On the flight out to Seattle on Sunday, I finally finished up Tim O’reilly’s overtly named What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us. In a coincidence of timing, this morning I also scanned across Jeff Atwood’s reference to an observational call to action (from Pamela Druckerman) in the following tweet:
These days, when I think, “Someone should really do something about that,” I realize with alarm that that “someone” is me. https://t.co/yHrEMsEFo2
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) May 7, 2018
The book was a deep read on how Tim has observed transformative change occurring in recent decades. There are ample examples, including very current trends in politics, technology, and economics, where the reader is walked through the development of a new mental map to understand why the change made sense. It’s often the case that looking back on disruptive changes, they seem obvious and inevitable, but it takes a spark of ingenuity or genius to build that new map without the benefit of hindsight. The challenge that the book hopes to instruct, is to identify opportunities for reframing our own views in ways that lead to constructive, but disruptive change.
Tim has been well positioned to observe and report, and includes anecdotes and quotes from key players in past significant disruptions. There are also many references to traditional business authors, like Drucker and Collins that will be familiar to many MBA students, including critical takes on some widely held beliefs about what makes business tick, especially in the United States.
Beyond understanding the processes of disruptive change, the book spends quite a bit of print developing ideas about what types of changes are good for people, good for humanity, and good for the future. In what seemed like an echo of this theme in the book, this morning I sat through an amazing keynote by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella which included a professorial call to action for developers to build the future that humanity needs by embedding privacy, security, and ethical choices in the systems and AI that we build for the future.
This book is a great read if you want to gain some knowledge about historical twists and turns in the technology industry, to slightly reprogram your brain for how to look out for disruptive change, and prepare yourself to help make a positive impact on the future.
One Man Shouting 