The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

by Joshua Cooper Ramo Narrated by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

Winner of the getAbstract 17th International Book Award

A McKinsey Top Recommended CEO Summer Read

One of Inc.'s Top Business Books of 2016

From the author of the international bestseller THE AGE OF THE UNTHINKABLE comes a powerful new story of revolution and riches in a connected age.

Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances. What if they were all connected? What if you could understand why? The Seventh Sense examines the historic force now shaking our world--and explains how our leaders, our businesses, and each of us can master it.

All around us now we are surrounded by events that are difficult to understand. But every day, new figures and forces emerge that seem to have mastered this tumultuous age. Sometimes these are the leaders of the most earthshaking companies of our time, accumulating billion-dollar fortunes. Or they are successful investors or our best generals. Other times, however, quick success is going to terrorists, rebels, and figures intent on chaos. What if we could know the secret of those who can make sense of this age? What if we could apply it to the questions that worry us most?

In this groundbreaking book, Joshua Cooper Ramo, author of the international bestseller The Age of the Unthinkable, introduces a powerful way of seeing the world. The Seventh Sense is the story of what all of today's successful figures see and feel--forces that are invisible to most of us but explain everything from explosive technological change to uneasy political ripples. The secret to power now is understanding our new age of networks--not merely the Internet but also networks of trade and DNA and finance. Based on his years of advising generals, CEOs, and politicians, Ramo takes us into the opaque heart of our world's rapidly connected systems and teaches us what the victors of this age know--and what the losers are not yet seeing.

But The Seventh Sense won't merely change the way you see the world. It will also give you the power to change it.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for The Seventh Sense

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

Winner of the getAbstract 17th International Book Award

"A fascinating guide to the way the world is changing."—Malcolm Gladwell, author of David and Goliath

"Joshua Cooper Ramo has a unique intelligence and a unique voice, which illuminate this fascinating book. The central new reality of the world we live in today is connectivity. People, computers, other machines, almost everything is getting linked and these new networks are spewing oceans of information. How should we navigate this brave new world? Ramo writes with ease and authority about the technology, history , and foreign policy of this power shift, giving us an essential guide for the future."—Fareed Zakaria, author of In Defense of a Liberal Education

"This book paints an accurate and timely picture of the world we live in and how it is changing."—Mareo McCracken, Inc.

"In this hyper networked world remade fresh every day, with new perils and new opportunities, there is one book to be sure to read: Joshua Ramo's new book, a masterpiece, The Seventh Sense. To understand the tsunami of the networked age, you need history, biography, tech, philosophy, politics—and you want a book that has a depth beyond whatever else you could be streaming, podcasting, or wiki-ing. This is that book."—Reid Hoffman, Chairman/Founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock

"Joshua Cooper Ramo has written a book that combines historic sweep and incisive detail. A great book, and a useful one. The Seventh Sense is a concept every businessman, diplomat, or student should aspire to master — a powerful idea, backed by stories and figures that will be impossible to forget."—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators

"If this book were read and understood by our next president, America would be a stronger country and the president would have an agenda for global leadership. Ramo's fascinating work serves a critical public purpose."—Bill Bradley

"Provocative reading... [Ramo] offers plenty of interesting scenarios for such things as global power shifts, AI-enabled weapons systems, and the like.... For policy wonks with an eye toward the middle term, Ramo provides a good effort to make sense of it all."—Kirkus Reviews

"The Seventh Sense ultimately isn't just about witnessing the power of human connections, but also harnessing that power to change the world. Highly recommended."—Midwest Book Review

"This book is the best yet on reviewing the ever more tightly woven, connected, pervasive networks - accelerating due to their interactivity - that now dominate our globalized human societies.... Ramo surveys this new world of interconnected networks in penetrating detail with deep knowledge of current global geopolitics and human history."—Hazel Henderson, Seeking Alpha

JULY 2016 - AudioFile

The author’s easy authority about these transformative issues is as evident in his performance as it is in his prescient insights regarding how networks and machine intelligence will upend the world. The low-key seriousness in his reading works well with his arresting message: Leaders will need radical sensitivity—a seventh sense—to deal with the intelligent networks of our age, networks that are “gifted with an exactness of vision” that is far more powerful than the strategies international players currently use to gain dominance in commercial, political, and social arenas. He is utterly convincing in asserting that global conflicts in the future will not be about trade, violent extremism, or environmental threats. These conflicts will involve fighting for control of how every institution and individual is connected to the rest of the world. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-05-02
Salutary futuristic reading for those still inclined to "use a mechanical way of thinking in an age of complexity."Has there ever been an age without complexity and confusion? Probably not. However, as Kissinger Associates CEO Ramo (The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It, 2009, etc.) writes, this is a time of disruption that lends itself to "seventh sense" thinking—in less trendy terms, the ability to discern how things connect to other things in nodes and networks, "to look at any object and see the way in which it is changed by connection." These networks can be benign; they can be useful, as in digitized library connections; and they can be harmful, in part owing to the "hyperdense concentrations of power" that are produced by networks, introducing opportunities for chaos and complexity into situations that are already fraught with them. Ramo quotes approvingly from the philosopher Paul Virilio in this regard: "When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck." Shipwrecks are all around us, as witness the network that is the Islamic State group, something that old-school thinking might imagine can be fought by air forces and bunker-buster bombs but that the Seventh Sensible would know requires different tools for dismantling. Ramo is sometimes vague but sometimes profound in a postmodern way that's not the usual stuff of Washington think tanks: we have been busy "murdering the exotic," he writes, with our first-world technologies and high-speed Internet connections, so we shouldn't be surprised when "from time to time, the exotic shows up and murders us right back." It all makes for provocative reading, and if the author is light on specifics, he offers plenty of interesting scenarios for such things as global power shifts, AI-enabled weapons systems, and the like. Plus ça change? No, the more it changes, the weirder the world gets. For policy wonks with an eye toward the middle term, Ramo provides a good effort to make sense of it all.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170207459
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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