Beating the Global Odds E-Book

Paul A. Laudicina

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 298

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Answer to Global Overload Contending with the 24/7 news cycle and an endless barrage of choices and information has stymied leadership and decision-making strategies among those at the top. But we all know, this is not a just a problem for the elite. The broad-based reaction to this chaotic, unmanageable assault has been to retrench, and to focus on immediate, controllable decisions. In the process, we lose sight of the horizon. More dangerous still, is the shift we've seen from value creation to wealth creation, where information technology 1.0 has enabled a transaction-based society in which the "deal" is more important than the value it drives or the relationships it is based on. On our current path, the odds of a better future are slim. What we need is a new value proposition. Beating the Global Odds is the answer to the dangers of too much of a good thing. There's no going back, but there is the opportunity to set things right. In this book, Paul A. Laudicina, Managing Partner and Chairman of the Board of global consulting firm A.T. Kearney, provides a fast-paced and engaging tour of how we got to this point and what we can do about it. Drawing on examples from everything from world history and current media to anecdotes from his vast network of CEOs and the world's most innovative thinkers, Laudicina helps bring our world of seemingly fuzzy and disconnected pixels into sharp focus. The result is a compelling case for change and call to action--not only for global leaders but also for everyone who struggles with the question of how we can inspire and seize a better future... how we can beat the global odds.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Wiley Global Finance

Praise for Beating the Global Odds

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Coalface Credentials

A Quick Tour of This Book (and Why I’m Emphasizing the Renaissance of Scenario Planning)

What’s Different, What Never Changes, and a Tale of Two Cities

Chapter 1 Global Brain Freeze

More Has Become (Much) Less

Think Pinball, Not Roulette

Disorientation and Decision Analysis

Chapter 2 Fast and Fickle

Lumbering Giants

Watch Out for Those Tuning Out and Checking Out

Chapter 3 Rudderless World

Tea Party, Occupy Movements: Birds of a Feather?

Privatizing the Gains, Socializing the Losses

The Three Deficits

Inescapable Trilemma?

The Case for Values-Based Leadership

Chapter 4 Lighten the Load and Make It Sesame Street Simple

Sesame Street Simple

Cockpit Confusion

Chapter 5 Repair Your Social Fabric

The Three-Line Whip

The Pause Principle

All in the Family

Chapter 6 Don’t Wait for the Next Big Thing

Innovation: Slowing Down or Speeding Up? (I Think the Latter)

Knowledge Hatcheries

Offer a Prize

Fighting Complexity with Complexity

Coming Soon: Information Overload, Tamed and Ready to Serve You?

Chapter 7 Open the Aperture

Vary Your Information Diet

Be Wary of Conventional Wisdom and the Usual Experts

The Problem of Being Right Too Early

Tap into Remarkable People and Places

Chapter 8 Turning Pixels into a Clearer Picture

Powerfully Imagined and Rigorously Researched: The Structure of Scenario Thinking

Counterfactuals and Other Futures Thinking

Envisioning the Future to Inform the Present

The Coming Chinese Commonwealth?

Pulling It All Together and Getting Ready to Beat the Global Odds

Epilogue

Afterword

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Praise for Beating the Global Odds

“With Beating the Global Odds, Paul Laudicina offers not only a provocative look at the major challenges of our time, but also the very real opportunities we have to convert headwinds into advantageous tailwinds. As countries, companies and individuals seek to solve the calculus for sustainable growth, this brisk and compelling volume by one of the world’s foremost business strategists couldn’t have come at a better time.”

—Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company

“Diagnosing the causes of decline is relatively easy. Inventing and applying remedies is a great deal more difficult. By drawing on a huge diversity of sources, by encouraging us all to become ‘discerning omnivores,’ and by applying the sum of his own peerless experience, Paul Laudicina helps us understand not just what needs to be done but also how to do it.”

—Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP

“Seminarian, scholar, Senate staffer, from Chicago to the top of A.T. Kearney, from whiz kid to wise man: Paul Laudicina has written a book as singular as his career. Beating the Global Odds shows how to turn complexity into promise, and pixels into the Big Picture. Don’t wait for the Next Big Thing; here is how to do it. The book is a concise and gripping breviary for the knowledge economy of the 21st century—the distilled wisdom of a thinker and a doer, a rare breed in the boardrooms of the world.”

