Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future

by Margaret Heffernan

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982112639
Publisher:	Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, chief executive, and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland, and educated at Cambridge University. She worked for the BBC and developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors, and The Learning Company. She has served as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation, and iCAST Corporation. The author of Beyond Measure, Willful Blindness, and A Bigger Prize, among others, she blogs for HuffPost, CBS Moneywatch, and Inc.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part I Prediction Addiction

Chapter 1 False Profits 3

Chapter 2 Does History Repeat Itself? 27

Chapter 3 Flukes and Mutations 45

Part II What Would You Do If You Were Free?

Chapter 4 No Available Datasets 81

Chapter 5 Go Fast, Go Far 115

Chapter 6 Think Like an Artist 139

Chapter 7 Cathedrals 163

Part III Life Happens

Chapter 8 Simple, Not Easy 193

Chapter 9 Who Wants to Live Forever? 223

Chapter 10 Be Prepared 245

Acknowledgments 267

Notes 271

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

06/01/2020

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 Gaudí’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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Heffernan is admired for books that question the received wisdom of how management works; she is a business guru who brings the stern discipline of good sense to the business book genre. In this book she turns her attention to a topic that absorbs most business leaders—and the rest of us too: how to think about what the future holds. . . . Wise and appealingly human." —Tim Harford, Financial Times

"As an entrepreneur and CEO turned thought leader and TED speaker, Margaret has a gift for both shaping and anticipating trends. In this powerful book, she challenges the common assumption that history repeats itself and teaches us how we can prepare for—and adapt to—the unexpected." —Adam Grant, bestselling author of Originals

“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.” —Publishers Weekly

"By the turn of the century, innovations such as computing and the internet were turbocharging the forecasting business to an extraordinary degree, as Margaret Heffernan notes in her excellent (and very timely) new book Uncharted. . . . As Heffernan stresses, while the forecasting business has made its 'experts' very rich, it is also based on a fallacy: the idea that the future can be neatly extrapolated from the past. Moreover, the apparent success of some pundits in predicting events (such as the 2008 crash) makes them so overconfident that they get locked into particularly rigid models." —Gillian Tett, Financial Times

“An original and beautifully written look into how the events that have the most profound effect on humanity cannot be predicted. . . . From beginning to end, this is a wonderful and timely book that eloquently describes the challenges we face in our time and the skills we need to develop to thrive in the future.” —QRCA Views

PRAISE FOR WILLFUL BLINDNESS:

"A polemic against the dangers of docility and 'groupthink' in every walk of life." —Financial Times, Books of the Year

"Writing in clear, flowing prose, Heffernan draws on psychological and neurological studies and interviews with executives, whistleblowers and white-collar criminals." —The New York Times

"Entertaining and compellingly argued." —Sunday Times

"An engaging read, packed with cautionary tales . . . Heffernan shows why we close our eyes to facts that threaten our families, our livelihood, and our self-image—and, even better, she points the way out of the darkness." —Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive and When

"A tour de force of brilliant insights." —Philip Zimbardo, author of The Time Paradox

From the Publisher

Entrepreneur, author, and management professor Margaret Heffernan is a naturally confident speaker, but her assertive delivery never upstages the power and flow of her thinking. Her crowd-pleasing performance is perfect for the kind of clever observations and intellectual sound bites that populate this guide to the unpredictable future. Yet the audio goes well beyond entertainment because, with her solid background in management science, it offers a highly useful guide to where civilization might be headed. Get ready, she says, for a world far more unpredictable than the experts want us to believe. Citing past economic predictions that have repeatedly been wrong, she promotes the skepticism, tolerance for ambiguity, and can-do spirit you’ll need to keep your sanity in the unstable times ahead. T.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Entrepreneur, author, and management professor Margaret Heffernan is a naturally confident speaker, but her assertive delivery never upstages the power and flow of her thinking. Her crowd-pleasing performance is perfect for the kind of clever observations and intellectual sound bites that populate this guide to the unpredictable future. Yet the audio goes well beyond entertainment because, with her solid background in management science, it offers a highly useful guide to where civilization might be headed. Get ready, she says, for a world far more unpredictable than the experts want us to believe. Citing past economic predictions that have repeatedly been wrong, she promotes the skepticism, tolerance for ambiguity, and can-do spirit you’ll need to keep your sanity in the unstable times ahead. T.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile