Our future will be radically decentralized, digitized, and disrupted. Leaders will need more than just skills to survive. Veteran futurist Bob Johansen offers five literacies-combinations of discipline, practices, and perspective-for thriving in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. A rapid and massively disruptive shift from centralized to distributed organizations has already begun. But current leadership practices were designed for large, centralized organizations, making them increasingly obsolete. Bob Johansen, who has been projecting future trends from Silicon Valley since 1968, outlines five literacies leaders need to develop to cope with this brave new world. Johansen says leaders need the literacy of projecting themselves into the future and "looking backwards" to make sure they are preparing for potential new developments. They have to cultivate the literacy of voluntarily engaging with their fear in a safe way, using simulations and gaming, so they can immerse themselves in the things they're worried about and deal with them. Distributed leadership is a third vital literacy-leaders need to know how to guide organizations that have no center, grow from the edges, and can't be controlled. In a globalized world they must master multimedia leadership-the literacy of having presence and influence even when they're not physically present. And finally, to stay on top of all this, they need the literacy of creating positive energy: leaders have to be extremely fit, physically and mentally, to keep their own energy and that of their organizations high to cope with this era of extreme disruption. Johansen presents dramatic and mind-expanding examples of how forward-looking organizations are developing these literacies and offers readers sage advice on how to cultivate them.
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Bob Johansen is a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, where he helps top leaders around the world prepare for and shape the future. Bob works with corporations such as McKinsey, Tesco, UPS, Kellogg, Syngenta, and McDonald’s—as well as a range of major universities and non-profits. A social scientist by training, Bob holds a BS from the University of Illinois, where he played varsity basketball, and a PhD from Northwestern University.
James A. Gillies has been a familiar voice across BBC television and radio for nearly a quarter of a century. Trained at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, he has worked as an actor, continuity announcer, program narrator, and newsreader. He lives with his wife and two Norwegian Forest cats in Kilbarchan, Scotland.