Friday 7 November 2008

Future Savvy

Adam Gordon

ISBN 978-0-8144-0912-1

We live in an age of numbers. It is often heard of management that ‘if we can’t measure it, we can’t control it’, and so we attempt to measure everything. Whilst this is appropriate for events that have happened in the past, it presents something of a problem for events that have yet to happen – future events. We do, however, wish to control our future, which means that parallel to the age of numbers is an age of forecasts and predictions. The promise of the book is that it will help us in “identifying trends to make better decisions, manage uncertainty, and profit from change”.

It is this practical aspect of the book that would recommend it to a wide readership. Those who specialise in areas other than a study of the future would be commended to come to grips with the template for forecast filtering and to apply it to their areas. More general students could well benefit from the text as a means to internalise a way to come to grips with future forecasts. And the text could be recommended to more seasoned futurists as a quick checklist of the questions that we ought to be asking about our work.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading the book. It was a straightforward read that meant that I could cover the issues without too much difficulty and the material was presented in a way that made it readily absorbable. The book covers an important area that is often neglected, and it is for this reason that I would recommend it.

READ the full review.

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