexity and turbulence in the world at large have been facts of life, looming larger and larger in people's concerns until today there is hardly anyone unaffected by them.

At the same time most of us still feel emotionally that things should be stable and certain; that once we're over the next hump of crisis, life will naturally return to tranquil normalcy. And there are things we don't want to see strapped into a roller coaster: Our country's security. Our companies and jobs. Our retirement accounts.

Is there a better way to live with this tension than just to hang on for the roller-coaster ride and react to every new surprise thrust at you? Yes, there is. There are still certainties-still facts and factors that we can rely on and even take for granted. For example, the quality of the natural environment-of air, water, and land use-in the industrialized world will significantly improve over the next thirty years. The use of "soft power" (moral suasion) will be more and more influential in diplomatic and military arenas, even as "hard power" (weapons and military technology) grows more prominent in the American federal budget. And the economy will revive: not in the same bubbling, effervescent form as it took in the late 1990s, but in a form that makes general prosperity seem once again accessible.

There are many things we can rely on, but three of them are most critical to keep in mind in any turbulent environment.

First: There will be more surprises.

Second: We will be able to deal with them.

Third: We can anticipate many of them. In fact, we can make some pretty good assumptions about how most of them will play out.

We can't know the consequences in advance, or how they will affect us, but we know many of the surprises to come. Even the most devastating surprises-like terrorist attacks and economic collapses-are often predictable because they have their roots in the driving forces at work today. On September 11, 2001, we saw the tragic consequences of ignoring those predictions. The terrorist attack that day was perhaps the most forecast event in history. A half dozen reputable commissions over the last twenty years had suggested that an incident very much like this might occur. Many predictions had singled out the World Trade Center (in part because it had been attacked once before), mentioned the use of airplanes as weapons, or specifically referred to Osama bin Laden. No one knew when the event would happen-it might be next week, it might be two years from now-but the details were foreseen. Yet most people, in both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, focused their attention elsewhere prior to September 11: on domestic priorities, campaign priorities, and other military arenas including missile defense.

A few people in responsible positions did look ahead. For example, following the surprising end of the Cold War, the President and the Congress created a commission chaired by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, to advise it on a new fundamental national security strategy. I led the scenario team for the Hart-Rudman Commission. Our report, released a few months after George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2000, warned that terrorist incidents represented the greatest threat to the United States. In one scenario we anticipated terrorists destroying the World Trade Center by crashing airliners into it. Our most urgent recommendation was that the U.S. needed new levels of capability in homeland defense.

The Commission's work, and other similar efforts by various critical agencies, did not prevent the attacks, but they did contribute to the decisive speed and competence with which the U.S. responded, especially in the first few months.

In the coming decades we face many more inevitable surprises: major discontinuities in the economic, political, and social spheres of our world, each one changing the "rules of the game" as it is played today. If anything, there will be more, not fewer, surprises in the future, and they will all be interconnected. Together, they will lead us into a world, ten to fifteen years hence, that is fundamentally different from the one we know today. Understanding these inevitable surprises in our future is critical for the decisions we have to make today-whether we are captains of industry, leaders of nations, or simply individuals who care about the future of our families and communities. We may not be able to prevent catastrophe (although sometimes we can), but we can certainly increase our ability to respond, and our ability to see opportunities that we would otherwise miss.

The global financial networks provide an ongoing example of this. Errors and panics continue to occur, but the financial world learns from these disasters. The 1929 financial crisis led to ten years of global depression; the 1987 financial crisis, which was arguably a greater calamity judged just from the lost market capitalization, led into a completely different outcome-a mild recession and then a boom. One reason for the difference: the financial institutions and regulators learned something from 1929. They are still learning. They will make many mistakes in the future, but they will not permit precisely the same kinds of abuses of research and accounting that led to the stock market crisis of 2000-2001.