—Josef Joffe, Editor, Die Zeit, Hamburg; Senior Fellow, Stanford University

“This book is sensational. It is a must read for anyone interested in the process of innovation, and in the future of the global economy. Paul Laudicina uses a direct and personal style to transmit difficult—and sometime iconoclastic—ideas about a myriad of subjects. You will learn about complex systems, the comeback of scenario-based strategic planning, the need for expanding managers’ peripheral vision, charter cities, and many other new ideas. After finishing this book you will see the world through different (and more powerful) lenses. But that is not all: this is also a very entertaining book. Once you start reading it, you will not be able to put it down.”

—Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor, UCLA Anderson School; Former Latin American Chief Economist, World Bank

“Business leaders often provide practical insights based on their experience. And thought leaders offer lessons based on their theories and analysis. Paul Laudicina is both a transformational business leader and a world-class thinker. With an engaging style, Laudicina blends in these pages the insights he gained from successfully turning around one of the most respected consulting firms with the best lessons management theorists and social scientists have to offer. This is an indispensable book—crisp, original, easy to read, practical and inspirational all at the same time.”

—Moisés Naím, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment; Author, The End of Power: Why It’s Easier to Get, Harder to Use and Nearly Impossible to Keep.

“Today’s volatile, hyper-kinetic world requires fresh approaches to step back to strategize, to connect and to innovate. Beating the Global Odds is an incredibly rich resource to navigate you and your organization through the ‘information smog’ to new, clearer possibilities. Laudicina does a masterful job taking an extremely complex subject and making it accessible and useful. This book is a ‘must read’ for leaders globally.”

—Kevin Cashman, Senior Partner, Korn/Ferry International; Author, The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward

“The world is getting more complex. We know that. We want to master this complexity but we don’t know how. Paul Laudicina has done us a great favour by sharing tools and ideas to help us understand and steer our way through an even more complex and challenging world. Mukesh Ambani’s foreword is an additional gift.”

—Kishore Mahbubani, Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School, National University of Singapore; Author,The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World

“Top-class decision-making in our over-complex, unpredictable world is an art. Paul Laudicina’s new book offers highly valuable advice for shaping the future towards sustainable value generation.”

—Jürgen Hambrecht, Former Chairman, BASF; Member of the Supervisory Boards, Daimler AG and Deutsche Lufthansa AG

“If you aspire to lead and win, you need to get this book, read it, and give it to everyone on your team. Beating the Global Odds clearly and pragmatically shows you how to develop the mindset, passion, and relationships that drive our future—so that you can create what matters most in a world fraught with change and opportunity.”

—Saj-nicole Joni, CEO, Cambridge International Group Ltd.; Author, The Right Fight

“ ‘Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.’ Sage advice from the coach of the century Vince Lombardi. Beating the Global Odds shows us how to turn the desire to win into action—through concrete, pragmatic, realistic advice. Count me in.”

—Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi

“Beating the Global Odds is a timely wake-up call for today’s CEOs, who must work harder than ever to seize the opportunities—and manage the acute risks—that our ever-more complex global business and policy environment has handed them.”

—John Quelch, Dean, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai

Copyright © 2012 by Paul A. Laudicina. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Laudicina, Paul A.

 Beating the global odds : Successful Decision-Making in a Confused and Troubled World / Paul A. Laudicina.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-34711-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-41671-6 (ebk);

 ISBN 978-1-118-42030-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-43187-0 (ebk)

 1. Strategic planning. 2. Organizational change. 3. Decision making. 4. Change (Psychology). 5. Diffusion of innovations. I. Title.

 HD30.28.L378 2012

 658.4'03—dc23

2012022596

To my fellow partners around the world, and the entire A.T. Kearney family, who have generously set sail with me on our successful journey together these past six years.

