The Signals Are Talking
Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
An expert in trend forecasting shows how to anticipate what’s next and prepare your business, your market, and your products for the future
“Amy Webb, with insight and a big dose of pragmatism, shows how to clearly see the next big disruption and then take action before it strikes.” ―Ram Charan, coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Execution
A Fast Company Best Book of the Year
How do you tell a real trend from the merely trendy? How, for example, will a technology—like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things—affect us, our businesses, and workplaces? How will it eventually change the way we live, work, play, and think—and how should we prepare for it now?
In The Signals Are Talking, noted futurist Amy Webb shows us how to analyze the “true signals”—those patterns that will coalesce into a trend with the potential to change everything—and land on the right side of disruption. The future, Webb shows, isn’t something that happens to us passively. Using a proven, tested methodology, she enables us to see ahead and forecast what’s to come—challenging us to create our own preferred futures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trends can be profitably predicted, according to this windy treatise on business futurism. Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute consultancy, insists that prognosticating is a "learnable skill" and lays out a labyrinthine, acronym-heavy conceptual framework for pondering the future, featuring three rules, six instructions, 10 "sources of change," a six-part "CIPHER model,"and a six-part "F.U.T.U.R.E test" to "pressure-test any strategy created to address a technology trend." It all amounts to a tangle of vague truisms rule one says, "The future is not predetermined, but rather woven together from numerous threads that are themselves being woven in the present" that leave the impression that futurology is still a dark art navigable only by hiring experts such as the author. Webb's own predictions are sometimes bizarre she asserts that drones will make America dependent on imported food and that "pods" hooked to maglev trains will replace airplanes but when she's predicting trends in digital technology, which is most of the time, the future sounds both grandiose and boring. (Google, she reports, is "creating a ubiquitous exo-brain... that could anticipate my every need" and will eventually become "some kind of digital life assistant.") Webb's futurism is not compelling, but her insightful retrospectives on why some innovations succeeded and others failed make for an engaging study of technical trends of the past.