The Nature of Predetermined Elements

How do I know all this? Because I have one of the most interesting jobs in the world. I lead Global Business Network (GBN), the world's preeminent research and consulting firm focused on scenario planning. I am also a venture capitalist-a partner at Alta Partners, one of the oldest and largest venture-capital funds. I am also occasionally invited by filmmakers to help them develop the details and plot lines of their films about the future-most recently with Steven Spielberg in the feature film Minority Report, which was released in 2001 and set in the year 2050.

With my GBN hat on I advise major corporations and leading governments on long-term decisions. I help them look ahead and figure out today's actions based on long-term perceptions and insights. I help them see the big surprises, and the driving forces that are shaping the potential futures that may lie ahead. I help them see what is inevitable and where the fundamental uncertainties lie. Then, as a venture capitalist, I place large bets on the future, helping to create the potential tomorrow that I would like to see emerge. Finally, in my motion picture advisory role, I help imagine the consequences of these large-scale trends for the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

In all three roles I have become increasingly aware of the critical forces that will affect the world, in ways that most decision-makers do not automatically expect. These forces are what scenario planners call "predetermined elements": forces that we can anticipate with certainty, because we already see their early stages in the world today. We know they are inevitable because they have already begun to take place. They are also going to surprise us because, while the basic events are virtually predetermined, the timing, results, and consequences are not. We do not know exactly how these events will play out, or precisely when they will occur. But we can anticipate the range of possible results, and the ways in which the rules of the game may change thereafter.

Scenario-planning exercises, such as the kind I conduct at Global Business Network, often include detailed examination of these kinds of "predetermined elements." Indeed, one of the great innovators of scenario practice, Pierre Wack, used to make them the linchpins of his scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1970s and early 1980s. He knew, after intensive study and thought, that inevitable surprises were coming down the pike, and that Shell's success in a turbulent marketplace depended on the company's ability to pay attention to them in advance.

Pierre used to compare his work to the prediction of floods on the Ganges River in India. "From source to mouth," he would say, "the Ganges is an extraordinary river, some fifteen hundred miles long. If you notice extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains at the upper part of the basin, you can anticipate with certainty that within two days something extraordinary is going to happen at Rishikesh, at the foothills of the Himalayas." Three days later, he would add, one could expect a flood at Allahabad, which is southeast of Delhi; five days after that, one could expect a flood in Benares, at the river's delta. "Now, the people down here in Benares don't know that this flood is on its way," he would conclude, "but I do. Because I've been at the spring where it comes from. I've seen it! This is not fortune-telling. This is not crystal-ball gazing. This is merely describing future implications of something that has already happened."1

The same is true for the inevitable surprises in this book. Chapter 3, for example, describes the waves of population migration that are bound to change societies throughout the world in the next two decades. In the United States, English-speaking descendants of Western Europeans will find their majority yet more reduced-which means Americans laws, institutions, and culture is about to undergo a sea change. European leaders will struggle with their own influxes of refugees and Islamic immigrants for years, if not for decades; and China may well face similar issues in Asia. To write this is not fortune-telling; the factors which make these waves predetermined have been visible for years. We've seen them! To be sure, the outcome of those migrations is not certain; but the success of our businesses, our governments, and perhaps even our life choices depends on being able to distinguish the aspects that are certain, and to act accordingly-even if it feels uncomfortable to do so.

This idea for this book was conceived in mid-2001, when I was contacted by Robert Rubin, the former secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton, and now vice chairman of Citicorp. "We keep getting surprised by big things," he said, "whether it's debt crises in Brazil and Southeast Asia, or busts in the stock market. I'm gathering my advisory board, and my senior management together for a couple of days. Tell us what the big surprises are going to be. We want to avoid them."

At first I was wary. The problem with predicting the future, as every prognosticator knows, is that one's mistakes are remarkably visible in hindsight. But as I researched the possible trends and forces that might affect the future of Citicorp, I realized that many of them were not only plausibly likely to take place, but were predetermined to do so. When I went to deliver the talk, I was amazed to discover that they already had a sense of most of what I had to tell them! Each of them knew some of the facts I had to offer. None of them had put it all together-either separately or in groups-to make sense of the whole story. And thus they kept on getting surprised. But as I spoke, each kept nodding yes, as if to say, "Of course."