Foreword

I believe the book you are about to read is one of the most remarkable books you will ever come across. In terms of density of wisdom, the author has managed to compile it all into a concise and compelling package—giving you, the reader, an exceptionally high return on the investment of your time as you savor each page. In writing this book, Paul practices what he advocates: broad, multidisciplinary insight bringing simple clarity to a world of increasing complexity.

As for the man behind this book, I am honored to call Paul Laudicina a good friend—and more. My organization and its leadership have benefited enormously from Paul’s wise counsel and incisive insights, not to mention his uncanny knack for having a pulse on almost everything. It probably was always going to be a difficult task for Paul to distill his wisdom into something so tangible. I am delighted that his book has achieved this almost impossible feat.

In leading a global institution of excellence such as A.T. Kearney, Paul has amassed tremendous learning over the past few decades. His ability to laterally connect issues and draw meaningful insights never ceases to amaze me. A vastly traveled, informed, and connected man, Paul brings a wealth of personal experiences to all his dealings—at all levels. In the pages that follow, you and I get to travel alongside him.

Given the convulsions and changes the world is undergoing today, Beating the Global Odds couldn’t have arrived at a better moment. As I write this Foreword, we are still trying to manage—and make sense of—the consequences of multiple global economic shocks. Nations that were ever so powerful and dominant in the past are grappling with sovereign survival. Nations that enjoyed economic supremacy are contemplating austerity. And nations that are ambitious and enterprising are on a new trajectory of finding their rightful place. This global reset has changed the world and has forced us to think in radically different ways to yield compelling, simple, and actionable insights.

Governments, corporations, civil society, and individuals all now have to reinvent themselves to beat the global odds, whether they want to or not. Business has a major role to play, not only to help provide stability but also to instill new confidence that the future could be brighter than the present. Paul also writes about the inescapable importance of values-based leadership. I have personally believed in values-based value creation in whatever we have done. Making a difference to the lives of millions of Indians has been a core value and driving force of my company since its inception. The foundation of radically innovating to fulfill unmet needs and aspirations of people has resulted in the fundamental transformation of whole industries. The rules of the game have changed, and sometimes the game itself has changed!

Given my own personal journey of enterprise and entrepreneurship, this book’s insights have special resonance for me. The dictionary defines an entrepreneur as “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.” This definition is inadequate in my view. I say this because I believe entrepreneurship is not just about risk taking for business. Entrepreneurship is also about risk taking for one’s community, for one’s country, and for the benefit of the entire world. Decision-making is not just about making choices. It is influenced by your ambition and what you are willing to sacrifice to make things happen. In every major initiative, we have tried to demonstrate the ability to think big, the ability to think of a large family of stakeholders, and the ability to think of our nation, and, increasingly, of the world beyond. For us, high stakes decision-making has always been in this context: high stakes for the broadest group of stakeholders.

Paul touches upon many requirements that may appear soft but are no less critical for success, such as the importance of relationships. We have always believed that relationships should come first whether with the broader group of stakeholders, with customers, or with business partners. Relationships based on trust and tolerance make efforts sustainable in the long run.

Paul also talks about information and complexity and the need to cleverly find the needle in an ever-growing haystack. We have always believed in decision-making based on first principles, which naturally clears up the clutter and allows us to focus on the most important requirements for success. Of course, perseverance and the courage of conviction play vital roles in this process as well. Sometimes the going has become tough, but our “no exit at any cost” approach has seen us through some difficult times.

Finally, Paul discusses strategic planning, especially through the medium of scenarios. We have always believed that a good strategy is only as good as its execution. What links the two is planning. We put unbelievable emphasis on getting the planning right. We develop a dynamic strategy emanating from a rich set of plans with fallback contingencies in place for course corrections, which will invariably be needed in this world of “continuous convulsive change” that Paul so rightly notes will be the steady state going forward. Envisioning the long-term future is a difficult task, but innate intuition coupled with astute and sometimes paranoid planning can help bring about the desired outcomes. Technology has fundamentally changed the way business is conceived, configured, and deployed. Big data is the next opportunity to harness intelligence and insights to help bring about exponential business growth.

