Author: Margaret Heffernan

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Comments: *In this book, Margaret Heffernan 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.

Gazing into the future is not fruitless, she argues, but it is unnerving and hard work. Lazy and fearful, we are far too quick to reach for overblown gurus, or misleading data or other useless guides. Even a good tool, such as GPS, can dull our senses.*

*Echoing the spirit of the last book reviewed on this site (Think for Yourself), Heffernan emphasises that the importance of forecasting is not whether forecasters get it right or not, but rather what they provoke in others. If they are good, then they provoke independent thinking in others.

“What matters most isn’t the predictions themselves but how we respond to them, and whether we respond to them at all,” she writes. “The forecast that stupefies isn’t helpful, but the one that provides fresh thinking can be.”*

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.