There was a lot that Citicorp could learn about the surprises of the future. The facts were not the issue; like most people in responsible positions in significant businesses, they were aware of the facts. But they could not always put them together to see their consequences. And the same is true for the rest of us.

Denial and Defensiveness

If the future is so predictable, why do so many businesses and organizations have difficulty putting the facts together? One would think that many people would be well practiced by now, for discontinuities have been a regular fact of life since at least the mid-1960s. (Consider: the Kennedy assassinations, the oil shortages of the 1970s, "stagflation," the end of the Cold War, the shifts in medical and communications technology, and the impact of climate change, just for starters.) Intellectually, it's easy to recognize that some of our working assumptions have been wrong, that we're on a roller coaster of events that puts our organizations and our livelihoods at risk, and that we have to be prepared. But doing something about it is another matter entirely. When an inevitable surprise confronts us, there are two different types of natural reactions. Both of them can lead to poor decision making.

The first is denial-the refusal to believe that the inevitabilities exist. This was one of the key reasons, of course, why the U.S. government was unprepared for the attacks on September 11, 2001. Enough people in positions of authority simply refused to believe the need was great and urgent enough to justify rethinking the structure of our national security system. When in denial about an inevitability, people tend to blithely act as if it didn't exist, and as if there were no need to break from routine and prepare for it. The losses that result can be immense.

Similarly, one can have a great deal of sympathy for the employees of Enron who saw their stock portfolios and pension funds collapse in late 2001. It was beyond their control to try to salvage their pensions, and even the cautious among them were probably devastated. But one might also recall that on the way up, when the stock price was rising because of false profit reports, these people were enjoying it, denying that there was a potential for a crash, and in many cases reminding others less fortunate around them of their own good fortunes. A little foresight and reflection ought to have suggested that a price that goes up so quickly can come down just as quickly, and that-whether or not Enron's management supported it-perhaps they ought to diversify their holdings. To the extent they thought, Nothing bad can happen to this company because we're growing so fast, they were deceiving themselves. (Indeed, many Enron employees did take note of danger signals and diversified in time, thus weathering what would become a very difficult storm.)

Denial is perhaps the most dangerous response one can make when evidence of an inevitable surprise presents itself. Today, many political leaders are in denial about several of the surprises described in this book: global climate change, the inevitability of new diseases, and the dangerous "hot spots" of Mexico, the Caspian Sea, and Saudi Arabia. In Europe, denial of the realities of migration may tear the continent apart.

The second natural reaction to any turbulent crisis is defensiveness. This is a kind of opposite to denial. People take the inevitable surprise so seriously that they freeze; in their minds there is no viable way to act except to find a safe place, hunker down, and wait for it to all blow over. They reduce their investments and activities, focus on their immediate and narrow self-interest, and wait for another stretch of relative calm to set in before they are ready to take risks again. If they are corporate leaders, they cut costs and innovation. If they are political leaders, they look for short-term gains.

On a visceral level this defensive response makes sense. Emotionally, you feel much less in control of your destiny than you thought you were. (Your actual level of control is the same as it always has been, but it doesn't feel the same.) Maybe you can't control some external forces, you reason, but you can at least minimize your exposure to them.

Unfortunately, this strategy also tends to produce poor results. You are making one of the riskiest moves of all: to do nothing in the face of uncertainty. For example: If you lost money in the bursting of 2000's stock market bubble, it's natural to think: I won't invest in corporate stocks ever again, because they can't ever be trusted. But not all company leaders are as shortsighted (or exploitive) as those of WorldCom and Enron were. The bursting of a bubble is not a signal to stop investing in all companies-or even in technology companies, trading companies, or "new-economy" companies. It does mean that your criteria for investment need to be tougher. Your homework and due diligence need to be more sound. Rather than avoid taking risks, you need to be smarter about your risks.

While being emotionally understandable, both denial and defensiveness are fundamentally irresponsible, especially on the part of corporate leaders. Unintentionally, they foster an attitude of victimization throughout the organization: "There was nothing we could have done about our poor performance. We were overwhelmed by events." The airline industry has been a prime example of this: "There was a terrorist attack and demand for long-distance travel dropped, so we couldn't make our profit targets." Well, if you're in the airline business and you don't have a contingency plan for expanded terrorist activity, then you're probably going to suffer sooner or later anyway.

This book is for people who want to get past denial and defensiveness, to be the masters of their own fate in a world full of surprises. The first step in making that transition is to pay attention to the inevitable surprises of the future, and to develop strategies for dealing with them.

Different aspects of the environment demand different strategies. We know about some of the surprises in this book, for example, precisely because they have been a long time coming. They move in slow, steady ways; they can be seen coming for decades. The population slowdown falls into this category; so does the continued evolution of the computer and the impending global climate change. There is a long time to prepare for them-which is good, because they will require a long time of preparation.

Other surprises are both enormous in their implications and enormously abrupt. Everything is different after they take place. The release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa was like that; many people inside the country were poised for apartheid controls to grow more strict. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union was another. The fall of the Japanese banking system was a third; in the 1980s we were all prepared for "Japan, Inc." to virtually dominate the United States. Other examples are the takeoff of the Internet, the Asian financial crisis, the stock market boom and bust, and, of course, the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Such system-changing, disruptive events are far more common than most people imagine. We are getting at least one per year on a global level these days. And yet most businesspeople behave as if they live in a continuous environment, as if their business plans and projections are going to be relatively linear. In a world in which there are regularly occurring upheavals, which will fundamentally change many basic assumptions about the way the world works, the most effective strategy is conscious resilience: balancing short-term reactions with long-term vision, and putting in place the necessary preparations so that you can rapidly shift direction if need be. IBM in the 1990s provided a good example of exactly this kind of navigation. For decades the company had a basic business model: leasing mainframes and providing ongoing support. They developed the IBM PC, the best-selling personal computer of the early 1980s, but never saw that as central to their business. It was peripheral to the mainframe structure that they had developed for their customers.

Then everything changed. Apple introduced more user-friendly computers that ate into their market share. They lost the battle with Microsoft for control over the personal-computer operating system. Their customers lost interest in the IBM mainframe and client-server structure as computers became cheap and powerful enough to operate in a more networked, interdependent fashion. And they began to watch the rest of the computer business move out from proprietary systems onto the World Wide Web and the Internet. All they had left was a large amount of cash, and a solid reputation-admittedly two enormous assets, but only if they deployed them.

They moved rapidly in the early 1990s to change their business model. IBM suddenly became the world leader in providing outsourced computer services, a field that EDS and Perot Systems had dominated in the 1980s. To accomplish this IBM had to bypass their world-renowned computer sales force, and essentially invent a consulting business from the ground up. The consulting business then drove their services business, which went from zero to $30 billion in revenues in less than a decade. This allowed them to shift their manufacturing orientation-to focus on the hardware needed for the services they provided. Few companies would have been able to make that move so quickly.

One reason that IBM could move so quickly is that they were attuned to all aspects of the computer business. Though the personal computer had been a sideline for the company, their experience with it gave them a gut feel about the changing marketplace and business environment that no other computer mainframe company had. Xerox, for instance, which was also a market leader in the 1970s, was blindsided and almost bankrupted by its failure to act in the 1990s. They knew about the changes that were occurring in the marketplace; in fact, in 1995, GBN had conducted a scenario exercise with their senior management, in which one of the scenarios was called "The Death of Xerox." When we presented it to them, they said, "We would never do any of those things you have us doing." Then, over the next few years, they systematically made every move we had warned them against making in that scenario. Today Xerox is a much smaller printer and copier company.