We live in an ideas economy, and things change at breakneck speed. Planning thus needs to be a real-time and continuous process. It also needs to be nimble and agile, allowing the organization to take the right turns without stopping or slowing down. For that we need intelligent, committed, and mature teams with peripheral vision. Paul’s latest book offers a compelling blueprint for such teams charged with delivering the future. Beating the Global Odds provides tangible advice for such teams to become extraordinary and world-class. Paul also offers an entertaining and inspiring guide to any individual who struggles with mastering the demands of a 24/7, 360-degree world of change, challenge, and opportunity.

Contrary to what some may think, the future is exciting and promising. I hope we all will beat the odds. Rather, I know we will—and this book helps us understand just how that is possible.

Mukesh AmbaniChairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Mumbai

Introduction

Seizing the Future Is (Fortunately) Not a Game of Chance

As we begin, I can’t do better than quote pioneering French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”

SOURCE: Fuse/Getty Images

If you’re looking for a roadmap to a better future for your company, your country, our world, and your career and personal life, I trust this book will help.

Today’s society—a swirl of businesses, governments, organizations of all kinds, and individuals—has been rendered confused and paralyzed by a multitude of shocks, crises, and high-speed changes that we are all more familiar with than we’d like to be. A technology-driven and connected world has exponentially increased our inputs and choices. At the same time, there is a lack of a fundamental, shared sense of purpose on which people and organizations can build things that last—inspiring and sparking actions that will yield longer-term benefits both within and across borders.

We can’t, nor would we want to, turn back the tide of connective technologies. Instead, we need to leverage them to solve the very problems they helped spawn. Information Technology 1.0 has enabled a transaction-based society in which “the deal” became more important than the value it drove or the relationships it was based on. And so this decoupling of wealth creation from value creation is at the heart of today’s increasingly angry, divided, alienated, and atomized societies. In this environment, individuals have retreated from integration, seeking refuge in the realities of their identity: nationality, ethnicity, religion. … 

Yet, we know that narrow thinking impedes innovation. And innovation drives value creation, which in turn drives wealth generation. Wealth generation enriches business, government, society, and individuals. And we know that diversity of ideas and inclusion of people drive innovation, which in turn are extended by further advances in technologies that span time and space.

Only inspired leadership can help our post-Great Recession, atomized society rise above itself to realize a new, rising-tide prosperity. To inspire and compel purposeful action, leaders must be grounded in values—and be able to pragmatically employ the best of technology and new ways of thinking. This renewed sense of can-do pragmatism must help create the future by enabling it, complementing leadership with similarly thoughtful followership. Unless there is a deeper understanding of the consequences of inaction or improper action, the promise of daring to reach beyond the constraints of time and space to seize opportunity and manage risk will not be reached.

Today’s leaders and citizens have to accept a world fraught with volatility and disruptive change, and they have to realize that inaction is not a good option. It’s not all bad: This unprecedented volatility is accompanied by an equally unprecedented and compelling convergence of doing well with doing good—a blending of the pursuit of enlightened self-interest with the pursuit of the common good. Successful leaders will need to understand and act on this converging value proposition. By leveraging new technological capabilities and employing more dynamic ways of thinking and inspiring the future, we can beat the global odds.

Coalface Credentials

Coal mines are tough places to work, especially if you’re working the mining equipment at the exposed seam of coal deep underground—the coalface. In Australia and some other places, the expression “at the coalface” means you’re doing something, not just talking about it hypothetically or speculating about it from a comfortable distance. Given the nature of this book, I think you, the reader, deserve to know something about me before we get too much further.

I don’t come from a traditional consulting background. A former seminarian, I studied political science at Chicago, worked for a large oil company, and entered politics before joining a think-tank and, much later beginning my current professional career in management consulting. Even in 1992 (the year I joined A.T. Kearney and founded the Global Business Policy Council) there were those who felt that an insufficiently technical and business-focused background was not a good fit for the hard-edged world of global business. Twenty years on, how much more difficult is it for a young liberal-arts type to enter the professional world?

On the other hand, technical knowledge becomes obsolete quickly, while the ability to think critically and write and speak well—the skills a liberal arts education provides—pays dividends for a lifetime. When polymath Mortimer Adler helped found the Aspen Institute in 1950, critics doubted that CEOs would have any interest in reading great literature and probing the “big questions,” even in the bucolic setting of Aspen, Colorado. Turns out they were interested, as even business leaders of that relatively conformist era realized that technical and managerial expertise in one’s industry was a necessary but insufficient basis for making sense of what was happening in the world—and for making sound decisions.

This book is about a journey—my personal journey, my professional journey, my firm’s journey, my clients’ journey, and, I hope, the reader’s journey. I write this book in part to help understand and illuminate a personal and professional crossroads I have come to: As the saying goes, you don’t know what you really think until you are forced to write it down.

I have spent a half century living in and being enriched by three worlds—a largely contemplative world of spirituality from my youthful years studying for the priesthood, which did not turn out to be what I was called to do; a highly inquisitive and externally engaged political world of my early career in government and policy-related positions; and a more mature commercial world working in business to help set strategic direction and meet corporate objectives for my clients and my firm.

These worlds often moved in independent and concentric orbits, almost as if they were governed by their own magnetic fields, coexisting without crossing each other’s wake except under unusual—and often quite dramatic—circumstances. These separate and distinct domains operated in a relatively stable steady state of independence from one another until the wonders of technology began to erode the natural boundaries and borders separating these worlds. More generally, the forces of technology fueled the ever more rapid and cost effective movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas. These many forces in turn, broke the pressure lock separating all these worlds—making them ever more vulnerable and important to one another’s ability to deliver on each of their own special missions.

A Quick Tour of This Book (and Why I’m Emphasizing the Renaissance of Scenario Planning)

I’ll admit it’s not enough to note that people and organizations are highly frazzled from the bumps, tumbles, growing complexity, and general overload of the past few years. Tell me something I don’t know, you say? In Chapter 1, however, before we can decide what to do about it, we need to unpack the whole story a bit more. As we’ll see, help is actually on the way, including from such (unlikely?) places as Santa Fe and Oxford.

In the two chapters that follow, I will take you on a series of visits to other sides of the complexity coin, including the ever-shorter half-life of everything, the increasingly messy and incapacitated politics of most countries, and the way in which our over-complex world has driven many ordinary people either to a state of angry populism or to just tuning out entirely. These trends are all closely connected and self-reinforcing in a negative way. To top it off, many of our brightest business minds have been given strong incentives to game the system, creating no lasting value and even off-loading risks and losses onto society at large. If this is capitalism, Adam Smith would find it unrecognizable.

So you might think, “Let’s just wait until the smoke clears and the economy bounces back fully before committing ourselves to any definitive course of action.” That might be an instinctive reaction to today’s chaotic mixed signals, but I will advocate that inaction or staying in neutral would be the wrong choice—and a very big missed opportunity.

In the succeeding chapters of the book, I will give you a brisk spin around some remarkable ideas, places, companies, and people who are definitely not waiting for some Eldorado of boom times to re-emerge from the ashes of the Great Recession. Behind the scenes, they are innovating like mad; lightening the material content of everything; simplifying and curating the interface where people connect with products, services, organizations, and governments; and repairing social fabric wherever relationships and bonds of trust have been frayed (which is pretty much everywhere).

In the final part of the book, I will try to give you a peek into where to prospect for new ideas and insights, how to use (and not misuse) expert opinion, why you should widen your lens of inputs in a discerning way, and, lastly, how and when to deploy serious foresight disciplines such as scenario planning—whether for professional or personal high stakes decision-making. As I will emphasize later, there is only one past and one present, but there are multiple possible futures for you, your organization, and our world. Happily, seizing the future is not a game of chance or fate, but rather much more a matter of skill and foresight—and thinking about the future in the right way is really about informing present decisions with a fresh sense of the possible.