There is a twofold process embedded in the information in this book. First, it seeks to understand the kinds of inevitable surprises that lie ahead of us, particularly in the next twenty-five years. That is the period of time in which most of the enterprises starting up today will come to fruition, and in which most of the established corporations (and governments) will have to reinvent themselves. Second, it suggests the kinds of steps that would allow a company or organization to thrive, given the inevitable surprises awaiting us.

Sometimes you may be able to influence the outcome of a surprise. If it's a good thing, you can make more of it happen, and if it's a bad thing, you may be able to prevent it. Sometimes you may be able to take advantage of it, because you have developed relationships, products, financial resources, and information that put you in the right position when the time comes. Sometimes, if you see a big surprise coming and are convinced it will happen, you can act with confidence in the face of apparent risk that others judge to be high-but that you know is lower than it seems, because you've thought about and understand the surprises. And you can also make sure you have the resources to weather the storms that you see coming-particularly the financial strength that allows you to get through crises without shuttering parts of your business.

One common question is: Can you actually see these things coming? I'll let you judge for yourself, by exploring the "face validity" of the predictions in this book. This is not a scattershot exercise; all of the points in this book are carefully thought through, drawn from intensive research and scenario projects that I and others at Global Business Network have conducted, as well as on cutting-edge sources of information around the world. All of them are inevitable-that is, I have phrased and developed them to distinguish those that are certain to take place from those that are merely likely. Some of these issues will probably be familiar to you, but others will be new. Some of the issues that you think are most obvious, and not even worth repeating, will turn out to be the most critical ones for other readers. For instance, there is a story about the human population slowdown in this book, which is so familiar to demographers that it has become second nature to them. They think it is obvious; that everyone already knows about it. But when I get up to talk about it, I find I can't simply mention it in passing. People practically jump up to ask, "But what about the exploding population?" I always have to take the time to explain, "It isn't exploding anymore." They may have heard this casually somewhere, but they've never absorbed the meaning of it. And some of the specifics will probably be thoroughly unfamiliar. I'd guess that, for most readers, this includes the physical underpinnings of potential teleportation described in Chapter 7.

Underneath the specifics, between the lines on every page in this book, you will find a basic message about the future in general: The challenges facing civilization right now are immense-arguably more difficult than they have been during the lifetime of any living person. At the same time, because of advances in knowledge and technology, the human race has never been so capable. And since most of our challenges are caused, at least partly, by our own activity, this expanded capability is a double-edged sword.

I am hardly the first to make these points. Indeed, for the past thirty years, ever since the publication of Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock, they have become part of the conventional wisdom. And yet most of us, in our decision making, are still not acting as if we truly believe them. The greatest challenge before us-on the personal, organizational, and societal levels-is to master our own accelerating power, without being swept away by it.

This does not necessarily mean taking hurried dramatic action. The dot-com bubble has shown the downside of rapid movement. The trick in navigating any set of rapids is being well prepared for all types of movement, and aware of the ways in which movement itself is changing. That's not an easy task, for rapids change all the time. The bottom of the river may only shift slowly, but the water level changes with the season and the weather. The rapids in the late spring can be a raging torrent of white water, while in the late autumn they can vanish as the water level drops. Rafting in the spring requires great skill and courage. The thrills are intense but the risks of falling out and being swept away by the current are great. Rafting in the autumn requires persistence in a slowly meandering river. The risk is running aground. The ride may seem less thrilling, and the water stagnant; but there is the steady satisfaction of endurance and balance. Navigating the future means being prepared to act in any season, and to shift from the mindset of one season to another as the environment changes. It means learning to recognize the rhythms of change before us, to avoid denial about them, and to practice our responses to them before they are upon us.