Scenario planning, which was born in the Cold War period of thinking the unthinkable and later played a significant role in various attempts to make sense of economic turbulence and oil shocks, is enjoying a rebirth with corporations and governments as they try to anticipate what might lie ahead. After all, who wouldn’t prefer fresh thinking and insights and a new sense of purposeful action to the alternative of staleness and shell shock? But scenario planning (or scenario-based strategic planning, as it might be better termed) is a real discipline that needs to be learned before it can be applied, much as you would need to learn accounting (or vascular surgery or in fact anything) before attempting to do it—or even before you become a consumer of someone else’s scenarios. I will do my best to show you the way.

What’s Different, What Never Changes, and a Tale of Two Cities

Reality is always more complex (and faster-changing) than any attempt to sloganize it—or to try to force-fit some paradigm or acronym. When I was a university student, the work of pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James had a major impact on my thinking. James, the father of American pragmatism, recognized that you first needed to accept and believe something before you could bring some structure to your life and thinking (i.e., to make a leap of faith of some kind before you can act decisively). Pragmatism was the antidote to the rigid school of scientific materialism—the need to have empirical certitude supporting every decision. All this remains true: We are still trying to bring order to chaos, and perennial, universal questions continue to gnaw at us. Read (or reread) a translation of some ancient manuscript or papyrus (sacred or otherwise) from 3,000 years ago, and you will be amazed at how people’s thoughts, hopes, and worries at that time look remarkably similar to what we think and feel today. This has not changed and probably never will. As Aristotle asserted over 2,300 years ago, “All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”

Some things have changed, though. What’s different now is the level of complexity and velocity we are faced with in every aspect of our lives and occupations. In short, what has changed is the ramp speed. What has also changed (decreased, of course) is the level of engagement of large groups of the public, who feel (and are) adrift. The courage required to make a somewhat more difficult leap is more significant than ever, as are the eloquence and inspiration needed to encourage others to come along for the ride.

If complexity and speed have increased exponentially in recent years, there is help on the way, and in some sense it’s a “tale of two cities”: Two unlikely places—ancient Oxford and avant-garde Santa Fe—are providing some truly breakthrough ideas about how to tame ever-increasing complexity and make it work for us, and also how advances in scenario planning and related foresight disciplines can help us think about the future and inform the present in ways that classic forecasting, polling, expert opinion, and so on never did or ever can.

Santa Fe is an old place by American standards: It has the oldest government building still in use (the Palace of the Governors); the oldest church in continuous operation (the San Miguel Mission); and it just celebrated its 400th anniversary—not to mention that this tiny state capital has the country’s third-largest art market by dollar value after New York and Los Angeles. But in the sparsely populated high desert of Northern New Mexico with its brilliant sunsets, you can still re-invent yourself with relative ease. When the U.S. government resolved to pursue secret work to invent an atomic bomb during World War II, it decided to use Santa Fe as the staging ground for the even more remote location of Los Alamos, about an hour away. The Manhattan Project (as it was called) in turn forced scientists and government strategists to confront entirely new questions of life and death on a previously unimaginable scale: “thinking the unthinkable” in the words of Herbert Kahn of the Hudson Institute, whose work fed directly into the creation of scenario planning.

In the early 1980s, according to the history of the Santa Fe Institute provided on its website, a group of Los Alamos National Lab scientists felt a “general dissatisfaction with the stove-piped, bureaucratic, funding-centric approach to science that had taken hold both at the federal laboratories and academia. And each felt that this carrot-and-stick support of science was, on a massive scale, leading their colleagues toward scientific myopia, reductionism, and stagnation. Furthermore, they believed, some of science’s biggest questions, those that required a more expansive perspective, were going unanswered to the detriment of science and mankind.”

So the Santa Fe Institute was born as a stand-alone, transdisciplinary research institute. This was not an entirely new idea: 100 years ago when the world’s top brainpower hubs were the 10 or so leading German universities, Kaiser Wilhelm II (despite his many faults) had the interesting idea to create an elite, stand-alone research institute, which survives today as the group of well-regarded Max Planck Institutes. In North America, the independent Institute for Advanced Study was created in 1930 near Princeton University and attracted luminaries such as Albert Einstein. But it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the new Santa Fe Institute (SFI) established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for research across disciplines and, indeed, in the vacant space between disciplines. Today, research and insights coming out of SFI give us hope that the complexity that is currently overwhelming us can be tamed and harnessed for good by use of the very instruments that have created this complexity. (I will tell you more about that later.)

As for Oxford University, it’s on the other side of the time scale: It’s so old that no one even knows the approximate year when it was founded. Teaching has gone on there since around 1096—the better part of a thousand years. But, as the saying goes, something isn’t good because it’s old; it’s very old because it’s very good. Unlike most universities that are relatively centralized and highly structured by school and department, Oxford remains an eccentrically assembled, loose confederation of independent colleges, halls, faculties, units, and centers of various kinds. Although it was very late to the business school scene (founding a business school in 1996, long after management studies had become respectable elsewhere), it has now carved out the world’s pre-eminent niche in scenario planning and related foresight disciplines. Along with its sister university, Cambridge, it is the only institution that has managed to stay in the world’s top tier for literally centuries—and is still going strong. But why? There are a number of reasons for Oxford’s continuing importance, including its being an important intellectual focal point for the entire English-speaking world.

But there’s more to it: Oxford’s loose confederation means that the disciplinary stovepipes are less rigid than they are elsewhere. In Oxford’s 38 separate colleges, marketing professors and poetry scholars dine with astrophysicists and theologians each night, over such delicacies (for acquired tastes!) as potted shrimp, reform cutlets, and orange fool. One well-endowed historic college (All Souls) has no students at all, only faculty members (known as fellows) who are given the gift of free time and staff support to use as they see fit. And, even as a very old institution, Oxford relishes the constant infusion of fresh blood. Cecil Rhodes’ famous scholarship program has brought some particularly talented new blood to the place every year since 1902. One such person was a brilliant scholar and cricketer who came from the far reaches of Western Australia in 1974—Rod Eddington—who went on to lead Cathay Pacific Airlines and later British Airways.

Sir Rod (as he now is) came back to Oxford in 2003 to speak to a large group of Rhodes Scholars and Oxford MBA students. He reminisced about the place and about the essential need for suppleness in our thinking and action, to avoid veins that become clogged and a mindset that becomes crusty and sclerotic, and to demonstrate that doing well and doing good must go together:

Whatever his faults, the basis of [Rhodes’] scholarship was selection on merit. Neither race, religion or need were to be taken into account. He counted moral qualities as well as intellectual ones and admired the instinct for public service as highly as anything else … 

If history teaches us anything, and we can only hope it does, there is a way ahead that should be obvious to us. If the West is to retain its position, we have to be inclusive. … We must not make the mistake of thinking that everybody thinks as we do. There is tension between the centre and the edges, between head office and the outposts, between the World Trade Organization and the world’s traders, from Calcutta to Qatar—that’s the essence of organization, and I suggest it has some very important implications for our global [system] too. Unless those arrangements deliver unequivocal benefits for countries less powerful and rich than our own, we will start depending more on force and less on persuasion. … It doesn’t work. … If we lose suppleness, we’ll lose the game.

Chapter 1

Global Brain Freeze

Nonstop Overstimulation Brings Disorientation

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

—Sir Winston Churchill

General Stanley McChrystal famously said in Afghanistan, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” One might say we have met the enemy, and it’s overload, confusion, and disorientation.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Defense.

You know the feeling: At the end of a long flight, the wheels touch down, and you instinctively reach for your iPhone or BlackBerry—pressing the on button even before the reverse thrust kicks in. Within about 10 seconds (if you’re lucky), your device picks up a signal, and then the messages start streaming in, each one giving your already overstimulated brain a dopamine hit. Maybe if you’ve just arrived in Mumbai after a 14-hour flight, you’ve got literally hundreds of incoming e-mails, a dozen voicemails, and bad economic news to process and react to: Global markets may have plunged again while you were trying to doze during the second meal service. Perhaps you’re grateful that aircraft don’t yet universally have in-flight WiFi configured, or you wouldn’t have gotten any chance to rest at all. In the sedan on your way to the hotel, you try to hack your way through some of the messages, answering those that only require a quick response and preferably little thought.