If you feel overwhelmed by the potential of surprises, your view of the future will be dark. You will continually expect to be hit by one unanticipated crisis after another, and your expectations will be met. On the other hand, you can approach the future with a sense of lighthearted enthusiasm-thoughtful, but eager to see what is coming next.

More than twenty years ago I was spending a Saturday afternoon at the Tassajara Zen Center not far from Monterey, California. It was a gorgeous day, and several of us were making our way down a slope clustered with pools, waterfalls, and rocks. The surfaces were very slippery, and most of us moved gingerly from one rock to the next, sliding along them, sitting on our bottoms when we felt it was too risky to stand. Suddenly a young woman came gliding down the hill. She looked like a dancer-slipping from one rock to another effortlessly and gracefully, perfectly balanced, never stopping for a moment. She had been walking those rocks so long, she felt comfortable on them. And it made the rest of us realize, suddenly, that the rocks were not such a dangerous environment at all. Not if you knew them.

The image of her movement has stayed with me, because I've seen people in many similar situations since then. We are terrified of movement because we don't know the environment very well. And then someone comes along who has thought about it, who is prepared, and who has a kind of uncanny grace and ability to move through peril. And even find time to be delighted by the challenge.

The Inevitable Surprises of 1978

This book looks ahead twenty-five years-the timespan of a generation of people. Before we get started, it's natural to look back twenty-five years and calibrate our judgment a bit. I had been in the scenario planning game for six years in 1978; working first at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute), and then at Royal Dutch/Shell's famous Group Planning Department (where Pierre Wack and other colleagues developed the scenario-planning method, still in use today, that I discussed in my book The Art of the Long View). What could we have seen in 1978? What were the inevitable surprises, visible then, that shaped our world of today?

• Oil as a commodity: Although we were still in the midst of the energy crisis, we knew that oil prices would have to fall. The industry was moving much too rapidly toward a multiple-sourced, flexible, trading-oriented model. And growing energy efficiency was driving down demand. OPEC would not be able to keep the price boosted artificially high forever. And, in fact, it didn't; the price crashed in 1986.

• The end of the Cold War. It was obvious to anyone who looked past the ideology of either communism or anticommunism that the Soviet Union could not much longer afford the expense of keeping its massive police-state empire intact. We didn't know exactly how it would end, but we knew it was unsustainable.

• Radical transformations in the world of communications. Fax machines, modems, electronic mail, satellite communications, cellular phones, and rudimentary precursors to the Internet already existed. The first wave of enthusiasm for personal computers had just begun, and some of the early applications (like computer-based spreadsheet programs) had appeared. It was clear that the results would be immense change in human communications capability and information gathering-as immense as the changes in mobility and infrastructure engendered by the automobile starting a hundred years before.

• Nuclear power would vanish as a meaningful energy option. The costs and risks were apparent.

*Japan would go into a boom and then a decline. The short-term protective benefits and ultimate systemic risks of their keiretsu-based financial structure (a structure of interlocking ownership and crony capitalism) were apparent.

*The U.S. would be hit by a big violent-crime wave in the 1980s. This was demographically driven; as the population of young men rose, so would crime.

*The U.S. Savings and Loan Crisis (or something like it). Deregulation in the U.S. and UK was a clearly unstoppable trend. Whenever there is massive deregulation of a previously highly regulated industry, there is a generally a crisis as the new institutions, without much memory of the old crises they engendered before regulation, try to test their limits.

*The growth of the Asian tigers and the pressure on China to change course after the death of Mao Tse-tung in 1975. It was not yet clear how China would move, because not much was known about the Chinese Communist party. But it would have to move somehow, because it, too, faced the same innate structural pressures that the Soviet Union did.

*The rise of radical political Islam. We were about to see the Iranian Revolution, which deposed the shah of Iran and created a Muslim state under the Ayatollah Khomeini.

If we look deeply enough, can we see the counterparts to these changes that are coming over the next quarter century?

—from Inevitable Surprises by Peter Schwartz, copyright © 2003 Peter Schwartz, published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.